>[Musk] hailed Tesla’s structural battery as a “revolution” in engineering—but for some battery researchers, Musk’s future looked a lot like the past.
>“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London
Doing something under research conditions and doing it in a mass-produced commercial product are separate accomplishments. Both are important and impressive and should be celebrated.
Having worked with a lot of researchers, in general, my experience has been that if something isn't the latest research meme/trend/buzzword, they don't give a fuck. "Something that we did 10 years ago" means they already got a publication about this idea, and that was that, they've long since moved on. Actually deploying something into the real world, effecting real change, is the hard part, but most researchers are focused on getting the next publications accepted, and only that.
Not every researcher is like that, but it's a problem. The researchers I worked with, also, unfortunately, had this idea that engineering is somehow beneath science. That's just worrying about the details. They think that the idea itself is the real advancement. They think of themselves as smarter and more important than engineers, and they don't like when engineers press them on how they would actually implement their ideas into something real.
Every part of the innovation chain has understanding of the difficulty of their own link. Without every link, it doesn't work.
Consider the SR-71: Is it the pilots, the crews, the administrators who secure funding, the voters, the integrating engineers, the test pilots, the supply chain, the metallurgists, the engine designers, the manufacturers of test equipment, the standards bureau, the aircraft architect, the people who specified the initial requirements, the tire manufacturers, the refueling crews, the avionics manufacturers, the chemical suppliers for the bespoke starting fuel, the aerospace engineers who did the fundamental research, Chuck Yeager, the Wright Brothers, Bernoulli, the thousands of spouses who sacrificed to support their partners, or the fundamental researchers who ascertained the physics necessary to make the aircraft fly and evade detection?
Every one of them, and more, can lay claim to the statement: If we hadn't done what we did, the SR-71 wouldn't have flown.
I'm a fundamental physicist who has spent the entirety of this century trying to get at the bottom of things because it is the foundation upon which our understanding rests. When we make a measurement, however, even those experiments rest upon work and resources provided by a vast array of engineers, suppliers, manufacturers, administrators, support staff, physical plant, custodial support, funding agencies, and taxpayers.
As much as I appreciate what you're saying, the answer to your question is
> the aircraft architect
because that's the guy who really built it. He could not have done it alone or without the help of everyone you mentioned, but let's not pretend like everyone was equally important here.
As a tangent, this is one of my favorite books detailing the creation of some of Skunkworks' projects, including the SR-71:
> let's not pretend like everyone was equally important here.
Except that's completely wrong. An architect did not build the SR-71. Physical engineering involves a feedback cycle and iterative design refinements, just like software engineering.
I don't think it's common from some architect to just draw a blueprint, hand it off to some people to build it, and that's it, we're done here, my design came to life thanks to my Godly design skills (and the simple work of 40 lowly engineers). The SR-71 is a project that took years and years of work, lots of failed attempts, experiments and lessons learned. There's no way that the majority of the credit for the SR-71 goes to some bossman architect dude who just told people what to do. It was very much teamwork. Everyone, including the test pilots, participated in its design and refinement.
It was definitely team work. But the question comes down to being replaceable - could anyone replace Kelly Johnson and still create the SR-71? I don't know. I'm not even sure Ben Rich would have succeeded. But I'm confident not every single other person mentioned was irreplaceable. In fact I'd venture 99% of those people could be replaced.
Likewise, it takes thousands of engineers to operate Google right now. But do you really think most of those engineers are irreplaceable? Meanwhile good luck finding replacements for Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemewat.
This notion that everybody is equally talented/important is absurd. And the idea that you can always make up for a lack of talent with hard work is pretty obviously debunked if you take even a passing glance at competitive sports.
I'm not saying a single person can do everything without help. I'm saying a single person can have talent that you could never hope to have, no matter how hard you try, and that's just the way it is. And because of that talent, those people are more important when it comes to getting shit done.
> Point to the mind, and suddenly everyone is equal
Not equal. Sufficient.
Athletics are entertainment. Entertainers are usually not fungible. Contrast that with jobs demanding physical work.
Denying that some people are more replaceable than others for a given task done to a certain tolerance is a significant self kneecap. It blinds you to power structures and leverage dynamics. It also makes several simplifying paradigms inaccessible.
It may be the case that 99% of the people some way involved in the completion of the SR-71 were replaceable but that still leaves a significant number of people besides Kelly Johnson.
But on the other hand a superstar can also suck all the air out of the room, such that other potential talented people won't have the opportunities to refine their talents.
That's pretty much it. The standard countermeasure for launch detection was simply to accelerate and outrun the missile. It had some early stealth attributes but could still be detected by the systems of the time.
What "early stealth" did it have? The most I've heard from pilots is that they didn't use an airborne radar and didn't use the VHF radio on the plane under any circumstance. Even on the runway, it was forbidden. Those things have nothing to do with stealth and everything to do with basic signals intelligence stuff.
> The second operational aircraft[40] designed around a stealth aircraft shape and materials, after the Lockheed A-12,[40] the SR-71 had several features designed to reduce its radar signature. The SR-71 had a radar cross-section (RCS) around 110 sq ft (10 m2).[41] Drawing on early studies in radar stealth technology, which indicated that a shape with flattened, tapering sides would reflect most energy away from a radar beam's place of origin, engineers added chines and canted the vertical control surfaces inward. Special radar-absorbing materials were incorporated into sawtooth-shaped sections of the aircraft's skin. Cesium-based fuel additives were used to somewhat reduce exhaust plumes visibility to radar, although exhaust streams remained quite apparent. Kelly Johnson later conceded that Soviet radar technology advanced faster than the stealth technology employed against it.[42]
I think your take on it seems fine. The researchers did the poc, later it goes mainstream. The researcher should not care or be interested in the mainstream practical application anymore, they should be on to the next thing.
It's not just that though. It's also risk aversion. If you're optimizing for numbers of papers published, and you're optimizing for your confidence that your next paper is going to be accepted, it leads to redundant and uninteresting research.
The research world, just like every other social circle, is full of people who are just parroting each other, repeating to each other what everyone already believes, and patting themselves on the back. Maybe, once in a while, one person takes a risk, gets a cool result, and then 100 others rehash the same idea with small variations. At some point, the field collectively decides what the next cool research meme is going to be, and everybody follows along.
So yeah, structural battery packs stopped being cool at some point, I guess. Except that battery tech 10 years ago wasn't the same as what we have today, so maybe the results don't directly transfer. The topic hasn't been studied in a contemporary context, maybe the old results are out of date, maybe they would really be worth investigating again... But who cares, that topic has been done, it isn't cool anymore, it was 10 years ago. All the cool kids are doing solid state batteries nowadays.
> The research world, just like every other social circle, is full of people who are just parroting each other, repeating to each other what everyone already believes, and patting themselves on the back.
I'd be curious to know what your experience is that leads you to this opinion.
A more charitable explanation would be that game changing discoveries are by their nature rare, and even when they do arrive, they only outline a new space for exploration, which means that by definition, most research is going to be filling the gaps in that new space, both for positive results, and the depressingly large chunk of work that is discovering what doesn't work. The results of this negative outcome often look the same.
I'm not sure which field you're in, but at least in electrical engineering, the situation is very different from your description. EE academics are deeply enmeshed in real-world problems, and justifying real-world impact in publications is considered more or less essential. This is also enforced by the bottomline: a lot of research is sponsored by industrial consortia or even individual companies (Intel, Microsoft, etc). Furthermore, many though not all academics at some point spin off some part of their research into commercial ventures, and for some that even becomes their primary concern.
I'm on the CS side. Was surrounded by people who love math but seem to believe that programming code is somehow dirty and less worthy than equations. The difference is probably that EE academics have an engineering background (are engineers themselves)?
I'm currently seeing mechanical and materials engineers who have just discovered computers and are planning to do fundamental research on data modelling. They ignore existing international standards that deal with the area since they are not new enough.
I think that EE has always been more connected to industry.
I think the publish/perish culture has pushed academics closer to industrial research horizons than they were in the past. This leaves a few fields in an awkward state where academics are just credentialed junior engineers/practitioners struggling to differentiate their skills and activities from every one else.
Yeah, but I think the problem is that you get a lot of "scientists" who are only optimizing to game the system and maximize the publication count. It leads to most of the published work following very safe and boring research directions that everybody else is already working on. There is less scientific progress as a result. Contributing something that is useful and novel is often not rewarded. Risking yourself exploring a new branch of your field is very dangerous for your career. In my own biased opinion, about 90-95% of published papers are contributing nothing new to the field.
That's kind of the whole point of specialization - a good framework to look at this is the Technology Readiness Level principles; and different institutions are specialized to work with different maturity levels of a tech and that's ok.
The requirements to work on core principles that might have an application (and fund&organize that work) are fundamentally different from finding product/market fit for something that's known to be possible and are fundamentally different from optimizing a process for making that thing 1% cheaper than last year, so those are generally done by different institutions and different people.
So yes, from the point of someone doing fundamental research, once a proof of concept exists, their part of the work is done - there's a lot of further steps to get that to a commercially viable product, but those steps should be done by someone else who's better at it and whose organization is structured completely differently to facilitate this completely different process. And meanwhile they'll working on some other tech that's ready for that engineering stage yet. Theoretical physics isn't applied physics isn't prototype engineering isn't process optimization engineering.
You need people and organizations working on every TRL step, and they aren't interchangeable, you need the preceding step well-funded to make your work possible and you need to move the results to the following steps since those will harvest the actual end-user value in the end.
They probably are smarter than Engineers, on average, but that does not make them more valuable to society at large, though it might in their academic habitat.
“Smarter” is a really vague term. At least in CS/Software it’s incredibly common for people to sound much more knowledgeable than they are, or for promising junior engineers to get stuck in a hole. Given the selection bias inherent to graduate school pathways* in the US, I wouldn’t presuppose any innate skill gap between Fresh Phds and baccalaureates.
* A top BSc candidate with a comp eco background would need to forgo ~800k in compensation for a 4 year PhD. While in grad school, they must be able to survive on ~20k per year in direct income. Fresh from a BS they may have 100k in student debt, or have been fortunate to have wealthy family or studied internationally where the cost of education is lower. People willing and able to go for grad school do not represent an unbiased sample of the top students.
Remember how Tesla had to add a titanium skid plate to prevent battery fires caused by punctures from running over road debris? Batteries in body parts likely to be damaged in collisions would be a problem.
Also, having the heavy battery down below axle height makes for a nice low center of gravity, making the vehicle much more stable.
My first though when I read about this was that it would be a mess for first responders. Fire depts across the country have had to retrain on how to handle electrical car fires. How are they suppose to use the jaws of life to cut someone out if the structural elements contain lithium batteries?
They wouldn't be lithium batteries, but I'm still wondering how these new kinds of batteries could safely deal with catastrophic mechanical failure without discharging all their stored energy in an explosion (or even just fire).
They're lithium-ion batteries with carbon fiber electrodes.
Doesn't matter what kind of battery it is though, once you start cutting through them you are very likely to short the electrodes together. Which usually ends in fires.
Depends on the circuit. Most batteries' voltage are <5 volts in default configurations. You can move the voltage boost/serial circuitry segment to the engine area. It will waste a lot of material and create redundant wiring but the overall structural voltage will be low. Low voltage does not mean it would not catch fire however.
High voltage battery packs are required due to the power required to move a car.
A 50hp engine[1] needs ~37kW which at 5 volts, that is 7,500 amps of current, which requires comically large bus bars (~200x10mm) and conversion electronics. Even at 48 volts[2], you still need ~780 amps, which still requires very large conductors.
At 400 volts, for the same motor, the wiring only needs to be sized for 100 amps, which is reasonably practical (think wire found on welders).
[1]: Let assume that 50hp is the max required steady state output for a motor in a passenger car, and lets ignore any peak/dynamic loads and HVAC as this is napkin engineering
[2]: 48v is generally accepted as the highest voltage before you really need to know what you are doing, though at these power levels, you still should know what you are doing as things like to weld, melt, become bad motors and/or explode.
It's a good thing then that the article only mentions Tesla because they aren't doing this. Tesla is not building the battery into the body, they are taking the safe way out instead. Tesla is just removing a redundant casing from around the packs.
In Australia, there are plans to manufacture batteries [1]. This is a collaboration with Cadenza, who promote their battery cells as being housed in ceramic insulation, preventing fires [2]. Here's hoping.
Er, no. Dumping 75KWH as heat requires a big resistor bank. One of these[1] could dissipate the power from a fully charged Tesla battery in 45 minutes. That's probably about as fast as you could discharge one without it catching fire. And you'd need the battery cooling system working.
It took ~10 years for flexible screens using OLEDs to be mass producible. 10 years seems to be the norm as of now for things produced under research conditions to enter mass production/usage, are there counter examples?
Solar, although to be fair I'm looking at "is financially worth producing" as I'm sure they technically could be mass-produced in the 1960s if they could somehow find a buyer.
Passenger cars all moved from a body-on-frame structure to a more integrated unibody construction where a lot of the rigidity is provided by other parts that happen to be located on the underside of the car. In an electric car that has a battery on the underside, delegating some of that structural integrity to the fairly rigid battery pack seems like an obvious extension of that trend. I'm pretty sure that's what Musk means when he talks about structural batteries. That will probably mean some changes to the battery packs to make them more fit for that purpose (that could mean changes to the cells, but doesn't have to)
Integrating battery packs anywhere else in the body of the car seems much less practical. These car batteries aren't like notebook batteries: they have dedicated heating and cooling systems in addition to high current connectors, fire proof casings, emergency shutoffs etc. You can't just pepper those around the car.
Stressed skin [0,1] is great for saving weight and enhancing rigidity.
It's terrible for repairability, and with regards to power sources... safety.
This is a bunch of researchers solving the wrong optimization problem. You'll likely see it in Formula E, but under no circumstances should it be in production, mass-produced cars.
No they aren't. Normally you have battery cells (think AAs) -> battery pack -> vehicle trunk, and they're skipping the middle step. It's analogous to how planes have a "wing-shaped fuel tank" (where the wings just have a cavity that you pour the fuel into), instead of storing fuel fluid containers that are separate to the plane.
What OP's link is describing, is where the battery cells literally are the vehicle trunk - as in they're built into the walls, instead of being contained between two walls.
Does this mean giving up on every being able to replace the battery pack if it's integrated into the frame? Tesla battery packs are only warrantied for 8 years, and after that you need to pay ~$7k to replace them. Are they developing new battery tech to make this time period longer?
"Tesla battery packs are only warrantied for 8 years, and after that you need to pay ~$7k to replace them."
You don't need to pay ~$7k. That's about the full price of a new battery. The battery isn't dead, it just has a lower rating (likely over 80%). Even if that's absolutely unacceptable, it can be used to A) replace batteries that have hit 60% or some other lower standard for people who don't care about range as much, or B) act as a stationary battery.
Considering that cars are currently driven an average of "13 500 miles per year" according to US stats, 8 years is a little over 100k miles. Tesla has already hit the "million kilometre battery" mark (so at least two thirds toward the "million mile battery"), so it's kind of absurd to say you'd have any serious need to replace it 1/6th through its spec lifetime.
And now for a BONUS: in 8 years the price of batteries will drop, due to economies of scale if nothing else. So the replacement will be cheaper than your current battery was (hah, implying we all have EV batteries).
I would like to understand what happens when you are in the accident? Does this increase the risk of fire/explosions no matter where you get hit? I still remember driving by the burnt-out Tesla on 101 & 95 intersection.
The junction of US 101 and CA 85 is the location of a well publicized Tesla fatality (tldr Apple employee in driver's seat, Autopilot engaged, vehicle accelerated into gore point, battery pack caught fire on scene and again later)
It's much like unibody car repair: You used to be able to bolt a hitch, bumper, roll cage, or winch to the ladder frame of your vehicle. The ladder frame was basically a pair of ~2x5" C-channel heavy steel bars running the length of the vehicle, with crossmembers linking them together. It's still present on a lot of trucks, and some SUVs, but more and more vehicles are moving towards lighter unibody construction. In particular, this helps with impact safety, because the unibody can form crumple zones. A ladder frame doesn't crumple.
Now, most vehicles don't have ladder frames. If you want to drill a hole for attaching a bolt, for example to add a tow hook, you probably need to first weld on a 1/4" plate. A body shop can't just un-bolt a rocker panel damaged in an accident and put on new ones, both rocker panels are one big piece that forms part of the structure of the vehicle and everything else is connected to them. You cut and weld to repair the damage, or bend it back into place. In race vehicles and motorcycles, this concept is extended to the engine itself: The block is a structural member of the vehicle.
Practice will adjust to progress. It won't always be as easy to repair as it once was. We can only hope that the safety and energy improvements are worth the complexity and functionality.
One should never drill into the battery, regardless if it is inside the body, or inside a box. It's dangerous, but so is drilling into a gasoline or LPG tank. Car mechanics are trained on this topic, they know.
Compared to current battery-in-a-box construction methods, I expect that for crash safety the embedded battery may actually give more structural rigidity, and more freedom to incorporate crumple zones on tactical places.
>What happens when someone drills a hole in their gas tank? Probably similar.
They get wet.
Gasoline doesn't come with its own ignition source (and a drill bit isn't usually enough to provide one) whereas puncturing battery packs starts the chemical reaction that quickly results in fire.
What do they mean by Musk is incorporating the batteries into the frame? They just introduced a larger cylindrical cell. Cylindrical cells don’t get embedded, unless you mean as in a flashlight.
In some other generation of battery tech, there’s plenty of gray area here that still provides benefit. A stiffer battery requires less housing. A stiff enough battery only requires shielding against punctures. Stronger still, and you can bolt it between two frame elements and have it function like a cross brace, while still being able to remove it for servicing.
I watched their battery PR presentation and it seems like they're trying to integrate the structure of the battery (maybe not the individual cells but I'm unclear on this) as a "stressed member" so to speak, same way that the engine in a motorcycle is often a critical structural component. Makes sense, because the battery is super heavy and needs a ton of stucture itself, might as well integrate it more with the frame and reduce redundancy.
It sounds like as well they’ve reduced the length of the pack, allowing for larger crumple zones, which is a definite improvement, notwithstanding any other pluses.
A big issue with this would be safety. You don’t want your car to explode if someone runs opens their door into the side of your car. Also, repair costs would be crazy. You probably could not bang out dents, but would have to replace the entire (very expensive) structural battery quarter panel.
You could just disable the battery in that panel for some minor capacity loss.
The metal encasing around the battery should protect against a battery explosion. I'm sure there are solutions, like encasing it in foam for example to prevent oxygen getting in.
Tesla batteries do not extend to the edge of the frame. There is a buffer for t-bones and side impacts. Thousands of crashes and 8 years in your odds of bursting into flames seem lower in an EV than an ICE car with a tank of gas.
Television shows in the 1970's had me convinced that if a car went off a cliff that it would explode on impact with the ground and that almost any damage to a car would result in an eventual explosion. But that hasn't played out and so far quicksand hasn't proven to be a big risk either.
In fairness, cars were much more likely to explode back then. I still remember my dad bolting a piece of steel behind the rear seat of a mustang, because there was a good chance of the passengers being engulfed in flames from a rear end collision due to the location and configuration of the gas tank. I think the Pinto was even worse if my memory serves.
You do realize that real life is not a Hollywood movie, right? Cars do not explode like you see on TV. The crash danger to be concerned about is not that the car will burst into flames, but rather that when you wrap your car around a tree the rescue crew will be unable to extract you due to electrocution risk and so you will slowly bleed out while they wait for specialists with the right EV extraction experience to arrive. This was a major problem when the Prius hit the scene and suddenly there were high voltage cables that needed to be avoided, but if a crash could possibly electrify body panels or other more exposed pieces then things may get dangerous.
I saw a pickup truck run into a train at ~60 mph. 30 seconds later it was completely engulfed in flames. Sometimes ICE vehicles do catch fire very quickly (still not an explosion though).
That's hardly surprising. You have a high-speed frontal collision, a fuel line gets ruptured and high-pressure gasoline comes squirting out onto a hot engine (bonus points if it hits the exhaust manifold) with plenty of airflow. Under those circumstances a fire is far from unlikely.
Fire risk is about the same at the time of a crash. Random fire happening hours later basically never happens with liquid fuel whereas it's a possibility with EVs. The towing industry has all this figured out. It's not common but it's common enough that your insurer is gonna be real ticked off if you park a crashed EV inside and they have to pay out for a burned down building.
Hm. Inevitably that would raise the center of mass, right? The Tesla battery is currently the floor of the vehicle I think. Now it'll be threaded through the body, which brings weight upward. It'll have to be done carefully, to keep it handling well.
Interesting concept but I guess there will be huge investments needed into material science - we can model how a metal or carbon composite frame will react when exposed to impacts or general mechanical stress, how much load a given part can bear under which circumstances after many decades of data gathering, but for a battery that is the structure we don't have experience.
> Its battery pack will be integrated into the chassis so that it provides mechanical support in addition to energy, a design that Musk claimed will reduce the car’s weight by 10 percent and improve its mileage by even more.
i wonder if it also reduces the possibility (or increases the cost) of recycling used battery packs by 80%.
Sustainability? Can these new carbodybatteries be recycled when they can't take a charge? Can I replaces some of the car for a complete charge? or do I have to ditch the whole thing when the first component fails?
The news to me is now arstechnica.com is syndicating content from wired.com ... And as far as I'm concerned, no good can come from that...
... starting with this article which gives credence to these Asp and Greenhalgh fellows, who have deemed the current situation with batteries as a "structural parasite" while at the same time proposing to incorporate them into the skin of the vehicle, which moves mass way upwards and way outwards-- both of the no-nos in regards to stability. The negative effects from just the shifting of mass will likely outweigh any of the gains using their method, which so far seem to be a bit nebulous. And that's ignoring many of the obvious safety, reparability, and complexity concerns...
Wired and ArsTechnica are both Conde Nast brands. Wired is definitely 98% breathless reporting, and ArsTechnica is aiming for that too, while still trying to catch a couple people that remember what it was like before they sold out.
reminds me of a scene in some TV show long ago where (Howard Hughes perhaps??) the character threw a hammer I tothe side of his steam car, where it gushed steam, and announced that he was no longer in the steam car business. I would not want to be inside a vehicle whose body panels were filled with something like lithium!! a sealed box underneath is acceptable if it passes crash tests, door panels, no way.
The only reason EVs don't handle like complete ass despite being relatively heavy is all the weight is concentrated in the floor with a skateboard battery pack design.
>“He’s essentially doing something that we did 10 years ago,” says Emile Greenhalgh, a materials scientist at Imperial College London
Doing something under research conditions and doing it in a mass-produced commercial product are separate accomplishments. Both are important and impressive and should be celebrated.