Rice University Adds Asphalt To Speed Lithium Metal Battery Charging By 20 Times (nextbigfuture.com) 131
schwit1 writes: The Rice lab of chemist James Tour developed anodes comprising porous carbon made from asphalt that showed exceptional stability after more than 500 charge-discharge cycles. A high-current density of 20 milliamps per square centimeter demonstrated the material's promise for use in rapid charge and discharge devices that require high-power density. The Tour lab previously used a derivative of asphalt -- specifically, untreated gilsonite, the same type used for the battery -- to capture greenhouse gases from natural gas. This time, the researchers mixed asphalt with conductive graphene nanoribbons and coated the composite with lithium metal through electrochemical deposition. The lab combined the anode with a sulfurized-carbon cathode to make full batteries for testing. The batteries showed a high-power density of 1,322 watts per kilogram and high-energy density of 943 watt-hours per kilogram. Testing revealed another significant benefit: The carbon mitigated the formation of lithium dendrites. These mossy deposits invade a battery's electrolyte. If they extend far enough, they short-circuit the anode and cathode and can cause the battery to fail, catch fire or explode. But the asphalt-derived carbon prevents any dendrite formation.
"The capacity of these batteries is enormous, but what is equally remarkable is that we can bring them from zero charge to full charge in five minutes, rather than the typical two hours or more needed with other batteries," Tour said. "While the capacity between the former and this new battery is similar, approaching the theoretical limit of lithium metal, the new asphalt-derived carbon can take up more lithium metal per unit area, and it is much simpler and cheaper to make. There is no chemical vapor deposition step, no e-beam deposition step and no need to grow nanotubes from graphene, so manufacturing is greatly simplified." The findings have been published in the journal ACS Nano.
"The capacity of these batteries is enormous, but what is equally remarkable is that we can bring them from zero charge to full charge in five minutes, rather than the typical two hours or more needed with other batteries," Tour said. "While the capacity between the former and this new battery is similar, approaching the theoretical limit of lithium metal, the new asphalt-derived carbon can take up more lithium metal per unit area, and it is much simpler and cheaper to make. There is no chemical vapor deposition step, no e-beam deposition step and no need to grow nanotubes from graphene, so manufacturing is greatly simplified." The findings have been published in the journal ACS Nano.
Why Lithium? (Score:1)
Re:Why Lithium? (Score:5, Informative)
Battery chemistry is a hot topic and pretty much anything that shows promise is being researched by someone somewhere.
Ni-Fe [google.com.au]
Ni-Zn [google.com.au]
and those results are just for 2016-2017, and I didn't search for synonyms "Nickel", "Iron", "Zinc", "cell" (instead of "battery".)
Re: (Score:1)
Nickel is plenty nasty on its own, thanks...
Re: (Score:1)
Nickel is plenty nasty on its own, thanks...
But not so nasty that most Canadian coins aren't made from it.
Refining it may be funky, but there's nothing wrong with the metal itself. It's used in all kinds of everyday items.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd love to see how much energy they could get out of Ni-Fe and Ni-Zn batteries using modern manufacturing techniques... no toxic or exotic compounds required!
Very few industrial processes create more pollution than nickel smelting.
Re:Why Lithium? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's some pretty hefty hyperbole. It got that reputation from the past history at Sudbury, but today Sudbury is used as an exemplary case study of reducing environmental pollution from mining and remediating damaged landscapes.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah man, Im from there, I remember when it was scorched earth, moonlanding like. Rock climbing for miles and river pollution oh man. Crazy colours ive seen in creeks south of the superstack.
On the drive in on the Kingsway it would feel like another planet, but today there are forests galore. They started planting in the 80s and now it has really improved, there is soil again, less bareface rock, and the air is so much better.
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile, spewage continues at places like Norilsk.
Fixing it in one place hasn't eliminated the problem.
Re: (Score:2)
Nickel-Zinc whiskers so damned badly that it's about as useful as rechargeable alkaline - you might get 20-50 charge cycles at best then you're fucked.
Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's hope this isn't patented, so that anyone can use the research. Universities have a habit of taking federal funds, then patenting the research that those funds produce. This research was partly funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Congress should repeal the Bayh-Dole Act and require that any innovations from federally funded research be placed in the public domain.
Re: (Score:2)
I think there needs to be a middle ground, patented but easy to license the technology.
Re: (Score:3)
I think you missed his point. If the investment is ours, the return should be ours. The school's return is in the form of tuition and prestige (leading towards more tuition), the students return is a valuable and marketable education, and the professor's return is continued employment and the opportunity to publish.
Obviously if it's a private university, or the work is entirely funded by non-government funds, then there is no issue with privatizing the results.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
A couple of points to consider on this (I am a prof at a University, but used to work in industry):
1 - in my field at least (biomedical research), industry won't touch something without patents, which means it won't make it to market. It just costs too much to do all the safety & efficacy testing etc for it to make economic sense without a patent. The appropriateness of pharma pricing is a separate discussion, but the reality of the situation is if you want patients to benefit, you need industry to get
Re: (Score:2)
Congress should repeal the Bayh-Dole Act and require that any innovations from federally funded research be placed in the public domain.
Only if they adjust university funding to compensate. Public universities generally license their patents liberally, so it's not like the public is stripped of access to the technology.
University funds ultimately come from the public regardless. The only impact of these patents is what that money flows through: a private company or the US treasury.
I would support a mandatory FRAND licensing model to prevent anyone from stepping out of line though. Public-funds patents should be available to any interested p
Re:Patents (Score:4, Insightful)
Then let private industry provide the funds for research. Or if the University wants to patent it and license it then they shouldn't take federal grants in the first place.
if the money comes from all of us the research should benefit all of us equally.
Re: (Score:2)
Then let private industry provide the funds for research.
Like all that research funded by the tobacco industry that said smoking was OK?
Or the research funded by the sugar industry that implicated everything except sugar as a contributor to heart disease?
if the money comes from all of us the research should benefit all of us equally.
We can achieve this with mandatory FRAND licensing for all public-funds patents. Private organizations already do this for industry-standard technologies like DRAM and LTE, so we know it works.
This way, the universities have a financial incentive to perform useful research, and any interested party is guaranteed
Re: (Score:2)
Then let private industry provide the funds for research.
Like all that research funded by the tobacco industry that said smoking was OK?
Or the research funded by the sugar industry that implicated everything except sugar as a contributor to heart disease?
You're conflating junk "research" and real science. What patents did Big Tobacco or Big Sugar get out of those "studies" ? And honestly, who believed them anyway? Nothing I said implied that publicly funded research had to stop – only that universities shouldn't be allowed to tie up discoveries made with publicly funded research grants.
If industry wants to flush its money down the toilet by funding junk science, more power to them. They can – and do – fund real science too. They have to a
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Come on-- even the header says it prevents fire and explosions.
Re: (Score:2)
Wake up, chump. Rapid charging is highly dangerous. Batteries which take a long time to charge are much safer. Any time you speed up charging, you get more heating and pressure buildup. Sorry, but TANSTAAFL.
Re: (Score:2)
No. You didn't fix it. Any transfer of concentrated power is highly dangerous.
I asked my son to plug in my air compressor one day when he was about 12. I didn't realize the compressor was switched on, and he dallied when pushing the plug into the socket. But, I know there was something wrong when I heard him scream and looked up just in time to see six inches of flame shooting out of the the electrical socket. The stalled compressor looked like a short to the socket, and when the plug came in slowly it
Re: (Score:1)
Huh. On the one hand we have rice university researchers who say they have already done this successfully without problems.
On the other hand, we have a random person on the internet.
So hard to choose which side might be correct...
Re: (Score:2)
Considering all the cool things that we can make out of oil. It is a shame that we are just burning most of it.
Actually Looks Pretty Promising (Score:5, Insightful)
At 943 WH/kg and 1322 W/kg, this is really quite good. According to wikipedia, this is 4x "traditional" Li-ion density in terms of storage and decent in terms of charge/discharge rate.
I know they tested 500 cycles. Get to 1000 and it is practical. Get to 5000 and it owns the market.
Re: (Score:2)
Phone batteries are typically good for about 500 cycles. That's why heavy users who get down to a few percent every day find they only last 18 months.
Phone manufacturers motivated to improve battery longevity because it just means extra sales for them and the new model will be out in a year anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
For the most part, expect companies would want their customers to upgrade because they want to, vs because they have too. This is why these companies try to change the look and feel and add new features to their devices. Because it is was just because their batteries died on them, then chances are they will go with an other company who had better battery life.
I think the biggest killer, is every upgrade, expects more processing power, so each upgrade will use more battery faster.
Re: (Score:2)
Most people get new phones on contract, which means every two years. So the manufacturers design for two year lifespans, and an average user will get through their 500 cycles in a bit over 2 years, so there really isn't much incentive to provide a better battery. Or even a user replaceable battery.
Re: (Score:2)
You're not right. People that buy the high end phones are not typically waiting for their current phone to stop working. They are buying the new phone because it's faster, has different features, or is just new and shiny.
Heck, portable batteries are so cheap and small now that - short of the charging port breaking - a new battery should never be a reason to buy a new phone.
Re: (Score:2)
They hinted that it could be made without expensive processes that are currently used. This will push it to market faster than any other aspect.
Pancaked (Score:2)
Accidentally discovered when somebody ran over a phone
DIY Batteries for home are much more fun (Score:2)
The idea is - we have too many battery blue prints to work on. None of them are practical enough to be produced.
Is this actually it? (Maybe) (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, surprise, but somehow this one seems to be the announcement that, could, hit all of those points. The reported numbers are several times the current best for li-on power density, energy density (assumedly for both volume and weight), lasts a lot of charge and discharge cycles, and doesn't require some exotic rare earth material to make. Assuming the actual creation process isn't exotic or complex, IE can be economically scaled, this could actually be the coming of the affordable electric car/smartphone battery that actually lasts all day/etc. that's been promised for a while now. Here's fuckin hoping.
Re: (Score:1)
I'd have to agree. This does appear to be the game changer and it doesn't use expensive materials.
EV range out to 800k's or so - no more range anxiety problems.
Charge rate fast enough that it's no longer the bottleneck in driving distance - helped by the better range. And yeah, that matters, turning a one day trip into three massively increases costs. Accommodation for a start.
Or alternately, the same range as now with much less battery - drop the cost and size of batteries and more sensible (1-2 person) co
Re: (Score:2)
If you can push the range out to about 600 miles, which these batteries look like they could, then you only need to be able to recharge over night.
Put another way this is more than you can legally drive in the EU under the working time directive going around in circles at 70mph. Which of course is not realistic.
Actually I would say at more like 450 miles of real world driving is the most you can drive in a day without doing a driver change before you become dangerous on the road due to tiredness. However I
Miles to go before I sleep (Score:3)
The speed limit here is 80 mph. 450 miles is just under six hours of actual driving when you keep to the limit (and a lot of people drive a few mph faster.) Which will be interspersed with food stops at the very least.
Also, people are different. Your and my personal safe driving range really doesn't define the same thing
Re: (Score:2)
You know what they say about assumptions.
There is no really break through materials or processes here. Just a slight modification of current technology with readily available materials. The process actually appears to eliminate a few exotic and expensive processes.
If the results are replicated, manufacturers will be falling over themselves to license the technology so that they can beat their competitors to market with either an ever-so-slightly cheaper product (got to save those profit margins), or a "hi
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest... unless you're actually a scientist with access to a lab to create this stuff... it still "doesn't matter" until they are in shops, available to buy, just like everything else.
Until then, it's quite literally a science experiment.
It's like telling me that we have fusion-reactors. That's great. Cool science. The scientist in me loves the idea. But until someone actually BUYS ONE and puts it into the real world, it's entirely and literally academic. It doesn't affect my life, or almost any
Re: (Score:2)
You have to be a futures trader, or a research scientist for this kind of article to have any impact on you...
Everyone is a "futures trader" to some extent. For example, if you think there will be a massive improvement in commercially-available batteries within the next five years or so then it may not make sense to go out and buy an expensive electric vehicle based on soon-to-be-obsolete battery tech. Articles like this one help you estimate the likelihood of that happening and make a more informed decision, even if the commercial applications are still some years down the road.
Bookmark this, you'll never hear about it again... (Score:4, Insightful)
That might be an exaggeration... but seriously. After 15 years of reading amazing stuff on Slashdot, the amount of that stuff that actually becomes something beyond "University discovery" even 5+ years out from the initial story is depressingly tiny.
Re:Bookmark this, you'll never hear about it again (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the world of research! The gap between physical possibilities and economical viability is large, but without sufficient breakthroughs on physical possibilities we will never find one that is economically viable.So, regardless of the chances being slim that we will reap the benefits of all these breakthroughs anytime soon, I am still happy to see such breakthroughs happen.
Not only that, but reading that they used asphalt for this makes me think I'm driving on the biggest darn battery everyday (I know, it's not true... still...;)
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to the world of research! The gap between physical possibilities and economical viability is large, but without sufficient breakthroughs on physical possibilities we will never find one that is economically viable.So, regardless of the chances being slim that we will reap the benefits of all these breakthroughs anytime soon, I am still happy to see such breakthroughs happen.
Also, I got the impression from this one that it's not "aha, we've developed this new, fragile thing that can't yet work outside of a lab," but more "aha, we've found a way to solve some of those annoying economic viability problems! And it charges really fast!"
Re: (Score:2)
This. 100 times this.
They are not out on some limb exploring new concepts that requires all sorts of supporting context. They have discovered a way to fix problems with current tech using CHEAPER processes and materials to get BETTER batteries.
Expect this to be scarfed up and put into production with the utmost haste.
Re:Bookmark this, you'll never hear about it again (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Because 15 years ago I certainly didn't have 3Ah battery capable of being charged in 30min and only 4mm thick sitting in my pocket.
Assault and batteries (Score:2)
To be fair, you also didn't have a phone that was so thin it needed one, so power-hungry it needed one, and you could actually replace the battery if you needed to so it wasn't an outright horror if it couldn't make it through the day. Oh, and you could also opt for a higher-capacity aftermarket battery and back. You know, because the battery was replaceable.
Welcome to the future, where
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Closing one of the last analog holes means that your music an only pass through digital approved devices.
Soon:
*Danger, music from an unverified source detected, sound output disabled*
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
how good was a DAC on a phone anyway
Fantastically strong and clean power source from lithium batteries, essentially most modern delta-sigma or advanced segment DACs are difficult enough to tell apart by measurement let alone listening, all it comes down to is a tiny bit of silicon with most of the differences related to actual implementation and dependent on the skill of the person doing the silicon work. Frankly I'd take the skill of the people doing board design on complex devices like phones over those "audio experts" any day of the week.
Re: (Score:2)
Closing one of the last analog holes means that your music an only pass through digital approved devices.
Sorry but that doesn't pass the pub test. You can't actually close the analogue hole in any way at all because the signals required to produce sound are perfect for recording. It makes no difference if they come from the phone and go directly to a headphone driver, or if they come from a phone over wireless to the headphones via a built in DAC and then directly to the headphone drivers.
The analogue hole can't be closed, not without fundamentally changing the way human ears work.
Re: (Score:2)
chipset manufacturers mandating the feature be deprecated
No such thing. There's nothing stopping anyone from adding DACs external. There certainly isn't anything stopping someone ordering something by the millions from requesting the feature on an SoC which is already bespoke.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, you also didn't have a phone that was so thin it needed one, so power-hungry it needed one, and you could actually replace the battery if you needed to so it wasn't an outright horror if it couldn't make it through the day.
I don't have one now that needs it. Heck my Galaxy S5 has no problem lasting 18 days when I enable the power mode that makes it feature comparable to my old Nokia brick. Nothing "needs" it. We "want" it. Modern technology "enables" it.
Oh, and you could also opt for a higher-capacity aftermarket battery and back.
You can do that with pretty much every modern phone as well if you're happy with the extra bulk. It's called trade-offs. They haven't changed in last 20 years.
Welcome to the future, where "better" means "we milk the consumer ever harder."
Please go back to the technology you had back then. At least that way we wouldn't have to put up with your undiagnose
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, they have changed. You're just not paying attention. My S3 had a removable back, and buying an aftermarket extra-capacity battery for it was exactly as difficult as visiting Amazon for five minutes. My S7 does not have a removable back, and I can't get at the battery. M
Re: (Score:2)
My S7 does not have a removable back, and I can't get at the battery.
And yet functionality is still there if you want it. https://www.gottabemobile.com/... [gottabemobile.com] You're just being pedantic about the specifics of exactly how you want to achieve it.
However, the new phones from Google and Apple do not. Again, this is a significant change in strategy.
Actually there's more than 2 phones on the market too. Having to quote a Google pixel doesn't help your case. No one gives a crap about a phone with almost no market share. Apple can wallow in their filth. Wake me when I am unable to buy a flagship phone with that feature. Otherwise it's just complaining that not every single manufacturer
Re: (Score:2)
Try enabling the "This Day on Slashdot" sidebar, if you have not already. It shows you five most commented stories from previous years, and it's fascinating to see what we were concerned about back then.
Today we have "A Car With A Mind Of Its Own" from 2004. Thirteen years later and self-driving cars are still not ready.
who's fault? Asphalt! (Score:1)
Gilsonite is not Asphalt (Score:5, Informative)
Gilsonite might technically be Asphalt by definition,but it's a unique natural bitumen composed of a mix of light but solid hydrocarbons. It only occurs in one spot on the planet (the Uinta Basin in Utah).
It's believed to have been created when a few million years ago a geothermal event warmed up the Uintah oil shale (the same stuff they frack) and liquefied a bunch of the hydrocarbons into a slurry that then oozed up the cracks and solidified. It's a solid, actually looks quite a bit like obsidian (glossy and black) but is super light weight and obviously not glass. It's so light weight they mine it by hand with air hammers and use vacuums to collect it and bring it to the surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Oh boy! Can't wait! (Score:2)
Re: We read about battery improvements... (Score:1)
Well this one uses oil as a base component, so it confuses the fuck out of everyone.
Re:We read about battery improvements... (Score:5, Informative)
Meanwhile, cell phone batteries keep shrinking while their amp hours keep growing.
No, any given announcement isn't likely to ultimately play out. But some fraction of them do, and they change the world behind the scenes. The classic example is silicon anodes, which were the subject of big news stories on Slashdot years ago, then there was nothing.... but today they're commonly used in high-capacity li-ions.
As for this specific research: I read the study, and I have to admit, it's pretty impressive. One of the big things is that not only is the ion mobility high, but the coulombic efficiency is also very high (95-96% at high charge rates, 99% at low rates). If you want fast charging, having both is critical; otherwise, you'll never remove all of the waste heat at a fast enough rate.
After having read the paper, I have to add some caveats about this:
This is for the active materials only, not for whole cells, and only at low power density. First, the cell capacity is quite sensitive to how fast you charge it - if you charge it fast, the peak capacity is significantly reduced. That said, it's not a permanent difference; if the next time you charge it's a slow charge you go right back to the higher capacity. Secondly, when you include the inactive materials, they show about 450Wh/kg at low charge rates, and around 300Wh/kg at high charge rates. That said, it's still nice - and further refinement could probably reduce the inactive mass.
The capacity loss over 500 cycles - perhaps I'm not reading clearly, as I'm not seeing where that figure is given out. One of their graphs appears to show something like 10-15% loss over 130 cycles at 0,5C charge rate. It's hard to say how the curve will continue from there. A caveat is worth adding, in that the higher your maximum capacity, the fewer cycles you actually need, since for a given task you put fewer cycles per unit time on a higher capacity battery than a smaller capacity battery.
I see nothing about accelerated aging tests to see if there's any particular aging effect. Then again, I don't expect much of one, given their chemistry.
As for manufacture, it's a simple process, and requires no (relatively) expensive mined materials (e.g. no cobalt or the like). That said, one of their components - graphene nanoribbons - I have no clue what the current manufacturing costs are, nor what the potential is to bring them down in mass production. In theory, for something that's pure carbon, the cost should be able to go way down, since basic organic feedstocks are dirt cheap compared to most inorganic feedstocks. But that doesn't mean we've gotten it down that much at this point.
Just my takes from reading the paper :)
Re: (Score:2)
Carbon! In its many forms, what can't it do?
Soon, it will be simply to valuable to leave sitting around in the atmosphere.
Re: (Score:3)
You may have said that as a joke, but you might not be that far off.
There are processes now using molten-lithium carbonate electrolytic cells to pull the carbon out of the air. The real innovate though is the electrode has nucleation sites that allow for the growing of carbon-nanotube whiskers long enough to be harvested and spun into a carbon fiber with not much more processing (compared to current forms of carbon fiber manufacture). The other component to making useful carbon fiber materials is epoxy res
Re: (Score:2)
You may have said that as a joke, but you might not be that far off.
There are processes now using molten-lithium carbonate electrolytic cells to pull the carbon out of the air. The real innovate though is the electrode has nucleation sites that allow for the growing of carbon-nanotube whiskers long enough to be harvested and spun into a carbon fiber with not much more processing (compared to current forms of carbon fiber manufacture). The other component to making useful carbon fiber materials is epoxy resin. Resin is pretty much all organic, read-carbon!
This coupled with cheap PV solar and focused solar heating (for the carbonate cells) we could really be pulling truly significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Not just sequestering, but providing true value-added structural materials (ie market driven!!)
I would love to believe this but... ... in order to pull all the carbon out of the atmosphere you would need to have an industrial demand equal to the amount of coal and oil we have burned over the last 250 years. The volume of which is truly staggering.
Re: (Score:2)
It wouldn't happen tomorrow, but the demand could be there if the energy/materials were.
Some combination of sequestration and transmutation (not literally, but CO2->carbon fiber) could be a winning ticket. Not to mention we could try and reforest areas. That'd have a pretty large negative carbon effect. I recall recently reading an article about how in the early 90s in Costa Rica they dumped tons of orange peels onto depleted scrub land. 30 years later the growth was so impressive that they couldn't fin
Re: (Score:1)
First, the cell capacity is quite sensitive to how fast you charge it - if you charge it fast, the peak capacity is significantly reduced. That said, it's not a permanent difference; if the next time you charge it's a slow charge you go right back to the higher capacity. Secondly, when you include the inactive materials, they show about 450Wh/kg at low charge rates, and around 300Wh/kg at high charge rates. ...As for manufacture, it's a simple process, and requires no (relatively) expensive mined materials (e.g. no cobalt or the like).
about 15 years ago, when batteries looked like they'd plateaued, I pretty much thought the future of batteries would be in a nano-structure. My thinking was more along the lines of super capacitors shrunk to nano size structures, allowing for virtually instant charging and regulated discharging. I'll admit some of this was based on Phillip Jose Farmer's description of the "batacitor" in his Riverworld series and thinking there wasn't a real reason we couldn't come up with something to make that sci-fi conce
Re: (Score:2)
There's been some interesting work with quantum capacitors, although it hasn't really gone anywhere. The concept is that at incredibly tiny scales, charge is quantized, and you can use this as an effective barrier to prevent dielectric breakdown. In theory, the only thing limiting the strength of your battery / capacitor is its internal tensile and compressive strengths. The unfortunate thing is that tensile and compressive strength limits are more limiting than we'd like, even if you could pull off such a
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is batteries improve at a linear rate, while technology improves at an exponential rate. We get these improvements all the time, But the time it goes from the Lab to the consumer takes years. So by the time we get this technology in place the Recharge time change would not be as noticeable, as improvements from other labs in the past start getting implemented.
Re: (Score:2)
Certainly there's lag between technology in the lab and consumer retail, however if one steps back and looks at consumer battery [or other] technology over a relatively short 10 year period the individual improvements are incremental, but occur often/quickly that are significant overall. If people don't notice the changes it's because they aren't paying attention (but that's typical).
Re: We read about battery improvements... (Score:1)
There shall be no discussion of common sense here!
Re: (Score:1)
Nope, it is a story about America. Praise asphalt and gasoline!
By the way, David Bowie says god is an American so you better get used to it:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyric... [azlyrics.com]
Another good one involving gasoline:
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyric... [azlyrics.com]
Re:Snore... (Score:5, Insightful)
Over the last decade batteries have improved dramatically in capacity, reliability, charging speed, and (especially) cost. This is a result of the very breakthroughs that you so flippantly denigrate.
If you aren't interested in reading about leading edge research, then what are you doing on Slashdot?
Re:Snore... (Score:5, Insightful)
He is here to post, not read anything he posts about.
Re: (Score:3)
It has, constantly.
Or did you think you've always had 3Ah batteries capable of producing an insane amount of current and being charged in 30minutes sitting in a device that is 7mm thin in your pocket?
Re: (Score:2)
I have a pack of AA 2800mAH rechargeable batteries at home that can give me something quite similar.
I bought them for my GP2X back in.... hold on... 2008, according to my emails from the person I bought it from. They will happily fry themselves if you short-circuit them, the current available is unbelievable.
They could fast-charge in a little over an hour, I think, but I never bought ridiculous chargers, I just bought more of those batteries. I reckon there were fan-cooled chargers that would do it in 30
Re:Snore... (Score:5, Informative)
I reckon there were fan-cooled chargers that would do it in 30 minutes back then too.
Recharge efficiency and heat dissipation are two areas that these batteries specifically improve.
Smart phones and laptops have already benefited from faster recharging---as recently as 2-3 years ago. They can't just throw better cooling into the mix, so they rely on improvements like this.
But in the last ten years, the technology, capacity, size and charge times have barely changed.
The improvement of ~20% is much less than what we get in the microprocessor industry, but every bit helps.
And as far are charge times are concerned--- that is straight up wrong. You can now charge a phone from ~25% to ~75% in about 15 minutes, and that was not possible a decade ago. Fast-charging has quickly but quietly become the norm.
The ability to squeeze more energy into a smaller volume is what makes modern smart phones possible at all. Android could not exist if we still used 1980s-era battery tech.
There are other factors. LiPo batteries are about 1/5 lighter than traditional lithium ion batteries (of equal capacity). This is hugely advantageous for drones and other markets where weight really matters. And everyone likes lighter laptops/phones, even if the difference is not critical from a design standpoint.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)