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Researchers at the University of Texas, including the 94-year-old John Goodenough, claim to have achieved up to five times better energy density in a solid lithium glass battery. The technology supposedly charges much faster than other batteries. One expert says that the battery's proposed mechanism violates the first law of thermodynamics:
At the center of this debate is a towering figure in the world of science — John Goodenough, who teaches material science at the university.
In 1980, his work led to the invention of the lithium-ion battery — now crucial to powering everything from cellphones and laptops to electric cars. For a lot of people, that would probably be enough. But at 94 years old, he's still at it. [...] Now, Goodenough and his team say they've created a new battery that may store up to five times more power than current ones. And, even better, such a battery would charge and recharge in a matter of minutes — all without exploding.
[...] Goodenough's team is using a solid — a lithium glass. In their paper [DOI: 10.1039/C6EE02888H] [DX], they say this glass along with a new design allows their battery to perform so much better. But many others are skeptical. "If you could accomplish what this paper claims, it would rewrite the way we think about chemistry," says Dan Steingart, a professor of mechanical engineering at Princeton. He says batteries are sealed, so it's hard to know what's really going on. And he doubts the team's interpretation of what's happening here. In fact, he says, the chemical ingredients shouldn't be storing any power, what he calls "anomalous capacity."
NOVA, which aired Search for the Super Battery in February, covered John Goodenough in March.
Daimler is investing half a billion euros in a lithium-ion battery factory:
Daimler didn't give any projections for its factory's potential capacity, but it did say that its investment would quadruple the size of an existing battery factory on the site, which is run by Accumotive, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daimler. The German automaker is also pledging another €500 million to expand battery production worldwide. And if all goes well at the Kamenz site, Daimler says it will "go into operation in mid-2018."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Roger Murdock on Wednesday May 24 2017, @02:53AM (9 children)
The only take-away I got from this is that I wish my last name was Goodenough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @02:58AM
Murdock isn't Goodenough for you?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:08AM (5 children)
Batteries are goodenough! Make no attempt to improve them!
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:13AM (3 children)
Actually might be risky to try improving a life's work at age 94. People tend to be petty idiots who remember you only for the very last thing you did. If this new battery design isn't goodenough, his legacy could be ruined forever.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:36AM (1 child)
A young man is walking through a small village one day and decides to stop by a bar and have a beer. He walks into a bar, and sees a grizzled old man, crying into his beer. Curious, the young man sits down and says, "Hey old timer, why the long face?"
The old man looks at him and points out the window, "See that dock out there? I built that dock with my own two hands, plank by plank, nail by nail, but do they call me McGregor the dockbuilder? No, no."
The old man continued, "And see that boat out there? I've been fishing these waters for my village for 35 years! But do they call me McGregor the fisherman? No, no."
The old man continued, "And see all the crops in the farms out there? I planted and have been farming those crops for my village for nearly 45 years! But do they call me McGregor the farmer? No, no."
The old man starts to cry again, "But you screw one goat..."
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:42PM
He should screw hundreds of young girls.
They'll call him king Soloman, and women will demand his full penile castration and torture and execution (since it is in their interests and the interest of "society" (aka: women) to keep the market constrained)
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by takyon on Wednesday May 24 2017, @04:09AM
Legacy is useless. Only life extension matters.
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(Score: 2) by archfeld on Wednesday May 24 2017, @04:49AM
*Groan*, was that PUN-ishment Goodenough ?
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:07PM
I'm Goodenough, would you marry me?
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday May 24 2017, @03:36PM
His name does make it easy to remember. He has really enabled lithium based chemistries to come to the marketplace. This is why I'm quite excited about this announcement: it may take a few years to commercialize, but I don't think it will fall by the wayside like so many "revolutionary" battery technology articles we see.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160305003001/http://qz.com/338767/the-man-who-brought-us-the-lithium-ion-battery-at-57-has-an-idea-for-a-new-one-at-92/ [archive.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Goodenough [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:12AM (4 children)
If you're over 80, bad enough that you're probably suffering from a variety of age related problems. Can't walk as fast, not as strong, can't drive as well, etc. But everyone constantly wondering if this time you've finally lost your mind and gone senile has to be a real bummer. You may even have children eager to to shove your old butt into the nearest nursing home and hurry you into the grave so they can collect that big inheritance you're leaving them.
The suggestion that this new lithium battery is too good to be true, nothing wrong with that. Maybe someone made a big mistake somewhere. That does happen. But to assume that there probably is a mistake because the researcher is very old, is just a tad unfair.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:49AM
I don't see any suggestion of him being mocked for his old age in the summary and the linked paper has 3 co-authors who are probably a lot younger and could prevent any devastating age-related mistakes.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:20AM
It's not like you cannot find an overworked intern at your service 24h to check out if whatever you do is working as expected...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @08:50AM
Being an ageist must suck? Do you know why you're not working to improve on battery technology? It's because you are not Goodenough!
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:07AM
Possibly Arthur C. Clarkes 'First Law' applies:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:39AM (2 children)
The head of the committee continued:
- ... and so, dr Goodenough, we took your measurements, ran them against powerful AI systems to find the possible chemical processes going on. Found NOTHING. We analyzed your prototype and came to the inescapable conclusion...
- I AM NOT CHEATING!
- Yes you are. This thing is not a battery, it's a rather low yield cold fusion reactor.
- Oh. that explains a lot...
- ... which means your research is not done with the proper funding and procedures and must cease at once.
- I understand... who will take over from here?
- The military.
- So we will have rugged phones again, maybe.
- Everything about that is strictly classified. By the way, this meeting never happened.
- This sounds like you are not gonna...
- Our opinion is that our industries are not ready for this kind of development. Have a nice day.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Wednesday May 24 2017, @12:38PM
Is there a "+1 Jesus Christ I hope not, but it does almost sound plausible" mod, because if so...?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @10:49PM
Close but this is how it would really go.
- ...
- ... which means your research is not done with the proper funding and procedures and must cease at once.
- I understand... who will take over from here?
- ...
No-one. You are suspended and your lab is being shut down. You owe $4.2M in back payments for unfunded research and possible criminal charges. In the meantime a new director will be appointed (who hates you) to investigate wrong-doing by you and anyone who ever worked with you. Your accounts will fund the salary for the new director. Security will see you out.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday May 24 2017, @08:46AM (8 children)
As far as I can tell, this 'violating the first law of thermodynamics' shtick is down to poor reporting.
Also, why would you go to a Professor of Mechanical Engineering to ask about Electrochemistry?
In electrochemical research, it is not unusual to build cells that have the same electrodes either side of an electrolyte. If you push current through the cell, you get to see the anode reactions one side, and the cathode reactions the other; or in other words, you can see what happens when you charge the cell one side and discharge the cell the other, at the same time. (Cells don't have to be sealed by the way, unless excluding oxygen (or other gases) from the air is necessary). If you stop pushing current through the cell, you can remove an electrode and examine it e.g. under an electron microscope, to see what is going on physically e.g. are dendrites growing.
People are looking at the diagrams of the cell and saying: this can't work, as there is no electrochemical potential between the two electrodes, because they are not dissimilar materials. Well, duh!, they are not meant to be.
However, what Goodenough's team have reported in a peer reviewed journal is a non-traditional cell. I remember just about enough electrochemistry from my degree to read the paper, but I don't know enough to give a good 'dumbed down' explanation. (It's a good exercise is knowing how well you understand something to try and explain it in terms a non-expert will understand, without giving misleading information).
The teams cell has some really useful properties:
1) They've pretty much suppressed dendrite formation.
2) It's a solid electrolyte.
3) Electrode volume changes are unidirectional, which is a neat trick.
4) The capacity of the cell is determined by the amount of anode material, not how much of a particular ion is in the electrolyte. This is huge, as it massively increases the capacity of the cell. And controversial, as people who don't understand how the cell works think it is against the first law of thermodynamics.
As for understanding how the cell works, a key point is that it is not your standard wet electrochemical cell that operates on solid/solution redox electrochemistry. Redox potentials are 'just' another way about talking about electron Fermi-level differences (familiar to people who work with semiconductors), and this cell generates differences in Fermi-levels in a non-traditional manner. This is not made clear in the paper, but it means anyone using just high-school chemistry understanding of batteries/cells will not understand the mechanism of how this new cell works. I would almost say this cell operates in about as different a way as a transistor to a vacuum tube.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:14PM (1 child)
> I would almost say this cell operates in about as different a way as a transistor to a vacuum tube.
Are you saying this battery could be sold 5x higher to audiophiles?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:32PM
No, the audiophiles won't touch it.
They will want the old school battery.
Not the new fangled, better working, solid state battery.
I wonder if they initially understood why the first transistor worked?
I know they didn't know why the first diodes worked.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @01:21PM
Niggar Thugs Yo!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Zinho on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:41PM (3 children)
Why you gotta hate on Mechanical Engineers? We take chemistry classes too; and unlike physicists [xkcd.com] we'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you actually know what you're doing and talking about. For what it's worth, electroplating of metals is a significant portion of the study of corrosion, which is a specialty many mechanical engineers are deeply involved in. Professor Steingart's profile [princeton.edu] says he specializes in material science, so there's a chance he knows what he's on about.
I read through the professor's first law analysis, [medium.com] and I think he's being pretty fair about it. It seems there's a lively conversation going on between Goodenough and Steingart, with several updates correcting the analysis. Here's the short version:
* comparing the claimed chemistry before and after discharge, there's not enough change in energy to explain the work being done
* the proposed mechanism for the energy difference (change in Fermi potential) explains 1/100th of the work being done
* The results of the test speak for themselves; SOMETHING is going on, just probably not what the paper claims.
Professor Steingart is trying to help find the real mechanism involved, because if we understand it better then we can make an even better battery. It seems to me that everyone is on the same side here, and this is Science working the way it should.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday May 24 2017, @06:29PM (1 child)
Moderated you up, especially for the link to Steingart's analysis. You must admit, though, at first sight, mechanical engineering doesn't immediately appear relevant to electrochemistry: but I take your point about corrosion etc.
The reproducibility with different redox centres (S, MnO2, Fe(CN)4-) and significant numbers of charge/discharge cycles do indicate something is going on. Maybe it is oxygen contamination, but even if it were, it looks highly interesting.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Wednesday May 24 2017, @08:58PM
Thanks for the mod! And, yeah, you'll notice I was VERY careful not to make it sound like a sure thing that the Prof was an appropriate expert; having an ME degree very much makes you a generalist. Smart MEs keep their mouths shut when the topic goes outside their specialty; YMMV
:P
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:03PM
Why ask a Mechanical Engineer? Because MEs rule!!!!!
Check out the wikipedia page for Goodenough:
"John B. Goodenough". Faculty. The University of Texas at Austin Mechanical Engineering Department. May 3, 2005. Archived from the original on September 28, 2011. Retrieved 2011-08-23.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2017, @05:56PM
Because the other professors when asked either refused to comment or said boring stuff in the lines of "Plausible", "Goodenough probably knows what he's doing" etc.
That's how "journalism"/"reporting" works.