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Rechargeable Batteries With Almost Infinite Lifetimes Coming, Say MIT-Samsung Engineers

posted by takyon on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:55AM   
from the another-battery-breakthrough dept.

bitshifter writes:

From MIT and KurzweilAI.net:

MIT and Samsung researchers have developed a new approach to achieving long life and a 20 to 30 percent improvement in power density (the amount of power stored in a given space) in rechargeable batteries — using a solid electrolyte, rather than the liquid used in today's most common rechargeables. The new materials could also greatly improve safety and last through "hundreds of thousands of cycles."

[...] The electrolyte in rechargeable batteries is typically a liquid organic solvent whose function is to transport charged particles from one of a battery's two electrodes to the other during charging and discharging. That material has been responsible for the overheating and fires that, for example, resulted in a temporary grounding of all of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets. With a solid electrolyte, there's no safety problem, he says. "You could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it — there's nothing there to burn."

The key to making all this feasible, Ceder says, was finding solid materials that could conduct ions fast enough to be useful in a battery. The initial findings focused on a class of materials known as superionic lithium-ion conductors, which are compounds of lithium, germanium, phosphorus, and sulfur. But the principles derived from this research could lead to even more effective materials, the team says, and they could function below about minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

Another "almost there" revolutionary battery technology?

Design principles for solid-state lithium superionic conductors [abstract]

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Original Submission

• "Almost infinite" is not a thing "Almost infinite" is not a thing (Score: 4, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Thursday August 27 2015, @07:29AM

  by wonkey_monkey (279) on Thursday August 27 2015, @07:29AM (#228503) Homepage

  Almost Infinite

  So... finite, then?

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• Re:"Almost infinite" is not a thing (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:31PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:31PM (#228615)

  Yes, but separated from infinity only by a small infinite amount.

  Parent

• Re:"Almost infinite" is not a thing Re:"Almost infinite" is not a thing (Score: 2) by penguinoid on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:20PM

  by penguinoid (5331) on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:20PM (#228655)

  Almost Infinite

  So... finite, then?

  It's a synonym for "close enough to infinity that only a pedant will care for the difference".

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  • Re:"Almost infinite" is not a thing (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @05:24PM (#228656)

    close enough to infinity

    So... infinitely far from infinity?

    Parent