Battery Technology Breakthrough

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BBC Link



A team at the university of Illinois has found a way to increase storage capacity 30x when compared to today's batteries. This will open up all kinds of possibilities n the years to come.



Link 2

even more interesting is at the bottom of the article they left a tantalizing clue about powering things with radio waves. sorta like tesla?

You know, it's only a matter of time before they build-
1. A 6 Million Dollar Man. Those microbatteries could power limb motors, powerful eye or hearing devices and mechanical hearts that pump blood in relation to the amount of exercise exerted by its user.
2. A personal flight device. Right now, the gas jets are just too heavy, noisy and dirty to operate. The microbatteries, powering the jet pack's motors, would be an infinitely better application. Man, of course, would have to learn how to fall safely from, say, 500 feet in the air just in case.
3. The price of microbattery-powered cars would be within the ballpark of most new car purchasers. Stinky oil engines would go the way of the dodo bird.
4. Mankind is probably close to creating a Jurassic Park. Until then, microbattery-powered dinosaurs would have to do.
5. Robotics would take a giant leap forward. Rosie the Robot maid would leap from the services of The Jetsons into real life. Roomba was just the beginning.

Thanks for the links, energy production and storage is one of my favorite subjects!

reading now!

1. Is it safe?
2. Can it be made in a relatively inexpensive way?

They are still evaluating that. Seems like a clean technology, so I think this is going far.



It's a good investment. People are looking forward to a "super battery life", so my guess is that this will sell a lot. Of course, initially the costs are a bit rampant but when this gets to the "mainstream" and improvements in the correlation between quality/price are made, it will get better. This is a bit too generic but it rarely fails.

It holds great promise for electric cars. If they can increase the energy storage of a battery by 5x without increasing cost, size and weight. then electric cars will become practical.

Practical for us, impractical for oil companies. Who wins?
I think that electric cars won't have a tremendous effect on the usage of petroleum in a short term - a lot of things have to change to clean electricity!

That might explain why battery tech hasn't progressed all that much.

When are you expecting to see the "boom" of clean technology then?

It seems to be safe at its current scale, but not at a larger one. They're thinking about changing the electrolyte to something polymer based to work around that issue.


It doesn't seem like it can be yet (according to the article), but the way they've made it so far is reliable. They expect to market the technology in 1-2 years to replace supercapacitors in radios and other electronics.

If you feel like spending $32, you can check out the full publication Here

How long does it hold its charge when not in use is one thing I wonder? Also cell phones are too small currently and not long and concave enough to actually talk on them.