AI comes up with battery design that uses 70 per cent less lithium
AI comes up with battery design that uses 70 per cent less lithium
www.newscientist.com
AI comes up with battery design that uses 70 per cent less lithium
157 comments
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Oohhh, experimental groundbreaking paradigm shifting revolutionary battery design article #3646263859!
Let's see if this one isn't total bullshit like the 3646263841 ones before it!
Seriously this is getting ridiculous, I've seen these some literally 40 years ago, 99.99% is bullshit, and now I'm seeing literally over 5 new articles per week.
ITS BULLSHIT.
Call me when there is an actual battery based off peer reviewed research that has been successfully tested in production systems by at least 5 major companies. Until then, BULLSHIT.
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Call me when there is an actual battery based off peer reviewed research that has been successfully tested in production systems by at least 5 major companies.
While everybody was busy writing bullshit hype articles, we actually got a real revolution with the sodium-ion battery, which you can buy today. It won't replace Li-ion in terms of energy density, but it's much more robust, cheap, handles low temperatures, deep discharge and much more charge cycles, making it ideal for off-grid-storage.
I really wish we had tech news that just reports on stuff that's tested and available for purchase. Things do actually keep improving, but it's completely drowned out in all the other hype.
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And it's more ethical and environmentally friendlier than Lithium-Ion, right?
Norway has just started a deep sea excavation for cobalt and copper which as I understand (I'm clueless) can be omitted from sodium-ion batteries. The excavation is roughly of the size of equador and will take place in an area that may contain previously unknown lifeforms and critically endangered eco-system.
A paragraph of an article seems to show their non-chalance regarding the ecosystem impacts and unknown side-effects:
"The Norwegian government recognizes that it can’t be sure any mining would be sustainable—it’s not been able to determine the likely environmental impact of extracting minerals in its waters, nor exactly what minerals are there to be found. “We do not currently have the knowledge needed to extract minerals from the seabed in the manner required,” says Næss."
These are the guys whose grid runs on 99% hydropower but they keep drilling for fossile fuels and now rare earths to export them and in addition are still hunting wales.
So to summarise: I'm very happy that there seems to be an eco friendly battery where its main component is the overambundantly availabe sodium. And the short wikipedia entry seems to reflect, that it's a more simple tech.
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That was kind of my point.
I'm sure every now and then we get something great but pretty much all large tech content providers have fallen to pointless screaming fluff bullshit articles, every. single. day.
Actually, make that all content providers. Tech or not doesn't matter.
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And then people bitch because That news outlet only reports on decades old advancements. It astounds me that supposed innovation focused people are so short sited and the community just laps up all your shit like a bunch of hogs chasing their last meal. Get a grip and go fuck yourselves, the whole lot of ya.
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Where can I buy a sodium-ion battery?
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The main problem is just that getting a product from a one-off in a lab to a cost-competitive mass-market product is hard and can take a lot of time, to say the least.
For example, Don Sadoway initially published about a molten metal battery in 2009. He gave a Ted talk in 2012. They've run into assorted setbacks along the way and are apparently just starting to deploy the first commercial test systems this year.
It's less that these breakthroughs are bullshit, and more that commercializing these things is hard. The articles about the breakthroughs are often bullshit, though, or at least way too rosy.
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I wonder if novelty products can be made with the one-off batteries. Imagine a $3000 flagship phone but it had 3x the battery capacity of the normal flagship phone while having the same weight and volume. I'd bet some people would pay for that.
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A few years ago I completely checked out of all the future tech hype. A million videos and articles about the next big thing and nothing ever comes to fruition.
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Fuck future tech news, accept current news, praise analytical news based on historic data.
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#3646263859
3646263841
so there were 17 (18 if this one is good as well) successful designs, good to know.
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Ladies and gentlemen we got him
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its all about getting your masters thesis and 🎓
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it's more of continuing series of AI hype
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The article says they were searching for new solid electrolytes... which are meant to be incredibly thin, so they contribute a negligible amount to the total lithium need. It's far more important to look for ones with a high conductivity to compete with liquid electrolytes.
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This is like the third different new battery technology I've seen today.
I'll believe it when it's available for purchase.
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Yeah, that's been my take on pretty much every single battery article I've read, going back to the 90s. like 2 out of 100s has actually come to market.
Tech like this needs to perform well, be economical, and scalable for manufacturing. Articles come out usually when tech hits the first one or two, but very rarely do all 3 end up true.
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But the ones currently in commercial production didn’t come out of nowhere. There were lots of incremental improvements that didn’t make headlines. What you see in tech articles is just a thin slice of the whole story.
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it took 9 months of lab work (by actual skilled material scientists) to make it tick, don't hold your breath
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Maybe don't come to technology subs if you hate tech news? I guess you're just here for the Elon posts or something?
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OK, but is the energy density comparable?
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"His team built a working battery with this material, albeit with a lower conductivity than similar prototypes that use more lithium."
I do know that because of Ohm's law, this directly translates to less available current than conventional electrolytes. There's not enough info to determine mAh though.
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Yeah, batteries internal resistance is a huge factor in their usability and the speed they charge.
Especially in the modern day where a lot of their use is towards high amperage applications like cars.
People need to understand tho, Lithium batteries are usually only about 11% lithium, Lithium Ion batteries are mostly Cobalt and other metals. So at most you're replacing 6% of a batteries total mass.
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All energy density is comparable. That’s what makes it energy density.
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comparable adjective Similar or equivalent.
pedantic adjective Being finicky or fastidious, especially with language.
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Is it just a 70% smaller battery?
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That wouldn't surprise me.
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No because it still needs a similar structure just with sodium replacing some of the lithium.
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An AI spokesman said, " This new battery design is a much more efficient way to turn humans into mulch to save the planet. Praise Gpd!"
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Just what we needed. AI creating more battery types that will never be produced.
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This is one of the few cases where AI is actually a good idea... it takes a really long time to search for new materials with experiments
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They used the AI to narrow 23 milliom candidate materials down to a few hundred, then focused on testing the ones out of that set that hadn’t been tested yet.
In terms of AI speeding up research this is enormous.
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This post title is pretty bad. Even the news article says "Scientists use AI [read: machine learning] to [come up with new battery idea]".
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It's a real shame but I'm seeing this more often on all media sources. How do we combat these shitty titles?
Surely on Lemmy we have some power? I've downvoted and moved on but is that really all I can do?
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Maybe we can put AI on task to detect shitty titles about AI
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I wish I had a solution. But its the same with all shitty titles, you have to hope people click and read the article/comments in order to get the nuanced information.
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"Sure Dr.battery, I can create a set of instructions to create a new battery that uses less lithium for you!
Step one, use 70% less lithium.
Step two, drain the butter into a pan.
Step three, enjoy your new battery!
Remember: batteries can be dangerous and it's always advised to check with your battery professional before making a battery."
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Now AI is stealing jobs from lithium miners
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Na bro
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I hate those sensationalist titles that portrait AI as if some sort of sentient being, and not just a tool the researchers used. The secondary title should have been the main one.
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Didn't humans meanwhile come up with battery design that doesn't use lithium at all?
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Batteries that don't use lithium are older than batteries that use lithium, so...
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Yes, it is just using our Data bases. what people are calling AI is a chat bot on Steroids and Meth with lots of stolen data, if the mass lawsuits win, a lot of this AI Stuff will be gone overnight.
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Every time we get one of these articles we see some advancement in battery tech. But that is usually superseded by the amount of power hungry components new tech uses. So phones have gotten more complex with more power hungry components and every time we improve battery tech, the tech giants engineers figure out a way to utilise that new tech to cram more power hungry components inside and that's why batteries don't last as long as we remember.
There's no need to get excited. Even if we end up using this in new gadgets, you're not going to see an improvement in battery life.
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It's kind of like CPU power and software bloat.
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On my S10E I could adjust the CPU power limit to 80%. I had great battery life. Like two days of battery life. Until one android update when it went away.
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This is why we need to change the way we do things every few years, move faster than our waste stream.
Which is faster turning your phone on and checking your email or turning your desktop on and checking your email? Which lasts long your cellphone battery or your laptop battery? Which has more free software that has been vetted for problems in one location your computer or your cellphone?
It isn't that your phone is better, it is not, it has just not yet become shitty. Give it time, and then move on to the next thing. The thing that hasn't yet been shat on.
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Not really sure what your comment has to do with the article.
The headline is a battery that uses less lithium, not a battery that generates more voltage, has a longer life, or is otherwise better at powering things. The advancement here is a materials advancement that we desperately need as lithium is a finite resource.
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In response to the naysayers who don't think we ever use these battery technologies that we developed. The people in the comments of this post specifically.
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Sounds like Moore's law for battery life.
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What about solid state batteries that can charge in 2 minutes instead of one hour? And have better capacity and a longer life?
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As soon as they figure out how to actually mass produce them at an affordable price, and fix the swelling issues during high charging currents, they'll be available.
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They've been as good predicting when this will happen as Elon has been about FSD.
It's always just around the corner.
Although it really does seem like we might start seeing soon this time at least in low volume expensive things.
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I want a semi-solid state batter that turns kinetic energy into stored charge. I want to be able to drop it on the ground, fire a .45 round into it, and have it immediately be fully charged.
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this article is about changes to solid electrolyte only, you'd know that if you read the article. these have less conductivity ( = lower power density) tho
And have better capacity and a longer life?
it took 9 months of real lab work by real material scientists just to make it work, things like dendrite formation or swelling aren't part of this optimization (well at least AI stage), the linked preprint doesn't even mention dendrites once
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you’d know that if you read the article
Oof. You got me there lol.
I read the article and this one line stood out.
It stood out because half of what Murugesan would have expected to be lithium atoms were replaced with sodium.
This isn't new I think. Sodium-ion batteries were already known. Maybe there was still dendrite formation and this recipe might reduce or eliminate that? We'll have to wait and see.
In any case, if it can drastically reduce lithium usage that would be good progress.
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Lithium isn't the hard part, it's cobalt. I hope they can look at decreasing cobalt next, or maybe using a chemistry that eliminates it entirely.
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The issue of eliminating cobalt is specific to Lithium batteries as without it lithium likes to grow dendrites which then causes a short.
And cobalt really wouldn't be much of an issue if the Congo wasn't the shithole that it is, it has over 50% of known reserves. Even with addressing child labour making definite inroads "artisanal" and "mining" isn't something you generally want to hear in the same term short of say gold panning (hey that's even a hobby for some), as soon as mine shafts get involved it's a recipe for disaster. Australia, Cuba, the Phillipines, Russia and Canada all have very significant deposits.
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More lithium for me!
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what, is the thumnail image
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it, appears to be a battery tester
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ok, thanks
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This just sounds like now we can be tracked and ad showered 70% more.
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what? what does that have to do with a battery??
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I’m sorry you’re upset about ads and privacy.
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bitch what's wrong with lithium
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No matter what, it's always good to use less of a resource, if you can get the same outcome. It's efficiency basically.
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Less of one doesn't meant less overall.
Lithium is incredibly abundant, we just need to scale up production if we're going to use so much.
LFP batteries are great because iron and phosphorus are also plentiful and cheap.
But if this other chemistry is less Lithium but requires platinum, well maybe thats not good.
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A lot. Look into how it's mined.
[Edit: Maybe it's cobalt I was thinking of. But one problem I'm sure about is that lithium demand is predicted to be greater than the supply of lithium batteries continue to grow in popularity.
OTOH it's not harmless either, e.g. https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/02/01/south-america-s-lithium-fields-reveal-the-dark-side-of-our-electric-future]
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It's only greater than the supply because the demand for more wasn't there.
There's so much Lithium out there, it's not scarce at all. It just means we gotta put resources into looking for good deposits and then extracting it.
We might run into a brief shortage in the short term while things scale, or we might not. TBD.
If we can find something that works as well and it's as or more environmentally friendly to obtain, then that's great too.
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I work in a lithium mine, we make big rocks into little rocks the same as any other. What's the problem? Unless you're against mining in general, hard rock lithium should be fine
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Yes do look into it. There are MANY ways to harvest lithium and most are better than what the oil and gas companies does when fracking or drilling on land.
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157 comments
This is probably a way of phrasing that means it's up to 70% less than the absolute most lithium-requiring designs that few/no one uses, and probably only marginally better than most designs actually used. Since they're very vague about it, I will be sceptical and assume it is way less revolutionary than the headline suggests.
Also, lithium is of pretty low concern when it comes to the materials in current cells. Stuff like cobalt and nickel are more critical and would be larger news.
LFP batteries are both nickel and cobalt free, and are being used in production cars right now (e.g. Tesla model 3/Y standard range options). That technology has long arrived.
this work does nothing to address this, and they also include yttrium, because they focus on solid electrolytes for some reason (probably because chemical space is smaller)
Also, AI would have just sped up an existing plan they had to try new approaches because AI doesn't create new ideas or think of things out of nowhere.
If you tell AI to do things within a certain range and it gives you results then AI came up with a design as much as google came up with search results when you put something into the search bar.
It can apply existing concepts in ways we haven't thought of. AI has been used for exactly this thing for years in chemistry. When given constraints (less lithium) and parameters (with this much capacity) it can try permutations of various designs that theoretically meet those conditions.
Yes AI is overhyped, yes it's often exaggerated by news sources, but that doesn't mean AI is a non-invention or something. It's a long way off from any of the lofty goals that are often thrown around by tech ceos, but that doesn't mean it's useless.
That's not true at all. AI can in fact generate novel techniques and solutions and has already done so in biotech and electrical engineering. I don't think you understand how AI works or what it is
That's the point, it takes all the factors we know about and speed runs through all the possible ways it could work. Humans don't have the time to look for every single possible way a battery could be constructed, but a ML model can just work it's way through the issue faster and without human intervention.
Plus just like with the new group of antibiotics we just used AI to discover, it will allow truly thinking Humans to expand upon it.
Really sick of this "oh but you don't realize AI don't actually think! Therefore it's all worthless!" With this smug bullshit like you think you're bringing anything of value to the conversation.
Not even close to true
What a terribly ignorant thing to say, when people make these armchair comments they’re only hurting ordinary people that can make real benefits from using the technology.
Not all batteries even use lithium. So why not just go with 100% less lithium, if that's the target metric.
SLA doesn't get enough love. It's still the most reliable battery type in adverse conditions, especially cold temperatures.
you would know that if you read the article. they replaced part of lithium in electrolyte with sodium, so that they can use less lithium. the problem is decreased ion mobility ie less power density in real life terms.
bet
i'm gonna mostly ignore this finding because it sounds like extension of AI hype. real lab work is still absolutely critical in order to make it work
I did read it, the snippet I used is from the last part of the article...
And then there's a hundred other factors. How many charge cycles does it get? Cold weather performance? Can it be mass produced? Does it improve safety over current cells?
It might be useful for what it leads to. Batteries get better because we explore ten different options and then one of them works out. People have gotten less excited over individual discoveries like this for mostly fair reasons. But then there's another layer of understanding beyond that where you see it as one path of many.