A battery usually hides its nastiest chemistry from view. Inside many rechargeable systems, useful energy moves through liquids that are strongly acidic, alkaline, flammable, corrosive, or difficult to discard. The battery works, until the same chemistry that made it powerful begins to eat away at its parts.
A team in China and Hong Kong has now built a very different kind of battery. Its electrolyte is a neutral water-based solution of magnesium and calcium salts, chemically close to the brines used to coagulate tofu. In tests, the device ran for 120,000 charge cycles, used nonflammable ingredients, and met several disposal safety standards, the researchers in China report.
It is not ready to replace the battery in your phone. But it points toward a cleaner kind of battery for the place where longevity matters most: the electric grid.
I can’t believe every time I’ve been to a Japanese restaurant, they’ve been offering me a phone charger in the form of miso soup. I must have come across as a complete dunce.
“Did you offer them the complimentary phone charger?”
“Yeah, but, uh…”
“But what?”
“They…well, they drank it.”
“They drank the battery fluid?!”
“Yeah. I mean it’s technically non toxic. Said it tasted great.”
“Hmm, customer is always right I guess. How are they doing with the nigiri? Were they able to grill it okay with the shichirin?”
“They definitely enjoyed it, but it also got a little weird. They called it a hibachi, remarked about its pleasant glow and heat, and then took the set of skewers I had given them, held them kind of like tweezers or tongs, grabbed the nigri with them and ate the whole thing raw.”
“They ate it raw?!”
“Yep. Said it was the best sushi they’ve had, too.”
“Alright, just give me a moment to think. We need to avoid shaming them, but one of them is bound to visit Japan at some point. I think I’m going to have to call the prime minister and get ahead of this.”
“And what? Rewrite every history book and have every citizen change their habits?”
“How much did that slab of bluefin cost? How many pieces of sushi can it make? What does a piece of sushi sell for?”
[Sigh] “Alright, I’ll get you in touch with her.”
Similar energy as this old video
Thank you! That was hilarious. I am truly honored.
They achieved surprisingly good capacity for an entirely new chemistry. I wish them luck in their research, since this could bring luck to everyone. :)
Yes!! I was absolutely blown away by the capacity… it’s roughly on par with a lead acid battery.
I maybe managed to gloss over the power density, though? Very curious about that.
Per the article:
A 300-Year Battery? Not Quite
Just under 50Wh/kilo but still over 70% capacity after 120.000 charge cycles in lab environment. So quite interesting for grid storage and such.
so for a typical us household about 3 bathtub or 3 il drums worth but if put into a lead acid batter type configuration it would be 150 of them. If the larger deep cycle were used it would be like 60. I feel like this is duable in a shed shelf server room type of configuration. Thats for one day so 365 or about 1/3 of a 100 years or like 30 years. Will be very interesting if you don’t change them all at once although might need to increase everything by 1/4th unless of course the house is setup to be energy efficient and then that could reduce it by quite a lot.
I just want a big ass cheap battery I can stick on the side of my house and go off grid.
I just want a cheap ass battery I can stick into my me and go off biking. My ass always runs low halfways through a bike
pedal assist converter kits for bikes are getting cheaper. Lol
i got a wheel on my trike. can you do a pedal assist with a hub?
I think there are some. Depends on how generic your hub is, cause it’s generally a replacement. Not looked into that very much, though.
I worked in the production of activated carbon many years ago, and this title reads like the Elsevier titles I read back then like “Activated carbon from cow dung manure”. It’s just researchers looking for a novelty handle imo.
Morning rush hour news – May 10th, 2046.
“A three vehicle pile up is being reported on the 408 with one vehicle on its side and leaking brine all over the highway. Our own Stephen Jeffreys is on the scene. Stephen?”
“Thank you Gracie. Traffic is now backed up for miles and the scene is chaos. The 408 smells like a Florida marsh and cleanup might take a while. Back to you Gracie.”
How much does it produce and how big is it?
About three fiddy and half a farthing for a plum bit the size of a normal battery.
🐉?
That will never see the line of day (production).
Maybe in a hundred years. By the time this technology becomes viable, something else might have already made it obsolete.
I’m more referencing the rich that control the world won’t allow something like this that may be on the cheaper side and last several generations.
Where’s the planned obsolescence? Where’s the quarterly profit increase?
It’s hard to imagine anything more timeless in the context of our environment than a water based battery
And even that becomes obsolete when something better emerges. What’s perceived as better depends on time and location.
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Scientists make nothing battery that runs on nothing and lasts a hundred quasckrillion years.
