I recently came across an article about these on StumbleUpon (not that exact one but similar)… “Cool” I’m thinking, “this is gonna be huge! So much for lithium-ions”. Then I realize the date on the article is 2007. Now I realize mass production and such takes time, although they specifically mention in the article how easy and quick it’s going to be because of the existing infrastructure for producing lithium-ions. Yet now in 2010 I have yet to see a single laptop with a 20-hour battery life as this article promised. There is a paltry little Wiki entry on the things that says “commercialization is expected to take 5 years (as of 2007).” But I’m a little concerned that for such a “revolutionary” discovery it hasn’t even shown up at all yet. You’d think manufacturers would be jumping on getting that kind of technology into production.
So what’s holding it back? Patent/legal issues? Infrastructure isn’t as ready to support production as they claimed? Or is there some other reason these aren’t popping up everywhere - like, they’re not really as good as they thought they’d be?
This 2009 article refers to more recent work by Dr. Cui. The pure silicon nanowires didn’t last long – they can only handle 20 recharge cycles – so they are now working with silicon deposited on carbon nanowires. The new nanowires have a lower storage capacity, but they’re more robust and easier to make. Other labs are doing similar work, with nanoporous silicon and silicon nanoparticles. Dr. Cui predicts there will be batteries on the market in 5 years or less, depending on who develops a stable mass-production process first.
Battery technology seems to suffer from over optimistic reporting in the popular press.
Ever since the early nineties we’ve had, every two or three years, some report that a company has developed a viable fuel cell and we’ll all be using these to power out laptops for days on end and refuel simply by adding something like ethanol to the battery’s reservoir.
And yet these things never hit the mainstream and we have to make do with incremental advances in NiMH and Lithium battery technology.
The phrase “should be ready for commercialization (or whatever) in five years” is a bit of technological jargon that in laymen speak means “We don’t know if this will ever have any practical, widespread use but we are willing to string DOE, NSF, etc along for another three year grant funding cycle or two to find out”.
Most of these ‘pie in the sky’ reports do indeed tend to use that timescale, typically ending with something along the lines of: “but don’t expect <x> to appear overnight. It will take five years to develop a commercial product”.
The difference with the fuel cell announcements I have read is that they actually state that they have a manufacturable example ready and they will be on sale in a couple of years. It just doesn’t happen.
Back in around 1900 Thomas Edison said that he could make an electric car that would run all the way from New York to Chicago and back and average 25 mph for the route.
Sheer nonsense, of course. But Edison made similar comments about every invention he ever set before the public. It’s not clear how much was self-delusion about his genius and how much was the always desperate need to raise cash from financiers and bankers to fund his money sinks of projects.
Nothing has changed in the past century. Do not ever listen to anything said about any new technology until it is out on the streets and publicly available. Then you can start judging it. Anything beforehand is fusion power.
When a scientist says “it’ll be ready and working in 10 years”— That’s as reliable as when the contractor who is renovating your kitchen says" “the work will only take 2 days.”
I don’t think you can make absolute statements about translating theoretical time frames like that. For instance, fusion has famously been 20 years away for the past 50 years (an underestimate anyway; the current best-case estimates are 30 or 35 years), but the perpetually-distant time for the LISA gravitational-wave detector to fly is only 10 years. On the other hand, LIGO (much the same sort of experiment as LISA is, but ground-based) has proceeded at very nearly one year per year: It’s now at the point where researchers 11 years ago said it would be in 10 years.
Upshot: When the LIGO people tell me that they’ll be detecting gravitational waves in about three years, I believe them. When the LISA people tell me anything at all about their time frame, I don’t believe them. I don’t know the folks working on batteries (either in general or this specific group) well enough to say anything about whether I believe them.
Back when I was working on self-propelled electric handling equipment we had battery and fuel cell developers promising order-of-magnitude performance and efficiency improvements within ten years. While there have been some significant improvements with the energy density of Li-ion over Ni-cad and NiMH batteries, they lack the specific power output to really improve performance in high power mobile applications. Fuel cells have been a promising area of research and development for higher energy density for compact applications for a couple of decades, but so far very limited applications have been realized to market.
There are plenty of substances that, in theory, should be capable of density energy storage that is an order of magnitude more than conventional electrochemical cells. The problem is largely one of either storing or extracting the energy in a controlled manner in a reasonable timeframe, or being able to manufacture the storage medium in a useful way. Fullerine materials in particular have promised tensile strength, thermal, and energy storage revolutions, but the difficulty is controlled manufacture and fabrication using these materials in something like a production environment.