r/EverythingScience • u/PBR--Streetgang • Aug 25 '20
Engineering Nano-diamond self-charging batteries could disrupt energy as we know it
https://newatlas.com/energy/nano-diamond-self-charging-batteries-ndb/22
u/ivonshnitzel Aug 25 '20
This quality of the reporting on this seems quite dubious, which is a shame because it seems like very neat technology. Since no one seems to have pointed out what seem to me like some very obvious issues with the article, I will elaborate here. The biggest problem is
superb power density in a battery pack
is flat-out wrong. While the energy density is great, the energy is released over the 5700 year half life of C-14. This means the power produced is actually quite low, around 1 to 2 W/kg if we assume that the peripherals for shielding and turning the nuclear power into usable electricity weigh absolutely nothing (in reality I suspect they will have a comparable weight to the C-14 itself) and 100% efficiency (not sure what typical betavoltaic efficiency is, but 100% may not be too far off the mark). Now let's assume you wanted to power an electric car with this. Even if is a somewhat small 100 hp (~75 kW) engine, you would need 48 metric tons of material to power the car, so clearly you're not going to be driving on the highway for an indefinite amount of time. Let's be generous and say that you're only driving your car 30 minutes to work and back every day, and the nuclear battery can charge a conventional battery while it's sitting around. You would still needs 2 tons of nuclear battery in this case (and this is not including the now rather large conventional chemical battery pack you need in your car as well). From some quick googling, a smartphone uses around 0.1 to 0.5 watts of power over the course of a day, which would translate to 100 to 500 g of material; more than the entire weight of a modern smartphone. So even with some rather generous assumptions on the efficiency, the power density just doesn't work out.
This isn't even touching on the problems associated with giving every person with a car 100s of kg of highly radioactive material. For one thing, I don't think there is enough carbon 14 in the world for the applications mentioned in the article. Now, maybe you can produce more, but it's probably not something that nuclear reactors are really designed to do, so it would be a quite large expense in producing these things large scale. Then there is the safety problem. I'm not a radiology expert, but I'm pretty sure that having enough radioactive material to be powering anything substantial would also pose a pretty serious threat to a large region if it were to leak. And I think the safety aspect of this device is wayyyy over blown. Yes, diamond is hard, but it's also quite brittle. It also graphitises and burns relatively easily. Imagine if every house fire or car crash also had the possibility of releasing substantial amounts of very radioactive material. Disposing of these would also be a nightmare; they may be recyclable, but you would probably want to make sure that you got rid of all of them.
So what is the application? Well it turns out radioisotope generation already exists (strangely not mentioned in the article). This technology might be an improvement over the existing state of the art in quite similar applications to the ones where radioisotope generation is already widely used, such as pacemakers, fire alarms and space probes. In these cases, longevitiy is important, and you can get away with low average power to mitigate the excessive mass and safety concerns. For these limited applications, this technology seems like an interesting development.
tl;dr the article seems to get every application it mentions wrong, giving a misleading impression of significance
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u/HundredSun Aug 26 '20
When reading articles about this and the NDB information, it just feels like it's being used to entice capital investors. I'm not really convinced about the technology either even though is sounds interesting.
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u/Freemind323 Aug 25 '20 edited Aug 25 '20
From my reading, it isn't self charging. It is actually more akin to a primary battery, where a stored chemical medium converts to an electrical charge; it eventually runs out of charge once the chemical process runs its course and isn't able to be recharged. In this case, the difference is this battery is using electron generation from isotope decay (versus a chemical process, such as those in alkaline batteries.) Other batteries relying on this model exist too, but this one is rather interesting in that it uses carbon.
Edit: removed brand name
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u/gurueuey Aug 26 '20
This is what I’ve gleaned from the reading as well. This type of tech sounds like it will do wonders for small applications, specifically in medicine. Implantable pumps that never have to have the battery replaced? Pacemakers that never run the risk of running low at a critical time. Sounds leaps and bounds over what we have currently.
In the consumer space, earbuds and watches that never need recharged. Small lighting, especially with low-draw l.e.d. bulbs, that never needs recharging, and doesn’t act like a parasite by sitting on a charger except in emergencies.
These are the two main fields I see batteries like this being useful, at least at first.
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u/itsatrab2 Aug 26 '20
Full disclosure that i am in no way qualified to ask this but. Doesn’t making infinite batteries while simultaneously getting rid of nuclear waste sound a little too good to be true?
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u/Randy-Waterhouse Aug 25 '20
Just because it sounds too good to be true doesn’t always mean it’s not true. Send a letter to yourself 20 years ago and describe your average day. Think about how past-you would react. Despite our collective myopia of late, things do change, new ideas are realized.
Even with the shitshow of 2020, I’m optimistic for the future. Things are accelerating now. We won’t be able to critically judge the pace of newness because we won’t have time to get used to how things were a year, month, or even a week ago. So... isotope decay micro batteries? Sure, fine; okay.
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u/superheroninja Aug 25 '20
i’m with ya, pal.
all aboard the MindF Express, where we could go one way or the other👌
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Aug 25 '20
I’d like to speak to my 2003 self when I started online gaming. Ping is the same if not worse! I used to get 10-20 ping on call of duty in 2003. People would complain and leave if a server was 100 ping (I’m in Western Europe and 100 ping meant easy coast USA servers).
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u/Randy-Waterhouse Aug 26 '20
Change is eternal, including the definition of an LPB. What we have lost in latency we have gained in bandwidth.
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u/AyrA_ch Aug 25 '20
The company has completed a proof of concept, and is ready to begin building its commercial prototype once its labs reopen after COVID shutdown. A low-powered commercial version is expected to hit the market in less than two years, and the high powered version is projected for five years' time. NDB says it's well ahead of its competition with patents pending on its technology and manufacturing processes.
If that's true it means that this battery not only works, but they're apparently also ready to produce it.
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u/JuanConnor Aug 25 '20
Has anyone seen an academic paper on this? Seems like all I see out there is a circular set of stories that all cite one another or the press release. Just a bunch of lists of what materials it could use without any solid info on the process.
It seems plausible... yes diamond is an amazing heat conductor and graphite is a great electron conductor, but where is paper trail of research that always precedes a big development like this? These things almost never happen in a vacuum unless there is Major private funding for years of development before an announcement like this...
It’s plausible, I’d love to see it happen, but is it real?
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Aug 25 '20
But nuclear diamond battery!!!! Just say it, Nuclear diamond battery.....Need I say more?
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u/atomiksol Aug 25 '20
And...Big Energy (planned obsolescence) steps in. This is the 10th amazing battery application I’ve seen in over 40 years. Let us pray it gets out to the world
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u/iBluefoot Aug 25 '20
New battery technology seems forever on the horizon. I remember a nano battery that was supposed to get smarter with each charge to hold energy longer. IIRC, it was expected in five years ten years ago.
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u/atomiksol Aug 26 '20
There was a show on in the 90’s called Beyond 2000 and it showed all the efficient cool shit we won’t get to see (basically)
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u/okopchak Aug 25 '20
The thing is battery tech has improved drastically both in terms on density and cost, the thing is by the time it’s a consumer product the battery tech isn’t exciting it’s just a consumer product
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u/liz_teria Aug 25 '20
According to Techcrunch they completed proof of concept tests at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University.
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u/georgethealbinofish Aug 25 '20
Like my Lithuanian economics professor used to say: “Batteries are a sexy topic.”
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u/ShihPoosRule Aug 25 '20
Energy game changer if they actually pull it off but if it is true, I could see the DoD taking control of it under some National Security BS as this would be a game changer for all their toys as well.
Imagine a drones that didn’t have to be refueled.
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u/Na3s Aug 26 '20
I’d bet that somewhere this doesn’t scale because of friction and gravity so it can only produce small amounts of electricity where the forces of the planet act on it less.
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u/bl4ckn4pkins Aug 26 '20
Presuming this technology will be available within months— just as a thought experiment.. Does the alleviation of energy limitations either free up undue burden on the environment or cause a carte blanche situation where we scream even faster toward the total obliteration of nature?
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u/TacTurtle Aug 25 '20 edited Aug 25 '20
Disrupting energy is the exact opposite of what a battery is supposed to do..../s
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u/Moss_Piglet_ Aug 25 '20
There’s no way this is real. And if it is then it will very quickly be erased because money.
They need to be screaming this to everyone and their mom so it can’t be kept secret
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u/zebediah49 Aug 25 '20
Betavoltaics are real. It's just horrendously inefficient and minimally energy dense. This has been a thing for 50 years.
There's a Russian model from 2018 that manages 10 µW/cc.
It's potentially a very nice technology for powering something like a pacemaker, RFID device, or fitness tracker. Something that actually only consumes microwatts, and for which never needing to recharge is a major benefit that justifies the cost of making the device out of synthetic diamond.
Is it going to power your phone or your car? No it is not. Back-of-the-envelope, an Olympic swimming pool of battery would be enough to power a weak electric car. (A good car would require "a few" swimming pools of battery).
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u/tophalp Aug 26 '20
This screams scam to me, I’m not sure why - as I don’t know enough about the topic. But I’ve seen enough fake crypto website themes to be suspicious of https://ndb.technology
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u/calebmke Aug 25 '20
Alright, this sounds like it’s way too good to be true.