Hey.
What are the biggest limitations on improving today’s battery technologies?
In: Technology
Physics. I’ll try to explain using lithium-ion batteries.
When you’re dealing with a battery you’re dealing with the flow of electrons. Atoms are huge compared to electrons and each atom of LiC6 that splits into graphite and a lithium ion as part of the energy release only generates one electron. That’s the only part of the reaction we use when it comes to batteries. So to generate a tiny amount of current you need freaking huge atoms.
We’re finding better combinations of atoms that generate slightly more electrons per space or weight unit, but to get to the weeks or months level of power is going to require orders of magnitude of improvement which we just don’t know how to do with our current knowledge and materials.
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