There are materials possible that will completely change the world.

Theres probably a room temperature superconductor for example.

The number of possibilities is effectively infinite though, since its not just which atoms, but also how they're arranged.

That's why we name our ages after the materials within. Material science is the foundation for almost all other physical sciences.

I've been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.

While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.

Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.

|My university login no longer works so I can't get a copy of the paper itself :(

Scihub my brother 🙏

This one features the number 19.

They are all calling for investors just to figure out it doesn't scale.

That's my assumption at least

I had a little discussion with a guy complaining about sodium batteries and how you keep hearing these wild claims and then nothing. I did a quick search and saw an article about a $2 billion partnership agreement to work on a pilot plant for sodium batteries. He claimed it was yet another sensational headline and doubted anything would happen from it. Less than a week later I saw an article about a plant in America being announced.

This stuff is hard. It's not like Master of Orion where you throw money at a specific research and get access upon completion. Different groups around the world are researching a multitude of different ideas, some related, and after a while a bunch of these ideas are combined and associated and researched, and all of a sudden you have a new product that's significantly different from what was available before. And then you see incremental improvements for decades, not unlike the internal combustion engine or rechargeable lithium batteries.

If you remember what battery powertools were like in early 2010s, it's super obvious how far we've come. The higher end things like battery powered lawn mowers didn't exist, and if you wanted real power, you needed a cord.

Ha, exactly. We've seen the "start of the end" of batteries for decades now.

But capacitors aren’t batteries. Batteries store chemical energy. Capacitors store electrical potential energy. Electronically they behave much differently.

Headline is not dumb. There are reasons to make a distinction between the two, the most salient one being that capacitors are several orders of magnitude faster to charge and discharge.

I mean the application isn't exactly arduous but they use capacitors in solar powered watches instead of batteries. They claim you can still get 80% of max voltage after 20 years use.

Electrolytic capacitors use the chemistry to make a very high dielectric allowing the plates to get very close and increase the capacitance and decrease the size.

A cell in a battery is a capacitor then converts the charge on the plates into chemical energy and vice versa allowing much more energy storage and a flat operating range as the plates charge is replenished by the chemical reaction.

This article doesn't go into details but it sounds like the breakthrough is a much better dialectic then storing energy in a chemical reaction.

We already do with resistors.

Yeah. Good thing we don’t fill up planes with flammable material today!

/s