How many years before the battery breakthrough?

No matter how many generations of smartphones have been launched, we face the old question of how long the battery life is the same. No matter how much optimization the vendor makes, it's ultimately just an hourly difference. Why battery technology is always so slow to progress, we have actually talked about it before. When will the breakthrough come? Now there's something new to talk about.

It's like an impossible dream.

Even smartphones, which are thought to have reached a peak, see a lot of technical and design changes each year, such as the most topical OLED screens this year, big-screen design, and so on. Of course, no matter how these things change, there's something that we seem to be used to, and that's battery technology. Performance continues to improve, resolution continues to improve, and photos are getting better and better, but renewal is certainly not much of a breakthrough.

We certainly have a way to improve the battery life of the phone, just make the battery bigger, but this is just the most brutal way, the phone is so big after all. Almost all technical research can be done by spending money and time. Isn't battery technology so important that it's worth the effort?

The solution sounds simple, but it's not. Investing a lot of money, hiring the best scientists, and having enough patience are not the key to solving the problem. The problem is that building a more energy-dense battery will involve a whole new field of science.

In this regard, Billy Wu, a professor at London Imperial College of Engineering in Dyson, explained that Moore's law is simply that every few years, transistors will become smaller, allowing the chip to accommodate more, thereby improving processing capabilities. That's not the case in batteries. "In microprocessors, everything is just to make things smaller. But on the side of lithium-ion batteries, if you want to increase energy density, in other words, increase the battery life time, then you must fundamentally change the material in the battery. "

Of course, this is not a simple "then change the material", because the balance of internal material composition can cause serious problems even if it is wrong. Now so many accidents are a reminder of how serious it can be if something goes wrong. Wu said the existing combination of nickel, cobalt and manganese could change over the next few years. Because nickel is more active, its proportion will increase, thereby increasing the amount of electricity.

Of course, it's just that this change will take years of testing to ensure that everything is stable and safe. It is said that if successful, the endurance can increase by 10 % to 20 %. However, people have waited so many years, and the promotion of waiting does not seem to match the time. The real breakthrough in battery technology seems to be the pursuit of an impossible dream.

Be beset with difficulties

According to scientists, battery technology can be said to be a "chaotic art." It has developed so slowly, in large part, because almost every small step of progress or change requires a great deal of experimentation and testing to ensure safety and stability. Even if you find materials that can help increase energy density, you can't guarantee that they actually work.

Recently, for example, it has been found that silica gel seems to be a better material than the graphite in batteries today. Its energy density is ten times that of graphite, which means that if our phones can hold on for a day now, the silicone battery can hold the phone for ten days. The problem is that such a battery becomes a very dangerous explosive.

Why is this happening? When the battery is charged and discharged, the graphite expands and contracts by about 10 %. We can handle 10 %, but the silicone's up to 300 %. You don't have to think about how dangerous these batteries are.

And because of that, the investment in battery technology can be described as a black hole, so that despite the persistence of many scientists, companies and research institutions in the world, there is no prospect that these efforts will always be separate. Can not form an industry-wide partnership.

More importantly, the series of events at Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has shocked the industry, which has also made people more cautious in their research and pay more attention to each step of the test. Insiders say many manufacturers have begun to feel lucky to push the energy density of their batteries forward. The battery event was a wake-up call, forcing everyone to slow down -- and, of course, being safe must be a good thing.

Can we see progress?

So here's the question: since the breakthrough is so slow, when are we going to see progress? Interestingly, the answer is a long time later, but it doesn't seem to be that long.

"Developing a new chemical process will take about 10 years, 100 million pounds of investment, so it is not comparable to the microprocessor field in terms of economic scale. " said Professor Wu.

Moreover, 10 years is only the first phase. It will take another 10 years to continuously test and improve the new technology so that it is safe and stable enough that it can not be commercialized. In the simplest example, the relevant research results of lithium-ion batteries were first published at Oxford University in 1980. It was not until the 1990s that Sony first commercialized the technology.

"We already have another chemical solution, but it will take some time for it to arrive. People have been talking about sulfur or silica gel as a new material for batteries. In addition, there is now a possible final solution called a lithium air battery. However, it takes one or even two more 10 years before it is perfect. " said Professor Wu.

Ten or even 20 years is a terrible time for everyone, but after hearing about the desperate conditions before, it doesn't seem to be that long. More importantly, there will certainly be piecemeal progress and optimization by manufacturers.

Although battery technology can not break through for a short time, other technologies can not fail to improve. As the performance of the mobile phone continues to improve, the resolution even has to go up to the 4K level, which puts forward harsh requirements for energy consumption optimization. In this regard, 10 nanometer processes and even 7 nanometer processes are already on the agenda. OLED screens can effectively reduce energy consumption. Optimization at various software levels has also become a required course.

The page contains the contents of the machine translation.