from Hacker News

Ask HN: What happened to the batteries that charge in 2 minutes?

by tones411 on 1/21/18, 7:54 PM with 1 comments

• by philipkglass on 1/21/18, 8:28 PM

  Jeff Dahn, professor of physics at Dalhousie University, is skeptical that these electrodes will ever end up in products. “When you look at the flow chart for making this structure, it’s pretty complicated, and that is going to be expensive,” he says.

  Dahn was probably right: too expensive to make the special nanostructured materials in industrial quantities. A lot of battery technologies that are promising on the lab scale are like that; "nanostructures, hard to mass produce" is one of the usual electrochemical storage killers along with "rare elements," "short lifetime," "low rate capability," "low efficiency," and "high self discharge." Reading new battery papers to figure out if they could be commercialized is mostly a matter of trying to spot how many -- ideally zero -- of these common problems afflict the system being proposed.