TechStuff Classic: The Evolution of Batteries

I'm sure you'll get a real charge out of it. Let's listen. You have something called Moore's law. That's that observation that in general, microprocessors get twice the number of discrete elements, or if you prefer to think of it in another way, microprocessors tend to get twice as powerful every two years or so. Yeah. This is not exponential growth, which I have called it in previous episodes, by the way,

and people right in every time and call it. Take us to task on it, which is important because it's a misuse of the word exponential. I'm using it's a colloquial use, but I do not want to go down that hole again because I'm like you, guys, I get irritated when people misuse words too. I just wish I didn't do it as frequently myself, But anyway, it does double every two years or so, and that's a phenomenal

amount of growth. We're talking about microprocessors that have billions of discrete elements on them now, and they're all down at the nano scale. So there's this amazing amount of technology that's been poured into microprocessors, partially because More's Law exists and companies strive to to keep up with it, to maintain it because Moore's Law, as we know it is not a real physical law. It's more of an observation, and companies no one wants to be the company that

comes up and says, yeah, we can't do that. You know, we just got bored. So it means that there's been a lot of innovation in that space. But mean, while on the battery front, batteries have in large part remain more or less the same for decades. I mean, we've we've seen improvements in battery life, we've seen improvements in battery efficiency, but there have been some new technologies over

the past fifty years. But even so, it just hasn't it hasn't at all kept up with the microprocessors assessor side. This is also, by the way, this ties into our episodes where we talked about things like the Singularity, where we talk about how technology doesn't all progress at the same rate. So while we do see devices getting more and more sophisticated and powerful, uh, the power supplies aren't

keeping up with that trend. So it may be that the singularity, if it is ever going to arrive, is further off than what some people think simply because the power side of the equation is lagging behind, uh, the the technological sophistication side. So why is that. Well to understand that, we kind of have to one talk about what a battery is and to sort of look at the history of the development of batteries and talk about

what exactly it does. Now on a very very basic level, a battery is something that uses electrochemical reactions so that you can guide electrons through a circuit and have it do work. And that's about it. Yeah, that's that's really all a battery is. And it's because there are certain chemicals that when they have these reactions, they lose electrons in the process, and if you are able to control the flow of those electrons. Then you've got a battery.

So batteries date back possibly as long as though more than two thousand years ago. Yeah, these these clay jars found in modern day Iraq and you might have might have heard of them called Bagdad batteries where um, yeah, clay jars that contained an iron rod en cased in copper. Tests suggest that the jars were at some point filled with with with something acidic like vinegar or wine, and

modern day replicas have successfully created an electric charge. They might have been used for something like a like any anything from religious rituals and medicinal purposes to even electro plating. Right, And if you've seen if you're a big MythBusters fan, you may have seen an episode where they actually showed these They created one of these batteries and then they tried to see if they could get enough of a

charge for it to be detectable. Um, so that that's an indication of that we were familiar with the fact that certain materials, under certain circumstances could omit this weird energy. Now at that time we weren't necessarily really aware of all the things that could do, but that would change as the centuries would pass. The next big date I have is quite some time later, which is and that's when Alessandro Volta, Count Alessandro Volta, he's only one. If

there were more than one, I would killt him. Oh, sorry, you're talking about a nobility rank. So Count Volta created a battery by stacking alternating layers of zinc. Lawrence just checked out at this point zinc, brine, soaked cloth or paper, uh, and silver. He used these alternating layers kind of a sandwich here. And we call this a voltaic peel peel because it's French and uh and and voltaic after volta, yes, and so uh. The this this peel or pile if

you prefer, because it is a pile oh stuff. When you put it in this this configuration, you start getting these chemical reactions that emit electrons. And you could make the stack taller and taller to get more electrons a stronger flow of current through this peel. But in order to do that, you actually had to stack it up so high that eventually the weight from the top would start to squish the layers on the bottom, which would

kind of make the brine soak out. And that would make it less effective, and also the metal itself would start to corrode fairly quickly from the brine and movement the electrons. Right. It just wasn't wasn't a practical way of generating electricity, but it showed the premise and it gave scientists the idea of there's something here and if we can figure out other ways of generating the same kind of energy, we might be able to harness it for something. Skipping ahead, I mean there there are lots

of different developments in this technology. I have two specific ones. I think you have a few more. The next really effective one um was eighty six. Yeah, John Frederick Daniel, who was an English physicist. He created what we now call the Daniel cell, which was a you take a glass jar and on the bottom of the glass jar you put on in a copper plate, so copper plate in the bottom of the glass jar, and there's a wire from the copper plate that comes out of the jar.

Then you pour copper sulfate on top of that copper plate to about the halfway point of the jar. Then you suspend a zinc plate in the jar, and then you pour zinc sulfate solution on top of the zinc plate. Now, zinc sulfate is less dense than copper sulfate, so zinc sulfate will float on top of copper sulfate. If you've ever played with liquids of different densities that had different colors, then you know what I'm talking about. You can see

that actual level of division. Yeah, it's actually it's one of my favorite things. I just think it's super cool when it When I see that, I'm easily amused, I admit it. But anyway, you also have a wire coming from the zinc plate uh and exiting the jar. So a wire attached to this would become that that zinc plate becomes the negative terminal that's where the electrons are flowing from, and the copper plate becomes the positive terminal

that's where electrons are flowing too. And so if you were to connect the two wires together, it would very quickly burn out this battery. But if you were to connect it to a circuit, it could actually do uh, it could or a load as we call it, It It could actually do work. So again, not terribly practical. It it was useful for anything that was stationary. But you

know you're talking about a liquid battery here. So it's not something that you could easily carry around or put into portable electronics, right right, Yeah, and there's there's a lot of a lot more elegant ways of getting that that electrol kind of solution of of you know, just just a charged molecule then yeah, yeah, And it wouldn't be until we developed dry cell battery technology that we started to find practical ways of using it in portable means,

you know. And even then, you know, the batteries weren't small enough to use in what we consider portable electronics today, but you could move it around. Uh. The kind of Daniel cells that that John Frederick Daniel created were useful for different technologies, things like telephones. It was stuff that back then you did not carry around. I don't know if you kids know this, but telephones used to be these things that were extremely stationary. It's only recently that

we started carrying them around. Uh. Anyway, that's the kind of battery that became popular for that. Uh. Now, did you have any other ones who wanted to talk about before we move onto the basics of batteries. Rechargeable batteries, The science for that started um started with research around eighteen fifty nine or so when a French physicist, Gaston Plant invented the lead acid cell um and that that was a that was a precursor to to modern day

car batteries. So there you have, you know, the discovery that this chemical reaction that takes place within a battery, you get compounds that form out of it, and it makes the battery over time less effective. That's why batteries die. Eventually, the active elements that would create the flow of electrons end up combining with other stuff and for the purposes of of passing a current through a circuit, they become

a nert. Yeah. Yeah, something either wears out or um or maybe the the anode or cathode could could dissolve in the solution. Right, you just essentially what it means is that you run out of the stuff you need in order to make it to make this go, right,

and so what what was it? Plant believe? Yes, what Plant discovered was that for some kinds of solutions, if you were to pass electric current through the system as opposed to siphoning it off, you could reverse this process and yeah, and create a battery that can be used more than once. Right Now, this does not work for all batteries, which is why you can't just throw any regular battery into a recharger and expect it to come

out fine. If you did that to a to a you know, to adrist cell or something like that, mostly just explode. Right that these are has to be batteries that are using specific uh compounds in it for it to have this this reversible reaction, because not all compounds will reverse some of them once they're done, they're done and battery. We will talk about that a little bit a little bit later, but but let's let's talk about

how how exactly this this circuitry works. Okay, So, if you've ever looked at a battery, you've seen that there's a side that is labeled as a plus and one that's labeled as a minus. So positive and negative. If you're looking at like a nine volt battery, then they're next to each other. If you're looking at double a's or whatever, then it's on one end and the other. So the negative end the that's where the electrons flow out of. That's the electrons flow from that end through

a circuit and into the positive end. Uh. Now we know that you know the uh, the opposite charges attract, so that's why the negative wants to get to the positive. And inside the the the battery itself, there is a chemical called or a compound called an electro light. Now the electro light has a very important job. It blocks those electrons from just passing from the negative side to

the positive side directly direct That would burn, burn everything out. Yeah, that you wouldn't have You wouldn't be able to power anything. The battery would just you would just have a chemical reaction inside a canister and it would be dead within however long it took for those reactions. Yeah. Um. So it does allow ions to pass through, but not electrons,

and that becomes important. So the negative terminal is connected to something that's called the anode, the positive terminal is connected to what we call the cathode, and these together are the electrodes of a battery. Then you've got the separator between the anode and the cathode that's presenting that's preventing those two sides from reacting to each other. And you have the electro light that allows the electric charge to flow between cathode and anode, allowing the ions to

pass through. While making sure the electrons don't. And then you have a collector, which is the part of the battery that conducts the charge to the outside of the battery and through whatever the load is, the electronic load, so the circuit um. So within that anode side, the negative side, the chemical reaction that takes place is called oxidation.

It's an oxidation reaction. This ends up releasing ions, and the ions move through the electro light to combine on UH the other side, and then you've got uh the release of electrons that go through the circuitry. On the catholic side, you've got the reduction reaction. That's where the catholic material and the ions UH combine with the electrons that are coming in through the circuit that they form

a new compound. And so essentially you've got the anode freeing up electrons, the cathode accepting electrons, and the electrons do work along the way. So if you were to actually connect a wire from the negative terminal to the positive terminal, you would allow that that pathway to be open and it would just start to burn up that battery pretty quickly. Don't do that. It's a waste of batteries. It's going to heat up that wire. It doesn't do

anything other than kill your battery. But but that's what happens. It's so when you've got it plugged into something, whenever you turn the switch on to whatever it is, whether it's a you know, a lightsaber or a phaser. You know, I allow all lines of science fiction toys for batteries. But whenever you turn it on, it opens up that circuit and that allows the electrons to flow through. And when you turn it off, then the one of the gates gets closed essentially, and you no longer the connection

is no longer there. So the battery stops the chemical reaction. It has to have that pathway open for the chemical reaction to keep going. Now, there are several different basic types of batteries that are out there, and we're just going to cover a couple of them, and we're covering them based upon the stuff that's inside them, right, because there's a whole bunch of different substances that you can use to create these reactions. Like like we said, so yeah, so,

so one basic type is the is alkaline batteries. Uh, the anode in alkaline batteries tends to be zinc powder. So the anode again is that negative side that's where the electrons are coming from. The cathode side has uh, typically manganese dioxide, and the electrolyte is typically potassium hydroxide. These are the kind of batteries that you typically find in double a's, C and D batteries, right, and these are all examples of This is an example of dry

cell batteries. Yes, which dry cell batteries. One of the big benefits of those that you don't have to worry about liquid slashing around inside the battery, so that allows it to be used in lots of applications. You know, anything that's liquid obviously you can't shake around too much or else just gonna disrupt it and you're not gonna have a working battery. For they're more they're more more volatile. Yeah, you want that, you want that in a very uh

stationary position. Then you've got zinc carbon batteries. Uh. These have an anode that has that's a zinc obviously uh, and then you've got the manganese dioxide cathode. But the electrolyte in this case is often either ammonium chloride or zinc chloride. These are often found in triple A, double A, C and D dry cell batteries. Then you've got lithium ion batteries. These are the ones that we find in laptops, smartphones, cameras, that kind of stuff. They are rechargeable batteries and they

have different materials in them. Uh uh. One common version of lithium ion batteries uses a carbon note and a lithium cobalt oxide cathode and uh and yeah, these are the ones that we use when we're recharging our our various electronics very frequently anyway. Then you've got lead acid batteries. These are the ones that you often find in cars. These are more heavy duty, right, they are more volatile. They do include liquid, Yeah, they include their their their

electrolyte tends to be sulfuric acid. This is one of the reasons why you want to be really careful with car batteries because the materials inside them can be very caustic and and they can damage you, your stuff, your car. That's why you know you've got to be really careful with these things. Um. They tend to have uh, lead dioxide and metallic lead as their electrodes. So yeah, the

rechargeable battery we've already talked about. That's the kind where if you put the electric current through the battery, you reverse this uh, this chemical reaction. Uh. It depends upon what that rechargeable battery is made from, whether how effective this this process is right, because there's some kinds of rechargeable batteries that have well they have a memory, and that memory is not a good one. The memory effect

is what I'm talking about. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with this, but if you've ever heard someone say that before you recharge your device, you should make sure that it's completely that the current charges completely out. This was due to some some older types of batteries that have been mostly replaced by lithium

ion batteries. Nickel cadmium is the main culprit here. So the problem that some people notice with nickel cadmium is that if you used a nickel cadmium battery for a while and then you recharged it before you had completely discharged the original charge, it wouldn't hold as much of a charge the next time. So let's say that I've got a device that has a nickel cadmium battery in it and I run it down to about left like it's it only has charge left, and I decided to

recharge it. Well, now it's new maximum charge is more like eight of what it used to be because I didn't let it go all. It remembers that but doesn't let me actually consume that power anymore. So, yeah, that was a problem. Now most batteries now don't have that issue.

I mean, there's still a minor memory effect in some rechargeable batteries, but it's not nearly as dramatic as it the older batteries were, right, So so yeah, so if you are using the lithium ion battery and someone tells you that thing, you can you can tell them that we told you no, no, not as big a deal. And another interesting thing about batteries is what happens if you place them in series versus in parallel. So in series it sounds kind of you know, is what it is.

You've you've got them hooked up so that they are all the charges running through one and then another and then another yea in the sequence exactly. And uh, if you do that, you increase the voltage of the output. Now, if you put them in parallel, you increase the current. Now you might wonder what's the differences voltage and current if you're if you're not really familiar with electronics. I always have to look this up because I I, I

always second guess myself. But voltage measures the energy per unit charge. And you can think of that is it's how strong the electrons are pushed through a circuit. So think of it like water pressure, you know, through a hose. So the greater the water pressure, the harder that water is being pushed through the hose. That's essentially your voltage, it's you know. And then current is the rate at

which electric charge passes through a circuit. Now, voltage will stay constant, the voltage output will stay constant based upon whatever kind of battery you have or whether or not they're in series. Uh. But otherwise it it's going to remain the same. Current, however, will vary depending upon the load you place it. Uh, you place on it. So and that can, like the resistance of a wire, can affect what the current is. So current is variable. Voltage is not. And uh, apart from the fact that if

you put them in series, you increase the voltage. But once you've done that, it does not vary. Um. All right, Well that's the basis the very basic foundation of batteries. Guys, We're gonna have to take a quick break. I just realized the podcast has runned out of batteries, So I'm gonna go run across the street grab a couple more. Um, I'll be right back. All right, So we're back. Uh, And we've learned the basic function of a battery and how it does what it does. So what's the problem.

Why haven't we made super batteries that last forever and never need to be recharged and can put out more energy than uh the generator? Yeah, well, I mean, you know, there's the first commercial dry cell batteries premiered in and they haven't really changed all that much since then. Yeah, we've we've experimented with different materials, but the actual process has remained very much the same. And there are physical limits that chemical batteries have, but they can only generate

so much electricity through these reactions. There have been a few permutations of different things. In addition to those nickel cadmium batteries that that have the memory effect problem that we mentioned earlier. There's there was also some some nickel metal hydride, but they had a really short shelf life. They would start degrading pretty quickly. Yeah. That's another thing about some types of batteries is that lithium ion batteries have that problem as well. Um, they're they're less bad

at it, but they're still not deal right. The idea being that these these chemical reactions, like the longer the battery sits idle, the less juice. Yeah, and and and this doesn't have anything to do with how much you use it. It's it's from the moment that they're made. Yeah. Yeah. And also you may have heard stories about, well, if you want to keep your batteries from the grading, you

should put them in the refrigerator. Don't do that. Don't do that because that actually it actually slows down the chemical processes that happen when you Yeah, when you're when you're trying to use the battery, and you're going to not get as much juice as you thought you were because the chemicals themselves are too cold to have those chemical reactions happen at the correct rate. They're still going to happen, but you're gonna get a easily amount of

juice out of it. Right, So, so far lithium ion batteries, especially for small uses, have have been have been pretty pretty rad um. However, they are very sensitive to high temperatures um, you know, which is occasionally why they wind up exploding, bursting into flame. Let's let's also point out that lithium is an alkali metal, so and we'll we'll talk about a little bit. We're gonna talk about a a a possible future type of battery that people are

working on right now where that's really an issue. Both lithium and sodium are being considered for new types of batteries, but both of them are alkali metals. The big problem, there are several problems, but the big problem I would say with that is alkali metals belong to a class where they tend to be let's say, reactive when they

come into contact with water. So, if you've ever heard stories about sodium and water, or if you've ever seen anyone demonstrate what happens when sodium encounters water, uh, you know, it's explosive. The same thing is true of lithium. All right, this is where we get a little chemistry lesson. Everyone

go and get your periodic table of elements. I'll wait now, if you look at the left hand side of that table of elements, you're gonna see that down the line, you're gonna have lithium and you're gonna have sodium that are both in that same line, as well as potassium and some other alkali metals. That means that those elements share common characteristics, and one of those is when water

comes in contacts, sometimes things go boom. So first of all, never never ever play with these I don't if you get hold of sodium or lithium, never play with that. And water, this is seriously dangerous stuff. Also, probably just just don't. I mean, because because water is in the air around us in in great enough quantities that hypothetically it can burst into flame. I know of someone I didn't. This is a friend of a friend's story, so it's possibly apocryphal, So so it could be urban legend. I

admit that. But I know of someone who pocketed some sodium from his chemistry class and then was walking around with it in his pocket, and and his body was giving off moisture, and so he began to feel a burning sensation in his pants and immediately ran to the bathroom and pulled the sodium mountain threw it into the toilet,

which then exploded. Yeah, again, could be apocryphal. This is it was a story about a high school student who went to a rival school, so it could have very well been one of those stories where ha ha, the people who go to that school are so dumb, so much more dumb than the people who go to my school, which is saying something. I'm just kidding. I love all my classmates Spartans, but anyway, you were the Spartans, I was the Spartans. Spartans Spartans together. This is tech stuff.

So but the point, the point being that these these these elements have serious drawbacks to him. And that's one of the reasons why the another reason why battery improvement has gone so slowly, because we have to find safe ways to handle this stuff so that it doesn't come into contact with water and and just blow up. Right.

Part of that in lithium ion batteries specifically, is that they have to have a very small, very simple onboard computer to to manage the way that all of the bits flow around in there, and uh and and that that makes them pretty expensive lithium is already pretty expensive, but it makes them even more expensive than they would already be. Now, we have seen some improvements with battery life in recent years, but a lot of that doesn't

come from improvements in the batteries. It's coming in improvements in the actual electronics. We are finding more efficient ways to generate the stuff we want. So your smartphones, if you've got a smartphone recently that has a decent battery life, it may not be that the battery is so much better. It's just that the people who designed the hardware and software, we're able to maximize performance while being as efficient as possible.

So you're still working with the same basic amount of Yeah, but I don't need as much of it to do the stuff you are doing exactly. Speaking of that juice though, Um, the problem with batteries, and the reason that that that gasoline has not been ousted completely by batteries, is that gasoline has an energy density of something like thirteen thousand watt hours per kilogram, which is which is just a measure of how much of juice it has, how much how much how much work you can get out of

a given amount of gasoline. Sure, Um, the best lithium ion batteries only hold about two hundred what hours per kilogram, with of a of a hypothetical in a perfect world situation four hundred possible, so still vastly underpowered when you

compare it to gasoline. Right now, there are some people out there, very very smart people working on batteries that would have much higher densities power densities for their batteries if they can get the batteries to work, if they can get the the components to to to play nicely, to not explode, and to work on larger scales and

to work after more than three charges. There are a lot of barriers that are in place, and we'll talk about some specific uh cases, but keep in mind there have been dozens, if not hundreds of different experiments and trying to improve battery technology, and most of them just

have not panned out. They might have seen promising at the beginning, but when you get to a point where you're thinking, all right, how are we going to scale this up where we can actually manufacture it or create a battery large enough to do something useful, and then things start to break down. So one of the ones I wanted to talk about where these things called micro batteries. And this was something that UH that we received from

that initial request to talk about battery improvements. And this is a story about a team of researchers from the University of Illinois UH talking about a particular type of battery that uses these very tiny electrodes and lots and lots of them, and their three dimensional electrodes, and it was almost like these troads are kind of intertwined together, so they're very close together, which allows the ions to

pass very very quickly. It also allows electrons to flow very quickly, and the idea being that you would be able to release quite a bit of energy in a short amount of time, faster than you could with most batteries, and you could also recharge the battery way faster, right, because that thoroughput speed has a lot to do with how effective a battery is. Yeah, And in fact, according to several articles that were posted about this technology, BBC

did one as well as some other outlets. The claim was that such a battery would be reached could be recharged one thousand times faster than competing technology. So you could turn your you know, plug your smartphone in let's say your smartphone has one of these batteries in it, and you plugged it in. After a second, it's fully recharged. You don't have to leave it there for hours for it to charge up, which is that's a very attractive thing.

So you're thinking, well, if it can release lots of energy and if it can be recharged in a blink of an eye, where's the problem. Well, mostly the problem comes in from the manufacturing side and the scalability as well as, uh, the fact that it's not the most

reliable technology. Ours Technica actually ran a great article where they really looked into this and and dove deeper than a lot of the other outlets did to kind of take a look at this technology with a skeptical eye, just to make sure that it really did measure up to the hype, because we've seen this before with battery technology, right. And this isn't to say that they want the team won't figure out a way of of solving the problems that they face, But here are some of the problems.

One of them is that it's really hard to manufacture

these things. The way that the team was doing it, they were using this uh this essentially gold to make these little three dimensional um electrodes sort of, and then they used polystyrene uh, little little old tiny poly styring pills, essentially packing them in there, twisting the electrodes around, coding it in nickel in a well in a combination of nickel and tin and then uh nickelton alloy actually, and then coding the rest of it with manganese oxy hydroxide uh,

and then melting away the poly styrene so it it's gone, then immersing the whole thing to a liquid that was heated to three degrees celsius or five degrees fahrenheit. And so it's what even the team has referred to as a boutique manufacturing approach, meaning that it's very detailed, it's painstaking, it is not automated. Extremely expensive. Yeah, it's not time consuming exactly. Not something that's scalable to mass manufacturing methods

right now, certainly. Right. That's not to say that they wouldn't find some other way of doing it. They may find a way of doing it where it doesn't require this series of painstaking steps in order to get the result that they want, but uh, it's not ideal. Another problem is that the electrolyte they're using is combustible, so that's always a concern. If you get it too hot, it could burst into flames. Uh um or you know, if you were to get it close to a flame,

it could catch fire. And on top of all that, uh, the battery loses about five percent of its capacity with each charge discharge cycle, So after fifteen cycles it would be down to about two thirds of its original capacity. And uh, if you were to do a full discharge full charge, it might be even worse than that. So while it would recharge very quickly, it would have a

little less juice each time. And so after you recharge it twenty times, you have to charge, Yeah, you have to buy a new battery, new battery, right, So uh that raises lots of problems to waste problems. For example, like even if you were to say, well that's acceptable because I want to be able to charge my phone in a second, you can do that twenty times, and

then you have to go buy a new battery. And especially when the when the technology to create it is so so detailed and expensive, and to be fair, you wouldn't even you wouldn't even go twenty times, right because each time you would have less juice and so your your phone would be less and less useful over time. So after after your phone doesn't last more than a couple of hours, you think, well, I gotta get a new battery. So that might be six or seven recharges,

depending upon how hard you are on electronics. If you're me, then you'd be like, all right, recharge it, give me a new battery, yea. Lauren and I have more to say about the evolution of batteries in just a moment, but first let's take another quick break. So so that that's the downside to this micro battery technology. That's not to say again that they won't find ways around that.

Engineers are brilliant at finding ways of fixing problems. But it's not going to be the revolutionary battery technology that we're all going to see in our smartphones in the next few months. It'll it'll at least be a couple of years before we can see this rolled out in any way, assuming that they find a way to fix these problems. Right. One of the other ones that I wanted to talk about our lithium air batteries, and this is where we're getting into those alkali metals and the

concern about how they react with water exactly. You know, they could hypothetically store up to four times as as much as as lithium ion batteries, as much power as lithium ion batteries, but they work in the um. Lithium combines with with oxygen that's trapped by a carbon surface. Carbon nanotubes are are popular right now and um and the resulting interplay of these lithium ions and electrons induces

the flow of current UM. Yeah, you get a get a. One of the by products you get out of this is lithium peroxide, which is a problem because as it umulates, it starts to make it more difficult to recharge the battery. Right. So they they've only recently figured well, they they've had a bunch of of barriers to to making this work. That is, that is one of them. They're they're starting to.

For a long time, they didn't understand why the electrochemical reactions were going so poorly in these things, and it wasn't until uh that that researchers at M I T and Sandia National Labs announced that they were starting to be able to observe the reactions at all to figure out why this isn't work. And that's when they started seeing this lithium peroxide forming that was inhibiting the flow

of electricity. And uh, they did discover that if the electricity were flowing, that the lithium peroxide was starting to reduce around the trouble spots, and they figured that if they could improve the electron flow of the battery overall, then they might be able to get around this problem.

So that recharging does become an issue, right. Uh, that that explosion thing that we mentioned earlier is still at issue because when when you're dealing with you know, these these carbon surfaces are allowing air to basically breathe into the battery, and since water happens in air, yeah, you have to find either a way of coding the lithium inside the battery so that the water would not react with the surface of lithium, or you have to find a way of filtering the water out entirely, so that

membrane at the top end, Yeah, hydrophobic membrane, that's what we'd like to call that. It's scared of water. It pushes water out. So uh, yeah, it's that that's an issue. Now, there is a potential alternative to lithium air batteries called sodium air batteries that are even they are, they may not be able to hold as much energy as a lithium battery. It's a lower theoretical energy density, but a higher practical energy density at at the current moment exactly,

So current moment dear. So yeah, no, it's it always happens. You can't get around it. But yeah, that's so that's a possibility. But again, remember sodium is probably that alkali metal groups, so against same issues. You get that water in contact with sodium and battery goal boom, yeah instead of instead of zap zap. Right. Uh. There's there's also research being done into what's being called solid state batteries UM, which are kind of kind of the lithium ion um

solution to dry cell batteries. It's it's using um thin layers of solid electrolyte instead of instead of the liquid that most lithium ions use. UM. Yeah. And then there's a I read on Wired this interesting idea of spray can batteries where each of the each of the elements that you would find within a battery, the cathodeena, the electrolyte, all that is represented by a different can of uh, sprayable material, so you could actually spray this material onto

different surfaces and make a battery that way. And the idea being that this would allow you to create batteries in devices that would incorporate the battery designed directly into

the device, so you wouldn't have this blocky battery compartment. Now, it's not saying that these batteries would be particularly efficient or powerful compared to what we have now, just that this would give us more opportunity to explore different ways of shaping batteries so that they are part of our electronics and not just you know again, not just some clunky thing that you have to find make room, make room for it, right, right, and and also not so heavy. Um,

what would be terrific. That reminds me of the nanocomposite paper batteries that some people are are working on. These are These are composed of cellulose and um an aligned carbon nanotubes woven together UM and and they're they're they're small, they're flat, they're flexible, they're implantable. Um. They could hypothetically be put into medical devices. Yeah, these could actually use biological fluid as ionic fluid, So it ends up turning

your body's fluids into the electrolyte it needs. This is just making me think of idiocracy. It's electrolyte. It's the thing that plants crave. Um. I was doing the hand gesture and everything for those of you are fans of that movie. Then there's also uh, you know, the Verge reported on bacteria that are able to transfer electricity, and scientists had known about this for a while, but they weren't sure about what the mechanism was, like how did

it transfer electricity? And they discovered that that there were proteins on the bacteria surface that we're responsible for electron transfer. Uh. The bacteria is uh, this is this is going to be a train wreck of a pronunciation in front of me. Luck she wa nella oneidnisis. But anyway attaches to rusty iron and other materials and breaks those down and in the process of breaking down these materials, it releases electrons.

So why are we interested in this? Because by studying biological organisms that can emit electricity as part of some process where it's consuming something, we might be able to create biological batteries. Right, And these are these are a little bit more of fuel cell really than a battery. But and and to explain the difference, a fuel cell is a device that you put fuel into and then there's a chemical reaction that generates electricity, and then you

refill the fuel cell. So and you know, with a battery, what you're doing is you're using an electric uh or electrochemical reaction to harness electricity, and then you either have to reverse the reaction in order to get the battery to do it again, or you have to replace the battery. Fuel cell, you just refill it with fuel. So hydrogen fuel cells are the ones that most people know about because those the ones that we've talked about for things

like cars. Hydrogen fuel cell ells use hydrogen, which is the most plentiful element on Earth, although you have to break it up from other stuff. It doesn't, it doesn't, it's not so plentiful in its pure state. It's usually it's it's in water, which is very plentiful, and hydrocarbons as well, also very plentiful. But you have to separate the hydrogen outfast, which requires energy a lot of energy.

But once you've got it, assuming that you've assuming that you found some sort of a hydrogen mine where it's not going to take you too much energy to get it free. Um, you put hydrogen on one side of a a membrane UM that has a catalyst on it, usually something really expensive like platinum, and then on the other side of the membrane you've got oxygen. The membrane allows the hydrogen ions to pass through, but not hydrogen atoms. It has to lose the electrons for it to pass through.

The electrons go through a circuit just like it would with a battery and combine on the other side. So the hydrogen ions passed through the membrane and that meets up with the oxygen and says, hey, you wanna you wanna go do something? I got my buddy here, my buddy here, and I would love to take you out to dinner. And so the two hydrogen take out the one oxygen to dinner. Meanwhile, the electrons come back over through the circuit and recombined, and then you get water.

So the output of a hydrogen based fuel cell is water, electricity, and heat, which is why everything pretty Yeah, I think this is why we would love to use it to fuel cars because instead of giving off all these different ghouse Yeah, now water vapor is technically a greenhouse gas, but it's water vapor. It's not carbon dioxide, it's not methane or anything like that. So that's why they're very attractive. But they are you know, they're similar to batteries, but

there there is a difference. I do I do have a have a bio battery that I was just reading about research last November at m I T. Harvard and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Um. Okay, so so mammals have in their inner ears chamber that's filled with ions and um uh. These these ions produce an electrical

potential which drives neural signals. And what this means is that this is the chamber in your ear that that lets the vibration of your ear drum be converted into an electrochemical signal that your brain can read and then interprets the sound and interprets a sound. Um and so but but but you've got this this inner chamber that's just hanging out with ions in it, which is a

potential battery. UM. And these researchers put, UM, put some electrodes in there along with a very low power electronic device, and UM the chamber produced enough power with these electrodes to power the device to wire wirelessly transmit data. That's pretty cool to to an external drive. Now again we're talking about you know, we're not talking about stuff that's that's advancing the power of batteries, but we are looking

at brand new applications that could that are really exciting. Yeah, it's just but again, this isn't the thing that's going to make your cell phone last longer. Probably probably not. It's it's really really really low power, but it would it would mostly be great for for medical advances in um hearing aids. Yeah. So anyway, anyway, the advances we're talking about for the most part, are again just refining

the technology that we already have. It may turn out that we just have to find a different means of generating electricity that goes away from this electrochemical model entirely for us to get beyond this this bottleneck. Or if one of these other like the if the lithium air or sodium air batteries work out, or if the micro battery works out, maybe maybe that will be that that would be a huge leap ahead. And if either of those,

if any of those were any any more efficient chemical combination. Right. So there, we're not saying it's impossible. We're just saying that it's been several decades AIDS and we've only seen incremental improvements. So don't be surprised if that stays the same. If it doesn't stay the same, if we do have this huge leap, that's gonna be awesome for everybody, and that's what everyone wants. Just you know, be prepared to wait. Guys, I hope you enjoyed this classic episode of text Stuff.

If you have any suggestions for future tech stuff topics, reach out to me on Twitter or on Facebook. We use the same handle at both locations. It is text Stuff H s W. And I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.