Actually good article if you continue reading. Comment from an independent expert:<p>"Research has shown vertically aligned – or even just well distributed – carbon nanotubes have far greater properties than randomly placed carbon nanotubes," said Dr. Shearer. "I am not surprised a x10 in conductivity is possible. Controlling the placement of carbon nanotubes is really the way to unlock their potential. The issue in commercialization is the cost associated with producing aligned carbon nanotubes. My guess is the cost would be much more than x10."<p>Even if it was x10 the cost right now, I would expect that cost to go down a lot as the engineering gets better. Looks interesting.
IF this is true, it would be a massive breakthrough. Truly monumental.
Hence, I am skeptical.<p>But otherwise, this would be a massive thing. a 2x capacity per weight advantage of batteries? Without an increase in space? That comes down to doubling the range of EVs, and making electric planes and rockets a lot more viable.<p>A 3x capacity per space advantage means roughly a 3x improvement in your phone and laptop battery capacity. Or, more likely, a slight improvement in your phone and much thinner phones. On laptops, we might see the return of more ports.<p>A 10x speedup of charging? That makes all-day EV travel a lot easier. It makes topping off your phone something you can do a minute at a time, rather than an hour long process. It means, with wireless earphones, you can re-charge them in a minute and almost never be without them.<p>If even a third of what they claim here is possible, it would be amazing.
Reasons I'm suspicious:<p>* article leads with "in production" but it sounds like they are still at the design phase. production of prototypes maybe?<p>* they are doing a lot of "talking" and "partnering" but not so much selling mentioned.<p>* they are "known for" their similar work in the ultra-capacitor market but the linked page's top comment is "still waiting for a product".<p>* PR about raising funding and starting soon but not a lot of PR about actual products and results.<p>Am I being too cynical - does anybody know if they are for real?
Articles like this is why I want a service which lets you "bookmark" the article and have it tell you whether it panned out a few years later.<p>There's not much you can do here other than Defer Judgement yet again, at which point you'll have forgotten about it anyway.
Bad headline. This increases <i>power</i> density, not <i>energy</i> density of lithium batteries, by decreasing internal resistance. That potentially increases charging speed. They claim by 10x.<p>Car charging stations are going to need megawatt chargers if this works.<p>They talk some about the possibility of future silicon batteries using this technology.
This <i>sounds</i> great. But I first heard of these guys last year around this time when they announced their "NAWACap Ultracapacitors" where you could get a 1000F capacitor with a .1 mOhm ESR @ 1kHz. That was when they announced they were in production. So I reached out to the various distributors I used and put in cash-ok sample request[1] for one. Not a peep in 10 months. It is entirely possible that someone came in and said, "We will buy every capacitor you can make for the foreseeable future." but that generally results in causing the manufacturer to ramp up capacity to maximize revenue until there is excess capacity :-).<p>So what is the deal? Can they build stuff or are they a bunch of scientists who can get something working in the lab or one-off and fail miserably at making it a product? (They would be in good company to be sure if this were the case, just it helps to be a bit more forthright about.) The other argument against the hypothesis that someone is buying everything they build is that they have yet to show up in the Thomas register[2]. If their entire capacity was booked they would have quite the revenue stream.<p>You can of course buy carbon nanotube arrays[3] made to order, the last time I checked (about 2 years ago) they were over $5,000 qty 1. So not something I'd make into a general availability product. But if the NAWA guys can actually print these sheets with no trouble at all maybe Aldrich could use them as a supplier and get the price down to something more accessible?<p>I'm really interested in a reasonably high voltage (say 48V+ super capacitor in the 800 - 1000F range) even better if it weighs less than 50 lbs. But I've got a railgun out back that doesn't do squat without a 500kW power source.<p>[1] Basically this is saying you're willing to pay list price for quantity 1 to get a sample, as opposed to demanding a free sample which involves lying about market opportunity :-)<p>[2] <a href="https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/capacitor-manufacturers-suppliers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/top-suppliers/capacitor-m...</a> These guys basically have teams of people trying to figure out where to get stuff, so they usually know who is actually shipping.<p>[3] Get your own carbon nanotube array, 1 x 1 cm <a href="https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/687812?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/687812?...</a>
I had the opportunity to work in one of the world best nano technology lab.<p>My supervisor once told me that he refused to work on nano-structured batteries for an obvious reason: These are impossible to recycle.<p>Science these days is often more about the headline (even better if you do the cover of Science) and less about real (societal) benefits.
Carbon nanotubes seem to be the real life version of chemical vat accidents or radiation exposure in comic books.<p>I think they also fed some carbon nanotubes to a spider and managed to get stronger silk. Like what's going on here?<p>I'm hoping that the scientists involved know what they are doing because from a layman perspective it just looks like carbon nanotubes can be added to anything to give it super powers.
I've yet to see these carbon nanothings on the market. It's been 10 years now that we hear about carbon revolutionizing everything and it never pans out.
I’m excited for new battery tech, almost entirely due to my niche interest in powered paragliding.<p>Electric paramotors require a lot less maintenance than their gas-powered counterparts, which need servicing after every 10 hours of flight. I’d love to buy one, but I am not interested in becoming a two-stroke mechanic.<p>One of the big names in the sport has said that his only reservation to recommending electrics is their flight time, currently about 45 minutes vs 1.5 hours for gas.<p>This advance, assuming these motors use lithium batteries, which I haven’t checked, bumps them up to 2h 15m on one charge and makes them more compelling. I thought I’d have to wait a decade to get this kind of gain, so this is pretty awesome news.
Battery noob here: Will this achieve the energy density of fossil fuels? In other words, a 50 litre tank of petrol gets me around 500 km. What will a similar volume of these batteries get me?
Nanotubes? It admittedly has been a couple years since I checked in on nanotube production, but I found they will be cheap.<p>Also, cycle endurance is paramount in a usable battery, did I miss that? High density batteries form dendrites when they discharge, gradually ruining the battery. The nanotube structure would probably help though.<p>Anyway, need cell cost, vol and mass density, cycles, temp ranges, charge/discharge raye. Those make for a competitive battery.
The first person to manage to mass produce CNTs with any reliability around size, shape, resultant properties, alignment, distribution or really any quality will be a trillionaire...
Am I the only one who gets halfway through this and gets bombed with malware pop-ups?<p>In general I'm cynical about any big breakthroughs which aren't actually in production. Too many steps between the lab and manufacture. I'm not sure what their definition of "Production" is, but in my book production means it's in a customer's product on it's way to the end user. That's clearly not the case here.<p>This all seems sketchy enough, the sketchy advertising just completely sinks it for me.
A bit off-topic, but when you think about it, it’s interesting how our vocabulary is shaped by gravity.<p>I mean, why “vertically aligned” and not “horizontally aligned”, right? It’s not like the performance of the battery actually changes if you made it stand up or lie sideways.<p>Why are we expected to picture “vertically aligned” as |||, but “horizontally aligned” as ——, right? Could we have used different wording that is not influenced by our superfluous spatial perception?
Didn’t Maxwell Technologies already announce a similar breakthrough a few years ago, and isn’t that why Tesla bought them?<p>Some patent lawyers are going to wake up to some good news today...
I haven't read the article and I have no intention to do it. I've been seeing breakthrough titles like this popping up every month for two decades now. It's not not worth the click unless lithium batteries are your hobby somehow.