FINALLY! A Graphene Battery That Could Change Everything | Answers With Joe

this is a paper clip paperclip weighs about one gram each and it's made out of steel which means it's electrically conductive so you definitely don't want to stick one in a light socket materials are electrically conductive because electrons can freely move across its surface and the more surface area it has the more electrons it can hold now paperclip obviously doesn't have a whole lot of surface area on it if you flattened it as flat as humanly possible you might get one square foot of surface area maybe and then there's graphene now you've probably heard graphene refer to as a wonder material for all the crazy things that it can do and the reason that it can do all these crazy things is because graphene is only one atom thick so if you folded up one gram of graphene it would have the same surface area of not one not two but ten tennis courts that's a lot of electrons and a lot of potential [Music] saying the words lithium ion before battery is practically a redundant these days i mean let's face it lithium-ion one these are the batteries that power our cell phones tablets computers even our cars we are officially a world run by lithium ion you might say they have the le ions share of the market i don't know but lithium ion batteries aren't perfect i mean they're good enough but they do have their downsides i'm sorry are all my puns giving you a charge i'll stop one problem we continue to have with lithium ion batteries is safety these batteries run hot and yeah if not properly configured they can burst into flames uh you might remember in 2016 2.5 million smartphones were recalled after some of them burst into flames in people's pockets and bags and don't get me wrong they've gotten safer over the years but that safety comes with the cost ev batteries for example they've got extensive cooling systems woven into them to keep their temperatures at an optimal level this not only complicates the design and makes it more expensive these cooling systems take up space that could be used storing energy and all of which lowers the pack density and don't even get me started on how much it complicates recycling these batteries i mean they've got to break it all apart and there's all this gel that has been separated from the recyclable metals which is super important because there you go you did it you got me going no battery recycling is super important because the materials that these batteries are made out of are not easy to come by for example i did a whole video on the cobalt problem with lithium ion batteries now it takes a lot of it from artisanal mines in the congo that exploit child labor and really dangerous conditions now a lot of work has been done to source cobalt more ethically and battery makers are cutting down on the use of cobalt but it's still an issue the point being these batteries do have a finite life cycle and we need to be able to recycle them but for all the reasons that i just pointed out it's still far more expensive to recycle lithium ion batteries and just build new ones in fact when i looked i saw that only 10 percent of lithium-ion batteries get recycled now to be fair this was an article from 2016 so hopefully it's gotten better since then but still and all these issues are on top of the fact that well there's still a lot of room for improvement look let's be fair the reason that they went out is because they were leaps and bounds above the options that we had before but still two hours to charge your phone i mean what is this the stone age it's not the stone age it's the phonage yeah i know i know so researchers around the world are working on the next big thing in energy storage there's like a half a million new battery chemistries being worked on i've covered most of them already but the battery i want to talk about today is different because it does its magic using graphene and let me tell you something when i hear about a new technology that uses graphene i uh i i don't know how to feel about it because we have been hearing about graphene and how it's going to change the world for so long it just starts to feel like it's a football we just can't kick like the potential of graphene is off the charts it could potentially revolutionize everything from construction materials semiconductors clothing even make a space elevator possible so much potential and yet graphene is like that gifted kid that was always told they had so much potential you know but then they just never believed in themselves enough or never learned how to apply themselves and execute on that potential so they just kind of flounder around on the internet for a while and then they eventually become a mid-tier content creator in their 40s [Music] but hey producing graphene is hard which is why it makes this battery really interesting the company that designed it is a graphene manufacturer so not only are they some of the biggest experts in the world on graphene they make it in-house so they don't have to pay retail for it might possibly make the cost of these batteries less now before i get into the battery itself let's just back up a second and talk about why graphene has these wonder properties in the first place it's kind of important to the rest of it graphene is basically carbon which actually makes up 12 of your body so you're familiar with it but unlike the carbon in your body in graphene the carbon atoms are arranged in a honeycomb pattern literally one atom thick and this is where it gets its crazy properties the bonds in this pattern give graphene more than four times the tensile strength of steel while still being extremely flexible and light it also makes it an excellent conductor of electricity and heat good things to have in a battery but an even better thing to have in a super capacitor all right so capacitors are devices that store energy similar to batteries but instead of storing the energy in chemical reactions they store it on the surface of electrodes and this means they can be charged extremely quickly because they don't have to rely on chemical reactions to store the energy the downside is energy density as in they don't have much of it the energy density of a typical capacitor is about 1 3 of a watt hour per kilogram for comparison a one kilogram lithium ion battery can store hundreds of watt hours so the trick to getting a capacitor to increase its energy density is to increase its surface area of the electrodes and for that you need an extremely thin extremely flexible material that's electrically conductive and manages heat really well that you can fold up into a tiny space and as i pointed out in the intro this video one gram of graphene has a surface area of 2629 square meters roughly the size of 10 tennis courts now i've been talking about capacitors here super capacitors are obviously capacitors that have been turned up to 11. and then there's ultra capacitors which have been turned up to more than 11. but even a massively upside supercapacitor can't compete with the energy density of advanced chemical battery which is why researchers at the university of queensland in australia have developed a graphene-based supercapacitor battery hybrid this battery uses aluminum so it's generally referred to as a graphene aluminum battery now i would love to go into the details of the design and and how it works but a lot of it is proprietary and what i did find i'll be honest pretty much went over my head but i will say that it involves embedding aluminum ions into perforations in the graphene mesh this creates a graphene aluminum later that acts as a cathode with an anode of just plain aluminum foil the battery as a whole has an energy density of 150 to 160 watt hours per kilogram and it can still charge extremely fast sounds great but tesla's new 4680 battery sells closer to 265 watt hours per kilogram so there's definitely still a big gap there but it might not be as big of a gap as you might think because that's talking about cell density you also have to think about pack density like i was saying before lithium ion batteries have to have massive cooling systems built into their battery packs to keep it from overheating this battery wouldn't have that issue so all that extra space could be taken up with energy storing batteries it might not put it perfectly on par with a tesla pack but it does close the gap a bit so the university of queensland developed the battery but as i mentioned before there's a graphene manufacturer that's producing it that company is called the graphene manufacturing group or gmg and they've built a prototype that can reportedly charge 60 times faster than a lithium-ion battery so while their battery pack might not take an ev quite as far charging will be a lot closer to the experience of filling up with the gas pump which could open up evs to more people who don't have access to home chargers today of course i'm spending all this time talking about avs it would be just as world changing for everything else we use you know our phones our watches our computers you could plug in your laptop and go take a leak and come back and it'll be full of charge also keep in mind everything that i'm saying here applies to their prototype battery it's still the very early days of this technology in a presentation back in march to the graphene council founder and ceo craig nichols said that the energy density of this battery has a theoretical upper limit of 1050 watt hours per kilogram and their team's currently testing 300 000 variations on the design in pursuit of better performance now i can only imagine that those tests are being done with ai in some way but these tests are happening at a pilot plant the company opened in december of 2021. and here's where it does get pretty exciting they are actually producing batteries at this plant right now they started manufacturing coin batteries which are being shipped to customers for testing and feedback and they plan to begin manufacturing pouch pack batteries by the end of june 2022 in other words right now pouch back batteries are batteries that are housed in a polymer bag instead of a solid case but these are the kind of batteries that you see in phones and tablets and other small electronics although there are some evs that run on pouch pack batteries including the chevy bolt and not for nothing but late last year chevy issued a 1.8 billion dollar recall of the bolt over issues that their batteries were catching on fire these wouldn't have that problem and as if all that wasn't enough to give you a tech nerd stiffy there's also the fact that these batteries are fully recyclable and made from abundant easy-to-source materials so what's the catch as rocky balboa once said life ain't always sunshine and rainbows of course there's a catch and the catch in this case is the price of graphene right now graphene costs about 1 000 per kilogram that's for the highest quality graphene that you would need for these batteries lithium is selling for about 80 per kilogram of course that's just one component of the lithium-ion battery but still and that's been the major drawback of all graphene technologies this whole time it has to be synthesized you can't just dig graphene out of the ground the only way to make it feasible is to reduce the cost of making it gmg for example is patented a process for making graphene out of methane but they're being kind of cagey about exactly how much it saves them in production costs but if you're going to compare the price of graphene to lithium ion it's only fair to consider the fact that once upon a time lithium ion was prohibitively expensive the price of lithium-ion battery storage has plummeted over the last couple of decades and it's now flirting with 100 per kilowatt hour it is more than possible that graphene could follow the same trajectory once a sustainable inexpensive process is perfected and there's a lot of projects working on that one that's definitely worth talking about is a team from rice university who's working in collaboration with ford they're working on a way of recycling plastic in a graphene uh kill two birds with one stone yes please professor james tour and his team were able to turn plastic into graphene car parts and they were able to recycle old graphene and new graphene the question of course is whether or not this graphene is high enough quality for these types of batteries now we wanted to get the answer to this so my writer ryan actually emailed professor tour and he asked him if their flash joule heating method is of high quality and he was kind enough to respond he said quote flash graphene is one of the purest graphene forms you can get unquote but while he did agree that his method could possibly make graphene prices drop he was careful to say that it's only as much as the market can bear and yeah it's going to be a while before the supply catches up to the demand so you won't be like flossing with graphene dental floss anytime soon now there is one more problem with gmg's graphene battery and that's voltage for example their coin cell that hits the market this year it delivers 1.7 volts and most small electronics require at least three volts now that doesn't mean it can't be used you can combine cells to get what you need this is true of other types of batteries too but there are some devices that only take a single cell like computer chips watches some toys and gmg wants to make it so those manufacturers don't have to change their design but they're totally confident that one of these 300 000 variations that they're working on will wind up doing the job they just need time to find which one of course battery technology is advancing and evolving so fast it's possible that you know some other breakthrough might make all this irrelevant i feel like that can be said about pretty much everything these days though but hey let's focus on the good news here there is an actual graphene based battery hitting the market this year also i feel like i didn't mention that gmg does have some partnerships with some major big name companies including the tool manufacturer bosch and the mining company rio tinto so let's hope that something actually comes with this because man you know an ethically sourced fully recyclable fast charging battery would be a game changer and it'll be nice to see this super material we've been hearing about for decades finally in action i mean i'm still holding out for that space elevator but you know got to start somewhere but i don't know what do you think is this worth getting excited about are we just going to have the football yanked out from under us once again sound off in the comments and let me know i also can't help but wonder if there's another super material in our future that we haven't yet discovered i mean the whole history of humanity is one of constantly finding new innovative materials that totally change how we live to get a deeper perspective on that and how graphene fits into the whole history of materials manufacturing you might want to check out the secret life of materials on curiosity stream this hour-long program explores the various materials we've used and innovated on throughout human history starting with natural elements like wood and stone all the way up to alloys plastics nanotechnology and beyond and it gives a look at how future developments could change the way we live and work this of course is just one of thousands of documentaries from award-winning filmmakers from all around the world no matter what you're into science technology art history whatever you're curious about you can stream it there seriously curiosity stream is pretty much the best streaming service for documentaries on the internet and with your subscription to curiosity stream you also get access to nebula the streaming service that i'm a part of as well as many of your other favorite educational youtubers where you can see all of our content early and ad-free this means both the youtube pre-rolls and sponsor reads like this one you don't have to deal with them there it's also the only place you can see my series mysteries of the human body and other nebula originals from other creators that you can't find anywhere else and i did just start the forgotten atrocities series the first episodes up there in case you missed it it's about the a civilization that was wiped out for nutmeg in 1620. it's insane and now we also have nebula classes where you can learn new skills and ideas from your favorite creators in a structured format so you can really dive into subjects you love and you can get both of these services for 26 off an annual subscription making it a grand total of 14.79 for an entire year for two streaming services just just think about that for a second okay so if you're curious just head over to curiositystream.com joe scott to get started i'll put the link down below thanks to 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 631,966

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: 5kj83ouhXTo

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2022