New 'Perfect' Battery: BUSTED

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so while making my latest for the about seeing electrons with the naked eye by dissolving lithium in ammonia solution and making these fantastic dendrites I first came across dendrites growing in lithium ion batteries and then I came across this and thought bull shit nearly 40 years after he helped create a battery that would change the world good enough and researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have announced they've invented a new battery that sounds too good to be true and the new battery they've come up with is unlike anything anyone's ever seen before compared to current batteries it can hold three to ten times the charge can be recharged in minutes instead of hours and has a lifespan of over a thousand cycles and doesn't go boom in your back pocket and pray tell what do I find in the comment section now what some of you will be thinking the inventor here is the guy who invented the lithium ion battery it was in the late 1970s when John Goodenough developed the first lithium ion batteries right here at the University of Oxford something that has touched the life of everyone watching this video this was a guy who could realistically lay claim to having revolutionized electrical design for a generation so how could I say that he's talking crap well I'll tell you something else I know very little about batteries but I'm still gonna demonstrate to you why he's talking crap because I do understand thermodynamics and thermodynamics is king so if for instance I were to ask you which contains more energy a kilogram of body fat or a kilogram of TNT which would you say well this is called energy density and it's going to be crucial throughout this video after it turns out body fat rules supreme a kilogram of body fat contains almost 10 times the energy of a kilogram of TNT now sure it doesn't detonate quite as well but it stores a lot of energy in fact from this you can see that oil or body fat gas diesel whatever all contain a comparable amount of energy which for a chemist is remarkably unsurprising as they all basically the same chemical Constitution now currently batteries hold about one-tenth of the energy density of TNT which as we will see is a good thing because you're effectively trading energy density for safety in fact even from here alone it must be painfully obvious that batteries are just a pale shadow of the energy density of things like gas and there's a very good reason why gas is the fuel of choice of almost everything that needs lot of portable power because of kilowatts per kilogram now batteries currently carry about 100 of the energy density of gas per kilogram now let's just imagine for a second you could pack as much energy into your battery as TNT yeah your battery contains quite literally as much energy as a bomb but I hear you say that's got to be an unfair comparison I mean because doesn't that mean that gas is even more dangerous than TNT well in energy density terms yes however gas only burns when it's mixed with air which is a kind of built-in safety feature and when you do mix gas were there yes those are the largest non-nuclear munitions on earth and the key reason for that is that gas contains about 10 times the energy density of TNT so the father of all bombs whose credibility has been questioned nonetheless it's essentially a giant tanker truck with a burst of charge in it and all that burst of charge does is it mobilizes the gas into the air which is then ignited and that's what releases all of the energy and causes the explosion now some of you might cry foul at this point because batteries generate electricity whilst burning fuel just generates Heat well fine so let's see how much electricity we could generate for say a liter or less a kilogram of gas if we were to burn it in a generator and we will get about three kilowatt hours which is about 10 mega joules for our liter our kilogram of gas which is still almost 20 times the electrical energy that you would get from a kilogram of batteries in fact at this point I got a kind of correct wiki again although this time it's in a more subtle fashion gas actually has zero energy density it's only when it's chemically reacted with oxygen when it's burned that it has energy density that's when it releases the energy so in reality it should be the energy density for the fuel plus the oxygen well how much oxygen do you need to burn gas well the Saturn 5 ran on essentially gas and kerosene to be exact and oxygen I mean like I was saying earlier it really doesn't matter whether you're towing gas kerosene poly fat whatever they all basically have the same chemical Constitution so the Saturn 5 burned kerosene and liquid oxygen and saying is they're both liquids with comparable densities all you have to do is basically compare the fuel tank size for the kerosene tank and for the oxygen tank and give or take it's about 2 parts oxygen burn one part kerosene and give or take by volume or mass doesn't really matter which one kilogram of gas requires about 2 kilograms of oxygen to burn it and yet these were liquid fuels but it really doesn't matter a kilogram of gas weighs exactly the same as a kilogram of liquid the practical upshot of this is really that should be the energy density of 1 kilogram of gas and 2 kilograms of oxygen now of course if you're giving the oxygen to burn the fuel from the air then that's great because you don't have to carry that mass with you which is basically how cars and jet engines work however if you're in space say for instance you absolutely need to carry that oxygen with you and in that case the energy density is 1 kilogram of fuel and 2 kilograms of oxygen gives about 15 mega joules per kilogram in other words is true energy density is about one third of this so it's about 15 mega joules per kilogram which is now only about three times the energy density of TNT and make no mistake if you get mixture of two kilograms of oxygen and one kilogram of fuel like this and mix them that a still pretty much the apex of energy density it's the apex of what can we achieve in terms of energy density from chemical fuel and it's only safe when the propellants are stored in two different tanks you mix those two propellants and give it the tiniest of ignition sources and it will become very clear why having that much energy density packed into one structure has its drawbacks so the oxygen fuel system has an energy density of about 15 mega joules per kilogram and that's maybe a fairer comparison with TNT where all the energy of the TNT is packed into the structure of the material and that's exactly what happens with a battery you're storing all of that electrical energy within the structure of the battery in one way shape or form now currently batteries have about one tenth of the energy density of TNT because they're metal they can form little wires internally inside of the battery that can short-circuit the battery this can lead to significant safety concerns such as formation of fire etc imagine you ramp it up by a factor of 10 you're quite literally in boomtown energy densities compared to current batteries it can hold three to ten times the charge can be recharged in minutes instead of hours and has a lifespan of over a thousand cycles and I'll tell you why imagine you just short-circuit the battery and you dump all of the energy from that battery how much does the temperature of the battery increase well let's make a first-degree approximation that the battery has the same heat capacity this water which is a very generous assumption given the water has a very high heat capacity it takes about 4,000 joules to heat up a kilogram of water by one degree so if our kilogram battery releases some four million joules which is about the same energy density as a kilogram of TNT the water would heat up to about 1,000 degrees basically to hot well let's take another benchmark thermite has about the same energy density as TNT and when that releases all of its energy when it reacts each temperature goes up over 2,000 degrees once it's going there isn't a chance in hell of stopping it please civilians well although it should be said that their mic still contains one tenth of the energy of jet fuel you know metal beams and all that and this is the critical fundamental limit for batteries all of that energy has to be locked up within the structure there's not many estimates you can actually block that energy up in and very much like with an explosive if you get a failure in any one part of it it can cascade through the entire structure causing a cascade runaway failure which leads to the destruction of the whole battery now sure you can actually get more powerful explosives than TNT the problem is that if you get more energy into the structure they become progressively less stable until you get to what is basically the apex of energy density which is a mixture of liquid oxygen and gas which given the slightest ignition source or source once it looks at it far they will explode so TNT really is pretty much the best that can be done in terms of stable energy storage where you're packing all of the energy into a single structure however with the battery you can't get anywhere near that because every molecule in the TNT is actually storing energy you can't do that with a battery because you need at least one atom to hold the charge one atom to take the charge when it discharges and you need to separate the two by something make sure you know to stop it discharging immediately then of course you don't just want to get energy out of this system you want to get electrical energy out of the system which carries penalties of its own the practical upshot of which is you'll be doing very well to get one tenth of the energy storage of TNT into a battery which is about where the current battery technology is at the moment which is actually very respectable so basically systems like gas have this inbuilt safety system it only becomes an energy-rich material when you mix the oxygen and the gas together this is white gas is basically a perfect fuel it's an unbelievably safe system for over a billion cars that run on this at the moment and even when idiots manage to set fire to their cars these is just a tiny tiny fraction of the energy safely stored in the gas tank the fuel in that gas tank has enough energy to move the car some 500 or so miles while electric car batteries will take up three or four times as much space as the fuel tank and the weight of the fuel tank and contain only enough energy to move the car about a third of the range of a gas car now the downside of this of course is gas cars produce carbon dioxide which in practical terms means that every year I've been alive has been one of the hottest top 20 years on record nonetheless the gas tanks are incredibly safe because they cannot catch fire or burn until they're mixed with oxygen and if you have a fire all you've got to do is remove the oxygen and the fire goes out remove the oxygen from a battery fire on the other hand and it will continue to release energy the $70,000 car then burst into flames firefighters had a bit of trouble putting it out they had to flip the car on its side then used a circular saw to cut into the battery housing and douse the flames this is exactly the sort of battery that would make an electric car a true replacement for a gasoline-powered one spray water on it as if it's a sodium battery like good enough is proposing it can be cheaper to make since it works with low cost sodium as well as lithium that might be even worse the water is 25 degrees yeah and just so we're clear on how violent and erratic this explosion can be this was merely 350 milligrams of sodium that's only about the size of an aspirin tablet yeah I missed the tape with both normally we have this one and a little high-speed camera going that's for good enough no he's not gonna beat the laws of thermodynamics which incidentally is something else the battery claims it does he claims that the sodium metal is gonna be on both electrodes which in thermodynamics terms means there is no change in energy removing the sodium from one electrode to the other the battery cannot work so the fact that this battery even works is confusing other top battery experts it seems to be generating something from nothing which is a big no-no according to the laws of thermodynamics but according to good enough it doesn't just work it works spectacularly well now he claims it's some weird quantum thing because the layers of metal are so thin well maybe if it was one or two atoms thick and how thick is the metal on the electrodes well according to him a micron or so that's 1 or 2 million atoms thick rather than just 1 or 2 which blows the whole fermi energy thing out of the water look I'm not saying there's no place for electric cars clearly there is it just needs to be in the right venue and I'm not saying the battery research is pointless but you've got to be realistic about what can be achieved and what the drawbacks of cramming in scene amounts of energy into a battery are and honestly I think we're pretty close to what can be achieved safely we have if you like discover the battery equivalent of gasoline something that's not changed for for an awful long time and I really do wish that folks would just reign in the hype and just think about these things a little more skeptically many thanks to all those who support this channel through patreon and if you'd like to join those who support competent scientifically literate media like this you'll find the links below [Music]

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Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 602,658

Rating: 4.5119815 out of 5

Keywords: superbattery, busted, pseudoscience

Id: 8RbwOhM6PUk

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Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2017

Reddit Comments

It's amazing how many people have been educated by pop science alone and truly believe in the exponential technology meme.

Sorry, we're already at the bottom of the barrel. This is as good as it will ever be.

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Nov 25 2017 🗫︎ replies

I wish Thunderf00t stuck to his science videos and hadn't gone on his tilting-at-windmills anti-Sarkeesian tangent.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/124876720 📅︎︎ Nov 26 2017 🗫︎ replies

Electrolytes: It's what plants crave!

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/metro-jets 📅︎︎ Nov 25 2017 🗫︎ replies