The smartphone battery problem

this video was sponsored by curiosity stream in partnership with my streaming service nebula these are some of the most iconic early smartphones the original iphone from 2007 the first proper android phone called the t-mobile g1 from 2008 and samsung's first flagship in the galaxy s series compare these with their modern counterparts and the difference is quite literally huge we now have bigger screens faster processors multiple cameras and of course much improved battery tech as well apple google and samsung have all approximately tripled their battery capacities in the last 12 to 15 years and they can each charge those batteries at least five times as fast now too and when it comes to pushing the limits of battery tech these three brands are actually some of the most conservative ones their competitors frequently hit 6 000 milliamp hours or more in phones and charging speeds have also reached 150 watts in mass market phones these days that's a 30x improvement and yet if you were to ask the average person which part of their phone has improved the least over the last decade or two they would probably point their fingers at their batteries and they wouldn't be wrong so in the 86th episode of the story behind series let's talk about how our phone berries have evolved until today what our challenges are currently and where we might be going next [Music] in 1991 sony had a problem for a few years already the electronics industry had been undergoing a massive transformation sony themselves made listening to music and recording video portable with their walkman and handycam series nintendo made gaming handheld with the legendary gameboy and fujifilm had just brought the first tiny digital photo camera to market too huge new brands and product categories were built from scratch by making electronics portable in these years but the industry was still stuck with single-use alkaline batteries and terrible recharging options that were hardly going to cut it in this new era so for their newest handycam the japanese giant decided to turn to a type of battery that had been stuck in research labs since the 60s lithium-ion batteries it was a huge bat nobody had been able to make them commercially viable in the past and most battery makers simply refused to take a chance on a new technology when it was not only unproven but could also make their own existing factories obsolete if it ended up working so sony took the risk into their own hands and made the first commercially successful lithium-ion battery themselves and to say that their inventions were a success would be a massive understatement this is a typical graph scientists use to measure the benefits of one battery over another and compared to the types that came before it lithium-ion batteries initially looked roughly like this notably they were flammable and they were initially pretty expensive but in exchange they held up well to hundreds of charge cycles and most importantly they were much better than their competition when it came to both how dense they were both in terms of weight and size and also in how much current they could output in other words they were just the solution sony needed for their handheld electronic ambitions and while the basic principle of lithium-ion batteries has remained remarkably similar since 1991 energy density even improved significantly since as scientists optimized battery chemistry and prices collapsed as well as mass manufacturing especially in the gigafactory age took over and process optimizations and economies of scale did their thing simply put lithium-ion batteries were great and the world got hooked on them which then generated two different problems first instead of powering just the tiny handheld electronics that they were originally designed for the high energy density and cost reduction of lithium-ion batteries eventually also made them the default choice for gigantic battery packs and cars that are easily 15 000 times as big as those in phones and a common pick in a residential backup batteries that power entire homes and even grid storage in massive farms that can briefly power whole cities and in these massive quantities lithium-ion batteries and in particular their three most common ingredients became extremely problematic cobalt comes almost exclusively from the democratic republic of congo where it is mined under some of the worst possible conditions to both the environment and its people and by the way is exported almost exclusively to china from there much of it going through black and grey channels high grade nickel production hasn't been able to keep up with demand for a while now and it doesn't help that most high-grade nickel actually comes from russia which is obviously extra challenging to get to now while a lot of the low-grade supply comes from countries like indonesia and the philippines where once again it is often mined with little regard for human safety or the environment and then of course there's lithium itself most of which is obtained either from the lithium triangle in south america or australia and you've guessed it extracting the stuff is terrible for the people and the environment we basically can't keep up with demand which pushed its price up more than 10x during the latest supply chain crunches and for now at least china controls most of the mines and the refinement capacities these materials are becoming so problematic that the price of lithium-ion batteries actually increased for the first time ever in 2021 which is partially to blame for brands like tesla recently raising their vehicle prices so that's problem number one lithium-ion batteries are so good that we actually want to put them into basically everything but with those quantities there's essentially no way to get those materials in a way that is even remotely sustainable on a human environmental or even geopolitical level but second they're also kind of just not good enough anymore our electronics have been stuck with essentially the same battery tech from the 90s computing power famously follows moore's law doubling every two years or so which gives it exponential growth and we see that other semiconductors like memory chips and camera sensors well those improve at very fast rates too lithium-ion batteries in contrast needed about 10 years to double their energy density at the beginning and they have basically shown slow linear growth not fast exponential growth now according to the charts that counterpoint research exclusively sent to me which i'd like to thank them for it is clear that battery capacities in phones have increased in size regardless on the android side more than half of the new phones that are sold now have batteries with capacities of 5 000 milliamp hours or more which is huge and over on the iphone side we can see significant growth as well even if their progress goes back and forth a little bit more but average phone battery capacity at least on android has only improved about 50 in four years which is a much slower rate than any of our other key components and much of those improvements simply came from including physically larger batteries and phones not really from improving the batteries themselves that is far from ideal and it means that batteries are actively holding progress back as we could move to more powerful phones or other gadgets like wearables and implants getting even smaller if it wasn't for the batteries in other words we clearly need the new battery technologies both so our big things like cars and grids don't require us to strip mine entire countries off of their valuable resources but also so our small things can get smaller and smarter so let's take a look at our best options and so far i've managed to avoid giving you a chemistry lesson but i'm afraid to move on we'll actually need to talk a little bit about chemistry but i promise i'll be as brief as possible so this is how a typical phone battery works you have a negative side called an anode which is typically made of graphite a positive side called a cathode which uses the nasty nickel and cobalt that we talked about before and in between there is the electrolyte in the form of a liquid or a gel with a semi-permeable separator in between all of this is built so that we can move lithium itself back and forth between the two sides which is an element that conveniently has an extra electron it really wants to get rid of giving those electrons a path lets them travel from one side to the other through a wire generating power for your device while the lithium ions can flow through to the other side through the electrolyte meanwhile plugging your device in basically forces this process to be reversed that's the basic idea and in practice the anode and cathode are typically applied as a thin film onto long flexible metal sheets like these which are then assembled and wrapped up into the shape that we actually want to use them in and voila you have a lithium-ion battery now to improve this technology you either have to improve the manufacturing process which is a little bit outside of the scope of this video so i might talk about that in maybe a future video or you have to change the fundamental chemistry of this video which is what i'll focus on now so let's take a look at our most promising candidates to begin with you could swap the lithium itself for another charge carrier remember we use lithium because it has an extra electron that it really wants to get rid of well so the sodium which makes it a promising candidate and indeed sodium iron batteries have received a lot of attention lately sodium is incredibly abundant everywhere and doesn't need a nickel and cobalt in its cathode either meaning that you can skip killing kids in the congo and destroying coral reefs in indonesia to get it and sodium iron batteries are also much less flammable so it's unsurprising that reliance industries one of india's largest conglomerates and kettle china's leading battery giant have both made big bets on this very promising technology with caitl having announced mass manufacturing ev batteries already the only problem with sodium is that it's a much bigger and heavier element than lithium so you can't really make batteries as dense and light with it kettle's claimed density is significantly below that of lithium-ion batteries meaning it might work great for cars and grid storage but is unlikely to work for small electronics in fact lithium is the lightest element that has an extra electron that it wants to give away which is why we kind of chose it in the first place and it's really unlikely that we'll find a really good replacement for it in the near term at least for consumer electronics so let's move on to what else we could change our remaining options are replacing the cathode the anode or the electrolyte over the years we've gone from liquid electrolytes to polymer-based gels making so-called lithium polymer or lipo batteries which are more dense less flammable and pretty common in electronics by now and the next big jump might be completely solid electrolytes like various ceramics these would be the so called the solid state batteries that you've probably heard about a lot in the last few years as almost every ev maker in the world is touting them as the holy grail magically improving everything from energy density to charging speeds reducing flammability and it could probably also make you coffee if you asked it nicely most recently toyota has announced that they have cracked the code on them so they can release them in their first mass-market hybrid car in 2025 which sounds great the problem is that solid-state batteries are notoriously hard to actually make and tons of other companies like fisker and quantum scape have made similar claims in the past that they later had to walk back from so for now they seem like an amazing technology that's just a few years away every few years so that's maybe a little disappointing but the good news is that progress on cathodes and anodes is actually a lot more concrete already so-called lithium iron phosphate batteries that swap the problematic nickel and cobalt in the cathode for much more abundant and less problematic materials like iron are pretty common by now and while they can't quite match traditional lithium-ion batteries on energy density they are an attractive choice for bigger projects like great scale storage for phones though perhaps the most exciting technology that has actually shown real breakthroughs already comes from the anode where scientists are replacing the graphite with silicon silicon is not only endlessly abundant it could also theoretically have 10 times the potential energy density as graphite so getting that swapped would offer a massive potential improvement the problem in the past was that unlike graphite silicon actually expands and contracts up to four times in size as you move lithium ions in and out of it which is obviously a huge structural problem still in the last few years at least three companies have successfully found ways to put silicon into the anode and of these three definitely the most interesting one for phones is a us company called sila labs their tech which mixes a bit of silicon into graphite just recently entered mass production with their first product a real fitness band that you can actually buy called woop where the company claims about 20 to 30 improvements in the same size while allowing battery makers to keep the exact same process for manufacturing too group bands are obviously a pretty small scale start but the company claims to be on track for embracing bigger electronics like phones this year or maybe next and meanwhile a company called ambrius claims to have made 100 silicon anodes as well which supposedly already almost doubles battery capacity their tech is way too expensive and finicky for regular phones for now and is currently stuck in more high-end devices but the progress is encouraging in other words if there is one battery technology that i'm hopeful will actually come to phones in the next year or two or three it's silicon anodes and while 20 to 30 improvements aren't like the quantum leap that all of us are hoping for it's significant progress regardless and this is just early days for this technology so we might actually get more out of it in the future now to make up for the inability to significantly improve battery capacities in the last decade or two firm makers have realized that the variable that they can actually meaningfully tweak is charging speed and that is an area where they have actually made massive strides both in speeds but also safety and convenience tiny charging bricks like this one from oppo can now safely output an insane 50 watts and for comparison this is an already small 30 watt macbook air charger phones with oppo's new 150 watt charging will supposedly survive twice as many charge cycles as the industry requirement and the company has even teased 240 watt fast charging to be coming soon as well i've actually had a fantastic in-depth conversation with some folks over at oppo who explained all the nerdy details of just how their whole fast charging magic works to me and so i've made a dedicated video about fast charging tech which is exclusively available on nebula together with a second bonus video of this week which is a fantastic 30 minute interview i conducted with peter richardson research director at counterpoint research where we discussed various battery trends and technologies in detail if you liked this video i think you will really enjoy those as well and if you don't know nebula yet it's a premium video streaming service built and owned by me and other fantastic educational creators like real engineering polymatter wendover productions and more nebula is a great way for us to fund videos on really niche topics like fast charging tech that might not find a big enough audience on youtube to be financially worth it or really sensitive content like real engineering's brilliant series on the battle of britain or real life lore's series on modern conflicts that would probably get demonetized here on youtube it also hosts all of our regular youtube videos free of ads and nasty tracking of course and often even early access and subscribing is a great way to get more from us while also supporting our work you can get access to nebula in our bundle with curiosity stream for just 15 bucks for an entire year not a month but an entire year and curiosity stream is of course the home for professional documentaries online from legends like david attenborough jane goodall stephen hawking and more as an avid scuba diver i recently fell in love with their new show called the coral triangle which was fantastically produced as always and besides nature documentaries they also cover history engineering science and more get both services 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Channel: TechAltar

Views: 816,763

Keywords: the story behind, TSB, series, battery, batteries, charging, fast charging, flash charging, lithium ion, lithium-ion, Li-ion, LiPo, solid state, breakthrough, explained, breakdown, science, chemistry, Sony, engineering, camcorder, manufacturing, making batteries, walkman, sodium-ion, NA-ion, NCM, NCA, anode, cathode, electrolyte, SEI, electron, charge, cobalt, nickel, LFP, lithium ion phosphate, silicon anode, graphite, silicon, SILA, tesla, elon musk, sila nanotechnologies, Amprius, VOOC, Quick Charge, QuickCharge

Id: oVFoHztPzX0

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2022