Well shoot!
You can now buy the darned things. -I'd not been paying close attention before; new battery Eureka! moments have been reported every few months for the last decade with not much to show for it, but now you can actually plug one into your computer. Keen!
So.., time to do some research and figure out what all the fuss is about. Here's what I've discovered...
(Image courtesy of https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/anywatt/apollo-worlds-first-graphene-battery-usb-c-pd-powe?lang=en )
The last time we got a big bump in battery tech was with Lithium Ion and Metal Oxides, and that was years ago now. All we've really seen since were tweaks and refinements and manufacturing efficiencies pushed up as far as could be managed. But this Graphene thing is new.
Or rather, it's taking the old chemistries and really blasting their efficiencies through the roof.
From what I gather, the benefit of Graphene is this...
Battery charges come from electrons being traded back and forth between different atoms, and traditional battery chemistries involved essentially taking quantities of certain elements, (carbon, for instance) and shaping or pouring them into battery parts.
Obviously.
The problem was that on the atomic level, no matter how you shaped those parts, you're subject to a certain amount of chaos; the distribution and structures on the atomic level were hard to control and tended to result in "lumpiness".
Down at that level, electrons, if pictured as marbles being poured into a grid, had to randomly find their ways into the grid holes, and the holes in the grid were unreliably shaped and distributed, and there would be lumps of crap forming all over the place as the chemistry degrades with time and use. So large amounts of potentially useful surface just ended up being wasted. -Of course, that's a terribly misleading analogy, but the reality of quantum charged hyper-spheres is pretty much impossible to visualize for us dumb monkeys, so.., marbles it is.
Anyway, Graphene is a cheaply produced, very reliable atomic grid which can be used to regulate the structure of whatever chemicals you want to use. You bind, say, sulfur to that grid, and now you have sulfur in a really useful shape instead of just a cookie sheet of sludge. That means a much more efficient grid to pour your electron marbles onto. -AND, by the way, it also provides a rigid structure for elements so that undesirable crystalization, "clumping" doesn't happen (or at least not as quickly), so the battery charge efficiency doesn't degrade as fast. More charge cycles per battery.
So Graphene essentially allows us to put our battery houses in order and get the most efficiency out of existing chemistries, -and also to make other chemistries viable which before crystalized too fast for commercial use, (sulfur, actually, is a perfect example of one of these; it has great electron exchange properties, but it would stop working after just a few cycles because it crystalizes really fast).
So this Graphene stuff really does change everything in a real way beyond just interesting press releases. The fact that we're seeing this battery tech for sale (!!!) and not just talked about is kind of huge. Essentially, your hot new laptop/smartphone/tablet just fell off the cutting edge.
"Lithium sulfur batteries have the potential to substitute lithium-ion batteries in commercial applications, due to their low toxicity, low cost, and the potential for possessing an energy density of 2567 W h kg-1, which is five times higher than that of existing lithium-based batteries."
~Quoted from some Graphene manufacturer's website I just read.
Investors in a variety of fields have got to be licking their lips right now. Right now, Kickstarter campaigns are early adopters, but the rush is on. It won't be long before you'll see this new tech popping up all over the place.
This is almost as cool a turn of events in the tech world as the White LED was when it first appeared.
Neat-o!
