So this guy thinks that battery manufacturers are going to pay him a licensing fee to add his magic third electrode to all their batteries so they can be easily restored in the future, thereby decreasing demand for replacement batteries? I’d like to see that business plan…
Well, don’t tell your customers, require a trade in for the battery, and then restore it and sell again…
Not exactly ethical, but I see it happening
Interesting read. … thanks for posting. :+1:
I'll take a wild guess that one of the larger battery manufacturers will buy him out and shut him up with a fantastic offer and that will be the last we hear about it.
This is the business plan used by most successful companies. Better; cars, computers, appliances, etc. If your product is better than the rest you sell more. If your batteries life is increased by say 5 fold you might sell twice as many to fill the void of your non competitive competition don’t build. Example 50,000 hour LED’s vs 1,000 hours cheaper incandescent bulb, who has the demand now?
If it really works, it’ll be a fantastic offer then they dominate the market.
Usually greed gets the inventors first so they sell out and live a happy life. Would be interesting to see a follow up on this story though.
First of all, like all “magical new battery innovations” that are on the news every 3 days, it will likely never make it to consumers.
Second, if restoring battery life was as simple as removing some extra lithium ions from an electrode people would have been doing this already.
This is not a “nobody has thought about this” idea, it is a “does not work in reality” idea.
That “restores 95% capacity” just sounds like another BS theoretical figure that isn’t possible to achieve.
If someone wants to prove me wrong with a peer reviewed research article showing the testing they used to arrive at that conclusion, please go ahead.
There are many other things which cause a lithium battery to lose capacity.
“Five common exothermic degradation reactions can occur:[22]
Chemical reduction of the electrolyte by the anode.
Thermal decomposition of the electrolyte.
Chemical oxidation of the electrolyte by the cathode.
Thermal decomposition by the cathode and anode.
Internal short circuit by charge effects.”
I’ve always wondered about that, you hear so many amazing inventions or changes to existing tech that would be game-changing but they never materialize.
I’m still waiting for this: Better Lithium-Ion Battery
Even innovations that actually work and are economical at industrial scale are rarely heard of again. They end up being one of the things, which, over time, yield ~10% annual improvement in batteries. No one launches a new battery company, or a branding campaign.
I’m with Kirman, we will probably never hear of this again unless Elon musk happens to be the buyer of the patent.
This is my final answer.
The big conglomerates absorb findings of this kind quicker than a dry sponge to water. If something like this “example” stood to be true, there would be TRILLIONS of dollars lost, 10x fold over time.
It’s no different than the medical field, or any other. When the equation is solved, funding is no more.