Try and sell a new technology without a patent and see how far into production a company will go with you. Most new technologies require extensive research and typically depend on profit from exclusive sales under a patent to recoup the costs. If the manufacturer cannot see a way to enforce a patent and have exclusive rights to a product then they are less likely to pour money into research which at times gives you products that are mediocre hoping to take profits from the first sales to improve the product more and more as time goes on. The first nimh batteries AA batteries I have seen were only 1200mah, now we have 2000mah LSD cells this did not happen overnight. I would figure there were patents involved that both helped and stymied the speed at which the technology advanced. I have seen companies that worried less about improving products as long as they could sell what they had and until someone else made better products (which is typically not allowed with patents) technology advanced rather slowly. This happens way too often IMO... if this battery technology could increase storage capacity10 fold with a lot of research and years of study but a company could put out a version that only increased capacity 10% over the best and while they had the patent didn't worry about improving those numbers but to maybe 30% over the next 5 years while the cost was 40% more what gains are there?
Lynx_Arc, again you completely miss the point of my initial post here. Repeatedly engaging in diatribes about patents and profits along with expressing your disappointments and personal perceptions of the slow pace of improvements in battery capacity are so far from the subject and intent of my initial post as to be off topic. (I'll elaborate more on this below.)
It's just that there have been like half a dozen "new breakthroughs" that result in some 3-8x increases in lithium capacity in the last few years, and they've either been vaporware, or completely failed to live up to those expectations. At least a couple of those promised to be on the market within a couple years at the time of writing, and we're a bit past that now. It's like the boy who cried wolf, no one is paying much heed to it since we've heard it so often, and so far, no wolf. I'll get excited when someone has a real product that could actually deliver 10,000-20,000 mAH in an 18650 sized cell or prismatic volume equivalent.
This post too misses the subject of my post and indulges only in a short term view of technological development and disappointment that new advances are not delivered to your doorstep at the speed and frequency you desire.
My post was about two scientists pursuing an interesting avenue of research. Nobody has promised any "new breakthroughs" or "promised"
anything to be on the market just yet.
Also, mass market science magazine articles in general should be taken with a grain of salt. They have a lot of hype and pseudoscience in them to catch people's attentions and make a sale. They shouldn't be taken as relevant, real science, but rather more as a science gossip column.
With all due respect Wrend, you apparently don't have a clue here regarding the sources I mentioned and linked in my post. The research paper I cited was from the journal
Science. This publication is hardly a "mass market science magazine" filled with "a lot of hype and pseudoscience". It is considered by many to be one of the premier
peer reviewed science journals in the world and was founded in 1880 with financial support from Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Only a very small percentage of the articles submitted to the Journal are accepted for publication and so an article published therein is generally worthy of paying attention to. The articles and research papers Science publishes are only available to members of the
AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, not the general public. This is why I also linked to the article
about this research in Technology Review Magazine, a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and hardly a "mass market" publication or "science gossip column" either.
I had hoped that my brief initial post might generate some interesting discussion about
the science behind what appears to be a fascinating avenue of research that could not only make lithium-ion batteries more efficient, but also cleaner and cheaper to manufacture. In fact, the scientific perception that an inexpensive polymer or proto-polymer already exists that is derived from aquatic plants, especially those in seawater that are naturally immersed in an electrolyte and their potential application to battery anodes is brilliant, but, hey, why bother discussing that when you can carp about more mundane and petty issues?
I spoke earlier in this thread about my dismay "at how often it happens that whenever a thread is posted about something new, potentially innovative or interesting how many of the CPF "cognoscenti" immediately pile on with nothing to add to the dialogue but detracting and skeptical comments and few if any facts." Sadly, instead of an interesting dialogue about scientific research, this thread, like so many others I've seen and participated in here at CPF quickly deteriorated into just that, with cynical whining about the perceived slow pace of technology, self appointed punditry, condescending and negative remarks and complaints about the battery industry along with those researchers striving to advance the field.
With minor exception, not a single poster to this thread bothered to or had any interest whatsoever in discussing the actual research that was the subject of my initial post. At the end of the day these attitudes are merely self serving and have little to offer the CPF community.
I would hope that CPF members could do better.
🙁
Seaweeds and algae are commanding tremendous scientific interest because their remarkable properties and potential are just becoming more fully understood, As member
RI Chevy points out in one of the few positive comments about this research, "we have only just scratched the surface as to what things from the sea can lead us to."
