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MIT engineers build battery longer than a football field - and it's machine washable
By adamg on Mon, 12/20/2021 - 12:38pm
MIT News reports 'Tute engineers have created a single-strand lithium-ion battery fiber 140 meters long.
Cool as that is all by itself, the goal is not to create a battery that can stretch an entire kilometer - although researchers are tempted to do that just because - but to advance work on creation of flexible battery fibers that could one day be woven into clothing and other things to provide flexible power on the go.
The researchers envision new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary clothing, as well as devices whose batteries could also double as structural parts. ...
The 140-meter fiber produced so far has an energy storage capacity of 123 milliamp-hours, which can charge smartwatches or phones, he says. The fiber device is only a few hundred microns in thickness, thinner than any previous attempts to produce batteries in fiber form.
Article is illustrated with a photo that suggests another potential use for the fiber, if one were to think like a 12-year-old.
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Comments
123 milliamp-hours
For context, iPhone 13 has a battery that can hold 3095 milliamp-hours, so this battery can charge your phone up to 4%.
It's a lab, man
I used to have an Apple 2. It had 16KB of memory. Now I have an Apple PowerBook. It has 16GB of memory. It took a little work, and a little time, to get from one to the other. I don't think it would have been fruitful to try to start out with the PowerBook.
What PowerBook do you have?
The last model, the G4 only goes up to 2GB, I thought?
Tee hee, I see what you did
Tee hee, I see what you did there, rascal!
You’re right
it’s a a MacBook. I think. The ghosts of generations of vanished computers parade before my tired eyes….
1 KM long battery
If you hook that up to a switch and a light bulb...how long does it take to turn on the light once you throw the switch?
Also, what kind of magnetic fields does a shirt woven from a battery create? OMG, they're making us into 5G towers for real this time!
A few microseconds
Electricity propagates at fairly close to the speed of light.
Yeah
I didn't specify that the thread is in a loop that is 1/2 km long and the strands are 1m apart. Nerd Internet has been buzzing with this Veritasium video dealing with information transmission and discussing all the minutiae around whether the light bulb comes on with non-zero charge across it or some higher threshold, etc. So it was a reference for anyone who has seen the original video or any of the "well, actually..." followup videos from a bunch of other big content creators.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/678127/doesnt-veritasiums-re...
Haha, yes
I was thinking about that when writing my reply, and wasn't sure if you were referencing it.
When I watched the video I was pretty skeptical, and the followup videos I watched confirmed my suspicion. I ended up unsubscribing from Veritasium after that, since it was kind of the final straw -- he's generally overconfident and doesn't seem bothered by deceptiveness.
made me laugh
Because the first thing I thought when I read "battery longer than a football field" and "machine washable" in the same sentence was "Where the hell did they build a washing machine that big?"
Now that would be a stretch
But this is MIT, where anything is possible (oh, wait, that's Zombo.com, but same idea).
Hey now
Everyone knows that all tech students carry batteries.
And
have no fashion sense. Now they can combine these two characteristics into one. After all, engineers are all about efficiency!
Beware the day when all of
Beware the day when all of the self-folding shirts decide not to unfold, and police and firefighters can't go to work due to lack of uniforms.
Oh, that’s so nice
The “submarine” is styled like a billionaire spaceship!
Never change, MIT. Never change.