AI Is Throwing Battery Development Into Overdrive (wired.com) 30
Improving batteries has always been hampered by slow experimentation and discovery processes. Machine learning is speeding it up by orders of magnitude. From a report: Inside a lab at Stanford University's Precourt Institute for Energy, there are a half dozen refrigerator-sized cabinets designed to kill batteries as fast as they can. Each holds around 100 lithium-ion cells secured in trays that can charge and discharge the batteries dozens of times per day. Ordinarily, the batteries that go into these electrochemical torture chambers would be found inside gadgets or electric vehicles, but when they're put in these hulking machines, they aren't powering anything at all. Instead, energy is dumped in and out of these cells as fast as possible to generate reams of performance data that will teach artificial intelligence how to build a better battery. In 2019, a team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, and the Toyota Research Institute used AI trained on data generated from these machines to predict the performance of lithium-ion batteries over the lifetime of the cells before their performance had started to slip. Ordinarily, AI would need data from after a battery had started to degrade in order to predict how it would perform in the future. It might take months to cycle the battery enough times to get that data. But the researchers' AI could predict lifetime performance after only hours of data collection, while the battery was still at its peak. "Prior to our work, nobody thought that was possible," says William Chueh, a materials scientist at Stanford and one of the lead authors of the 2019 paper.
And earlier this year, Chueh and his colleagues did it again. In a paper published in Nature in February, Chueh and his colleagues described an experiment in which an AI was able to discover the optimal method for 10-minute fast-charging a lithium-ion battery. Many experts think fast-charging batteries will be critical for electric vehicle adoption, but dumping enough energy to recharge a cell in the same amount of time it takes to fill up a tank of gas can quickly kill its performance. To get fast-charging batteries out of the lab and into the real world means finding the sweet spot between charge speed and battery lifetime. The problem is that there is effectively an infinite number of ways to deliver charge to a battery; Chueh compares it to searching for the best way to pour water into a bucket. Experimentally sifting through all those possibilities to find the best one is a slow and arduous task -- but that's where AI can help.
And earlier this year, Chueh and his colleagues did it again. In a paper published in Nature in February, Chueh and his colleagues described an experiment in which an AI was able to discover the optimal method for 10-minute fast-charging a lithium-ion battery. Many experts think fast-charging batteries will be critical for electric vehicle adoption, but dumping enough energy to recharge a cell in the same amount of time it takes to fill up a tank of gas can quickly kill its performance. To get fast-charging batteries out of the lab and into the real world means finding the sweet spot between charge speed and battery lifetime. The problem is that there is effectively an infinite number of ways to deliver charge to a battery; Chueh compares it to searching for the best way to pour water into a bucket. Experimentally sifting through all those possibilities to find the best one is a slow and arduous task -- but that's where AI can help.
Maybe someday I can charge my phone weekly (Score:1)
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I hope your comfortable; you'll have to wait -18 years.
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Get a better phone, I've been charging mine close to weekly (usually every 5 days) for ages now. First with a Motorola Defy, now with a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. The key to doing this is to dump everything off the phone you don't need, starting with Google and GSF. No Google account, no Facebook, no Shitter, no nothing. FDroid for apps, Aurora Store for those which live on the Play store, etc. Maybe you won't get to 5 days but you should be able to get 3 easily, 4 without too many problems.
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The tank in my car also stays full longer if I don't drive it. So it's not just batteries that perform this magic.
This is a game changer (Score:4, Funny)
This is a fusion changer (Score:3)
Hey, let's apply some AI to fusion then.
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Look here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.003... [arxiv.org]
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No, for idiots who are credulous of media talking heads, this extends the length of bullshit times, because they'll always assume the AI speeds development up, when really it bleeds resources away from real engineering and diverts it to PHBs at the AI companies. So when the materials engineer says it take another 5 years to complete the materials engineering, and the talking head would have told you that the completed product will be on the market in 5 years, now the talking head will say 3 years to the opt
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Unfortunately, that is pretty much the state of things. Materials research is hard. Sure, there will be a tiny faction of it where statistical classifiers and predictors can help, but that is about it. This is no revolution, that is just the typical "AI bullshit" that regards AI as the second coming or something.
Fancy Regression (Score:5, Interesting)
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you aren't going to have any major breakthroughs with this technique
I think that is due to the state of AI development rather than an inherent problem with it.
Even simple game-playing AI used to work by studying human play, parsing that out into individual steps and calculating the highest "value" of those to play in any given situation. But some recent AI has learned to play just by being told the rules, which frees it from being able to do only those things we've done.
Probably the sticking point in most development of physical products would be giving it a useful se
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have your batteries for even more money than you knew you had.
Thats called a 'loan' [provenir.com]. They've been around a long time [wikipedia.org]
The buzzwords would be 'microfinance' [google.com] or 'fintech' [google.com]
You'd need to use fintech in the cloud to microfinance a 3D printed Blockchain AI. Then it will cure covid while removing CO2 from the air.
Sorry, fusion is still 20 years away.
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Except the most obvious one. You pulse the charge at the frequency of the bond you want to break. Resonance will help break that bond, no free energy, just better absorption of energy into the molecular bond to help break it, pretty straight forward. Now Toyota America can claim that, lamers.
spinning shit to RWNJs (Score:2, Interesting)
AI or throw everything at wall to see what sticks? (Score:2)
Demon Seed (Score:2)
This reminds me of the old movie 'Demon Seed'. A company builds an AI to answer technological problems, but instead it takes too broad a viewpoint and starts asking why the problems existed in the first place. It would be funny if an AI answer to fast-charging being damaging batteries were 'don't fast charge the batteries then, Slow the metabolism of your society and economy instead, drive slower too, batteries will last much longer that way'
AI? Not Electric Vehicles? Not smart phones? ... (Score:3)
Every 5 years we get new, better batteries and new technology that needs even newer, better-er batteries.
Dammit! (Score:2)
First the CFO on our back, then the CEO and now the AI, sooner or later the abbrevionitis will get us,
Li is rare (Score:2)
How many industrial sized lithium based batteries can be made before we run out of lithium.
Lithium concentration is defined in ppm. There's billions of tons of it in sea water, but low concentration.
Nickel as a battery component is found in concentrations of 1 - 65% in ore and Australia has bucket loads.
Nickel won't make small portable batteries, but with NiFe batteries having a life of 20-100 years, why wouldn't we make Ni storage batteries.
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New angle, old story. (Score:1)
Nice try Boffins.
But it's still PR bullshit to get a grant.
Give us a battery now.
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Re: New angle, old story. (Score:1)
Because they're put out by Sales and PR directors who are after cash.