TDK claims "a next-generation solid-state battery with an energy density of 1,000 Wh/L, approximately 100 times greater than the energy density of TDK’s conventional solid-state battery." Their "conventional solid state battery" is a tiny thing used in meat thermometers, a ceramic device with, like most ceramic devices, good high temperature tolerance.
Lithium-ion batteries are around 250–693 W⋅h/L. So this is maybe 2x existing lithium-ion technology. That's about what everybody else is claiming for next-generation solid state batteries.
Incidentally, gasoline is around 9,500 Wh/L, although only about half of that reaches the driveshaft.
End result: longer cell phone battery life, and an end to "bulging" battery failures.
> although only about half of that reaches the driveshaft.
Isn't that more like around 35% on a good day? There are some pure ICE systems that can approach 50%, but those aren't in common passenger cars. Hybrid cars do considerably better, but even then 50% is an achievement.
38% in the Toyota atkinson cycle engines, which are the top of the industry. Typical is more like 28% for gasoline engines. Then you have automatic transmission efficiency, which is at best ~%80, so now you're down to 30% at best.
More typical: 28% engine thermal efficiency, 75% transmission efficiency means 21% overall efficiency.
So yes, gasoline energy equivalency is pretty meaningless unless you multiply it by 0.2 first.
Gas mileage figures from the EPA and others don't account at all for the time a vehicle spends idling before/after a trip - or even in heavy traffic, just waiting at traffic lights. For example, time parents spend sitting in their cars idling waiting to pick up their kids, time spend idling in coffee and fast food drive-through lines, etc. Start-stop systems help, but a lot of people disable them.
A 2x improvement in energy density would make EVs accessible to everyone without question. What remains to be seen is whether it can be produced at a competitive cost. My guess is not for a long while.
Toyota and Idemitsu Kosan (part of the same METI grant that TDK got for SSB development 20 years ago) are going to commercialize Solid-State Batteries for EVs by 2028 [0][1]
The new Toyota Battery factory in NC is part of that push [2]
The problem isn't energy density, nor competitive cost. Multiple manufacturers make EVs that are price-competitive with ICEs and in some cases the same vehicle model with an ICE.
The problem is mostly driver mindset.
You just can't convince them that
a)most of their charging will happen at home while the car sits in their garage / driveway
b)When they do need to fast charge, the 20 minutes it takes for a number of current EVs to get to 80% charge isn't much longer than what you'd spend at a highway service area by the time you get done with fueling the car, going to the bathroom, chasing down everyone who was in the car, maybe buying a drink and snack, etc
c)For the rare occasion they need a vehicle with more range or are going into an area without good charging infrastructure, they can rent a car. This is how things are done in Europe - you take public transit most of the time, but for a trip where public transit isn't convenient, you rent - often times after taking a train to get closer to the area you're going to be in.
Drivers still buy giant 7-passenger SUVs and hulking pickups that spend most of their service life with one, maybe two people in them and little or no cargo.
Making car rentals much less of a hassle would help, as would mandating maximum passenger vehicle heights, and tax penalties on noncommercial vehicles over a certain weight.
>So this is maybe 2x existing lithium-ion technology. That's about what everybody else is claiming for next-generation solid state batteries
It is sort of sad to think the future of Apple Watch and AirPod is only getting at best 2x battery life, and that is assuming they dont make it even smaller.
> TDK Corporation successfully developed a material for CeraCharge, a next-generation solid-state battery with an energy density of 1,000 Wh/L, approximately 100 times greater than the energy density of TDK’s conventional solid-state battery.
So, that energy density is 100 times greater than whatever TDK's previous solid-state battery was, not necessarily 100 times other battery technologies.
Also, note that they're measuring the density in Wh/L, or Watt-hours per Liter. That is, they're measuring energy density by volume, not by weight. According to my Perplexity search, lithium-ion batteries have a "volumetric energy density ranging from 250 to 680 Wh/L". So these TDK solid state batteries will have maybe twice that energy density by volume.
That press release doesn't say anything about the weight of these batteries, which is probably why they're not proposing these for vehicles. If these were lighter than lithium-ion batteries, electric car makers would be all over them, looking for ways to get volume production up to lower costs. The fact that they don't mention the energy density by mass suggests that they're no better than lithium-ion.
So this is neat development, if not a major tectonic shift. The use cases TDK proposes, wireless earphones, hearing aids and smartwatches, are applications where size is a more important consideration than weight (below a certain threshold). Good for them! And if TDK can manufacture these cheaply and reliably, I'm sure engineers will come up with other clever uses for this technology.
EDIT: Hearing aids were the first electronic products with transistors, so that is a historically auspicious precedent. Asianometry did a video on transistors in hearing aids here: https://youtu.be/3ykz4JAO91g
From the available information I estimate they are about 2x the theoretical maximum energy density of lithium ion chemistry or about 4x better than current state of the art lithium ion batteries in mass production. The theoretical ceiling of chemical batteries overall is about 25x higher still, especially when you start including air-breathing chemistries, so their claims are not out of line with what should be possible.
Current zinc-air hearing aid batteries (e.g. #675) are 1500+ WH/L. They are not rechargeable though. They are basically miniature fuel cells. They take in outside air to react with the chemistry inside, so they weigh a tiny bit more after they are used up. The energy density is impressive though.
> So, that energy density is 100 times greater than whatever TDK's previous solid-state battery was, not necessarily 100 times other battery technologies.
Yes. 100x better density than current LiPo, LiMH, or something like that would immediately enable electric airliners. Like tomorrow.
> The ceramic material used by TDK means that larger-sized batteries would be more fragile, meaning the technical challenge of making batteries for cars or even smartphones will not be surmounted in the foreseeable future, according to the company.
Coin-sized batteries are pretty usable for many current applications (wireless headphones, smart watches, ...) - presuming they can surmount the other challenges
What stops them from having huge arrays of these coin cell batteries? Can the "insane energy density" compensate for the overhead?
Cars don't have one huge battery, and smartphones are starting to have multiple smaller ones to fit around the other components (and in folding phones).
Conversely, smartphones could have batteries 1/100th the size of their current batteries and still have the same battery life. Nothing says that if we want to use this tech in smartphones we have to have 100x the battery life (although that would be fantastic). Even 2x or 3x would be game-changing for power users, especially if battery performance degraded at only the same rate that current smartphone batteries do.
You wouldn't need a huge array of coin cell batteries; one coin cell might well be enough.
From the TFA: "Solid-state batteries are safer, lighter and potentially cheaper and offer longer performance and faster charging than current batteries relying on liquid electrolytes."
The article to me is worse than click bait. They keep mentioning Apple supplier TDK as if this battery is currently being used in Apple devices. The only link this battery has to Apple is that they use other batteries from the company. So, yes, you're correct in that nothing indicates this as a direct replacement. It is shitty journo looking for relevancy in SEO
Battery technology starts at the cell. It's far easier to build a small cell and test it's chemistry than it is to build a large (in comparison) battery.
"Apple supplier" doesn't seem like a fair description of a company founded in 1935, with a billboard in Piccadilly Circus for 25 years [0], a billboard in Times Square since 2000 [1], and a famous maker of cassettes, minidisc, VHS, CD, DVD, Blu-ray.
They are a well-established company, but few people will have directly engaged with them outside supplier logistic chains. At least not in the past decade.
Usually I would take any battery breakthrough claims with a huge grain of salt, but TDK is a very well established company, so this seems pretty exciting.
The big open question is whether and how this can be scaled up to larger battery sizes in a safe and functional way. Still exciting to see!
That would be great, but wireless earbuds and watches greatly need battery advances to overcome the current tedious ways to use them. Most smart watches need to be charged in a matter of 1-2 days, and wireless earbuds have to use extra batteries in their carrying cases to even hope to have enough charge available for when you need them. It's nice that we may substantially relieve these limitations.
> "The ceramic material used by TDK means that larger-sized batteries would be more fragile, meaning the technical challenge of making batteries for cars or even smartphones will not be surmounted in the foreseeable future, according to the company."
Would fragility really be a huge concern in more rigid flagship phones? Screens are already quite delicate It's not impossible to build a phone that doesn't flex meaningfully under normal conditions.
> The new material provides an energy density — the amount that can be squeezed into a given space — of 1,000 watt-hours per litre, which is about 100 times greater than TDK’s current battery in mass production.
> The battery technology is designed to be used in smaller-sized cells, replacing existing coin-shaped batteries found in watches and other small electronics.
> The ceramic material used by TDK means that larger-sized batteries would be more fragile, meaning the technical challenge of making batteries for cars or even smartphones will not be surmounted in the foreseeable future, according to the company.
This is not in production environment. We don't know how big these batteries can be, what temperature they can operate at, how much they cost to produce, if they can even be mass produced, what their output could be, etc...
Every week we have a claim like this one made by some reporter.
The fact this report is coming from a commercial enterprise and not a university is pretty encouraging. Obviously it could still just be PR, but they likely wouldn't be touting this unless they expected to bring it to mass production.
Companies lie and exaggerate all the time. It's called PR. It makes no difference whether it comes from a company or university, but companies have much more incentive to lie than universities, especially in technical fields, because they don't have to subject their claims to peer review unlike universities.
“Kevin Shang, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a data and analytics firm, said that “unfavorable mechanical properties,” as well as the difficulty and cost of mass production, are challenges for moving the application of solid-state oxide-based batteries into smartphones.”
“The group plans to start shipping samples of its new battery prototype to clients from next year and hopes to be able to move into mass production after that.”
So they don’t know yet if they’ll be able to pull off mass production, and it’ll be at least a couple years off.
Readit News
Older TDK story from 2020.[2]
TDK claims "a next-generation solid-state battery with an energy density of 1,000 Wh/L, approximately 100 times greater than the energy density of TDK’s conventional solid-state battery." Their "conventional solid state battery" is a tiny thing used in meat thermometers, a ceramic device with, like most ceramic devices, good high temperature tolerance.
Lithium-ion batteries are around 250–693 W⋅h/L. So this is maybe 2x existing lithium-ion technology. That's about what everybody else is claiming for next-generation solid state batteries.
Incidentally, gasoline is around 9,500 Wh/L, although only about half of that reaches the driveshaft.
End result: longer cell phone battery life, and an end to "bulging" battery failures.
[1] https://www.tdk.com/en/news_center/press/20240617_01.html
[2] https://www.tdk.com/en/featured_stories/entry_024.html
Isn't that more like around 35% on a good day? There are some pure ICE systems that can approach 50%, but those aren't in common passenger cars. Hybrid cars do considerably better, but even then 50% is an achievement.
More typical: 28% engine thermal efficiency, 75% transmission efficiency means 21% overall efficiency.
So yes, gasoline energy equivalency is pretty meaningless unless you multiply it by 0.2 first.
Gas mileage figures from the EPA and others don't account at all for the time a vehicle spends idling before/after a trip - or even in heavy traffic, just waiting at traffic lights. For example, time parents spend sitting in their cars idling waiting to pick up their kids, time spend idling in coffee and fast food drive-through lines, etc. Start-stop systems help, but a lot of people disable them.
Some places claim the most fuel efficient vehicles are about 40% (again, on a good day in testing conditions).
EVs on the other hand are up around 87% or higher.
Toyota and Idemitsu Kosan (part of the same METI grant that TDK got for SSB development 20 years ago) are going to commercialize Solid-State Batteries for EVs by 2028 [0][1]
The new Toyota Battery factory in NC is part of that push [2]
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
The problem is mostly driver mindset.
You just can't convince them that
a)most of their charging will happen at home while the car sits in their garage / driveway
b)When they do need to fast charge, the 20 minutes it takes for a number of current EVs to get to 80% charge isn't much longer than what you'd spend at a highway service area by the time you get done with fueling the car, going to the bathroom, chasing down everyone who was in the car, maybe buying a drink and snack, etc
c)For the rare occasion they need a vehicle with more range or are going into an area without good charging infrastructure, they can rent a car. This is how things are done in Europe - you take public transit most of the time, but for a trip where public transit isn't convenient, you rent - often times after taking a train to get closer to the area you're going to be in.
Drivers still buy giant 7-passenger SUVs and hulking pickups that spend most of their service life with one, maybe two people in them and little or no cargo.
Making car rentals much less of a hassle would help, as would mandating maximum passenger vehicle heights, and tax penalties on noncommercial vehicles over a certain weight.
It is sort of sad to think the future of Apple Watch and AirPod is only getting at best 2x battery life, and that is assuming they dont make it even smaller.
So, that energy density is 100 times greater than whatever TDK's previous solid-state battery was, not necessarily 100 times other battery technologies.
Also, note that they're measuring the density in Wh/L, or Watt-hours per Liter. That is, they're measuring energy density by volume, not by weight. According to my Perplexity search, lithium-ion batteries have a "volumetric energy density ranging from 250 to 680 Wh/L". So these TDK solid state batteries will have maybe twice that energy density by volume.
That press release doesn't say anything about the weight of these batteries, which is probably why they're not proposing these for vehicles. If these were lighter than lithium-ion batteries, electric car makers would be all over them, looking for ways to get volume production up to lower costs. The fact that they don't mention the energy density by mass suggests that they're no better than lithium-ion.
So this is neat development, if not a major tectonic shift. The use cases TDK proposes, wireless earphones, hearing aids and smartwatches, are applications where size is a more important consideration than weight (below a certain threshold). Good for them! And if TDK can manufacture these cheaply and reliably, I'm sure engineers will come up with other clever uses for this technology.
EDIT: Hearing aids were the first electronic products with transistors, so that is a historically auspicious precedent. Asianometry did a video on transistors in hearing aids here: https://youtu.be/3ykz4JAO91g
Yes. 100x better density than current LiPo, LiMH, or something like that would immediately enable electric airliners. Like tomorrow.
Deleted Comment
> The ceramic material used by TDK means that larger-sized batteries would be more fragile, meaning the technical challenge of making batteries for cars or even smartphones will not be surmounted in the foreseeable future, according to the company.
Cars don't have one huge battery, and smartphones are starting to have multiple smaller ones to fit around the other components (and in folding phones).
You wouldn't need a huge array of coin cell batteries; one coin cell might well be enough.
From the TFA: "Solid-state batteries are safer, lighter and potentially cheaper and offer longer performance and faster charging than current batteries relying on liquid electrolytes."
The article to me is worse than click bait. They keep mentioning Apple supplier TDK as if this battery is currently being used in Apple devices. The only link this battery has to Apple is that they use other batteries from the company. So, yes, you're correct in that nothing indicates this as a direct replacement. It is shitty journo looking for relevancy in SEO
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TDK#Sponsorship_and_advertisin... [1]: https://www.tdk.com/en/news_center/press/aah33300.html
Looking at their product directory, it's all B2B
https://product.tdk.com/en/index.html
The big open question is whether and how this can be scaled up to larger battery sizes in a safe and functional way. Still exciting to see!
It could still end up making a major difference.
Dead Comment
> The battery technology is designed to be used in smaller-sized cells, replacing existing coin-shaped batteries found in watches and other small electronics.
> The ceramic material used by TDK means that larger-sized batteries would be more fragile, meaning the technical challenge of making batteries for cars or even smartphones will not be surmounted in the foreseeable future, according to the company.
Still extremely interesting.
This is not in production environment. We don't know how big these batteries can be, what temperature they can operate at, how much they cost to produce, if they can even be mass produced, what their output could be, etc...
Every week we have a claim like this one made by some reporter.
“Kevin Shang, senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a data and analytics firm, said that “unfavorable mechanical properties,” as well as the difficulty and cost of mass production, are challenges for moving the application of solid-state oxide-based batteries into smartphones.”
“The group plans to start shipping samples of its new battery prototype to clients from next year and hopes to be able to move into mass production after that.”
So they don’t know yet if they’ll be able to pull off mass production, and it’ll be at least a couple years off.
Breakthroughs like these are an important step. They are not nothing but they are not the end of the journey either.
a less blunt critique would've specifically identified why this breakthrough is similar to the last one that didn't make it past the lab
surely there's a large enough sample set of past failures to choose from since there are claims like this every week