电池技术革新依然遥遥无期

    未来我们能做什么：纳米工程材料

    德克萨斯农工大学（A&M University）教授、美国机械工程师协会（American Society of Mechanical Engineers）能源和可持续性纳米工程小组成员帕沙•穆克荷吉表示，现在还没到放弃锂离子电池的时候。我们可能仍会用它，但它将与我们在实验室中获得新能力的材料混合使用。

    纳米工程师可能会对电池材料的分子结构进行深入研究，以加速电池单元电压的产生速度，并提升其转换效率。电解质携带锂离子的方式可能会发生改变，以杜绝“交通拥堵现象”，并缩短充电时间。人们可能会设计出更薄、更强大但伸缩依然自如的电池膜，这样，即便电池受热膨胀，也不会爆浆。或者一心一意开发能够比碳、空气或任何已知材料吸附更多锂离子的材料。

    穆克荷吉说：“我们需要询问的最根本的问题在于，‘是否可以从头再来？’。这就是必须解决的中尺度模型。我们是否能增加材料的宽容度，以满足我们对于电池的诉求？”

    与此同时：着眼于长远

    一年前，伊利诺伊理工大学的塞格雷从美国能源部获得了340万美元的奖金，用于开发汽车用“流体电池”。流体电池将其活性化合物储存在外部储罐中，然后流经电池结构内部。塞格雷的工作专注于开发具有足够活性和能量的液体介质，以抵消液体的重量劣势。

    流体电池或许可以应用于汽车和电网，但却无法适用于手机或笔记本。与其他的研究人员一样，塞格雷深知，这将是一个漫长的实验过程，除非研究人员能够在偶然间发现几种能用于电池的不同材料组合。与此同时，“对于大多数人来说，这是一件尤为痛苦的事情，因为几年过后，电量没了，容量也下降了，然而电池供电的电子产品却在不断前进。”

    过去几十年中，我们一直生活在摩尔定律（Moore's Law）当中。根据该定律，处理器中的晶体管数量每两年会翻一番，而这也说明了技术进步的稳定性。我们目前所面临的局势是，晶体管尺寸已接近原子水平，芯片无法容纳更多的处理器，而且我们对设备中一成不变的电池感到不满。

    换句话来说，物理中是没有应用程序的。金门大学（Golden Gate University）市场营销教授米盖尔•安•斯特拉赫维茨表示，这对于深谙技术的消费者来说可能有点难以接受，因为他们已经习惯了电子设备每一部件都会定期改良。

    斯特拉赫维茨说：“适应升级很容易，得到的升级越多，对进一步升级的期望也就越大。在这个电子产品越来越好，性能越来越高的世界中，我们觉得这是我们应享有的权利。我们会问，‘为什么电池不能变得更好呢？’”（财富中文网）

    译者：Feng

    What we can do in the future: nano-engineer materials

    Don’t give up on lithium-ion just yet, says Partha Mukherjee, a professor at Texas A&M University and leader in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Nanoengineering for Energy and Sustainability group. We might still be using it, but with materials that have gained some new powers in the lab.

    Nanoengineers might dig into the molecular structure of battery materials to speed up how they transfer more voltage per cell. There might be a change in the way the electrolyte conveys lithium ions so that “traffic jams” don’t occur and charging is much faster. You could design a thinner, stronger, but still flexible membrane for batteries that allows for swelling under heat but never breaks. Or go for broke and develop a material that absorbs more lithium ions than carbon, air, or any material we know.

    “The fundamental question we need to ask is, ‘How about starting from the bottom up?” Mukherjee says. “That is the mesoscale paradigm that must be addressed. Can we make materials that are more tolerant of what we need batteries to do?”

    In the meantime: get perspective

    A year ago Segre, of the Illinois Institute of Technology, received a $3.4 million prize from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a “flow battery” for car applications. Flow batteries store their active chemicals in external tanks and pass it through the battery structure itself. Segre’s work focuses on developing a liquid that is reactive and powerful enough to compensate for the liquid weight trade-off.

    A flow battery might work in cars and power grid applications, but it will never work for a phone or laptop. Segre, like most researchers, knows it will be a long series of experiments until researchers hit upon a few different material combinations for batteries. In the meantime, “It’s especially frustrating for most of us because the battery dies, the capacity drops, after a couple years, while the electronics it powers could go on and on.”

    For decades, we lived within Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors packed into a processor would double every two years, providing a steady gallop of technology improvement. We are now approaching a point at which transistors are near atomic-scale, chips can’t fit many more processors, and we’re unhappy with having the same kinds of batteries in our devices.

    In other words, when it comes to physics, there’s no app for that. Which can be a bitter pill for tech-savvy consumers to swallow as they become acclimated to regular advancements in every other part of their electronic devices, says Michal Ann Strahilevitz, a professor of marketing at Golden Gate University.

    “Adapting to upgrades is easy, and the more you are upgraded, the more you expect further upgrades,” Strahilevitz says. “In a world where [gadgets] keep getting better and more efficient, we feel we have a right to that. We ask, ‘Why can’t they be more wonderful than this?'”