Im not in the loop about what people are expecting of ai or what state of the art models can do. But here’s my review.

Ive found chatgpt useful for code snippets, rewording paragraphs, writing emails, fun images. It saves time, but I still need to adjust things. I also use an llm for code suggestions, which I love.

I can not use it for things I don’t already understand well. Whenever I try to diagnose issues in my Linux computer, i feel like I get dragged down tangents and I get confused and after many messages it completely forgets what we’re doing. I would need to already know how things work to be able to navigate this.

It doesn’t do well with niche information. I haven’t been able to have it make me a functional EDH-deck. I have not been able to get basic information about my not-so-niche field of research. It gets things wrong too often for me to trust it as a source of information.

Overall ive found it very useful for the things I’ve found it useful. I understand why it fails at the other tasks. But I assume that someone better equipped than me could prompt-engineer, or adjust the model somehow, to make it useful for those tasks as well.

But ive also heard of really impressive uses, like alphago and alphafold. Im sure there are more recent examples.

But I honestly don’t understand what people are envisioning that these ai are supposed to do. Im probably just ignorant about the state of the art, but it seems absurd to me that an ai could tell you how to make government efficient by just throwing existing data at it, to use a topical example.

What does it mean that it’s an Indonesian hospital? Is that just it’s name?

The electrons can not be stored stationary floating in the vacuum of the bottle. They will immediately attach to the internal surface. The entire bottle is now negatively charged and will accumulate positive charge on the external surface until it is electrically neutral. Now you have a funny looking capacitor with extra steps.

The closest thing in existence are the magnetic bottles used for different fusion reactor designs and particle accelerators. In these, the charged particles are kept moving in a closed loop contained by electromagnets that contiously adjust to keep the system pseudo-stable. These certainly cant store energy.

I don’t see the point of nanoelectrofuel flow batteries. I’m sure there are niche applications that I can’t see. But not anywhere near what that author is describing.

Flow batteries are good because they’re so cheap per mAh and W, and if you’re using them for grid scale storage, size and weight doesn’t matter. The energy density is greatly increased when you add nanoparticles, to the point where it competes with EV batteries. This includes the extra weight of pumps and membranes. I think the addition of pumps and membranes make it really unfit for personal vehicles, even if it increases the energy density. The article talks about military applications, but doesn’t really explain what it could do better that Li-ion except for fire safety. And they’d be dependent on the fuel of this one company.

I think its major selling point is that it’s cheap and very modular, so you can easily choose what capacity/power your grid scale facility should store/output, and change it after the fact. But if your building a facility, then the weight doesn’t matter as much and you might as well skip the nanoparticles.

As a technology I think it’s really clever. It’s not a very well studied idea. They’re tight lipped and I assumed it was some sort of Vanadium flow battery, but judging by the articles they’re citing in their patent and their conference talk abstract I’d speculate the cathode nanoelectrofuel is a water based slurry with lithium iron phosphate nanoparticles and carbon powder. The particles discharge like they would in a conventional Li-ion battery. But then instead of charging them you pump the slurry to your big tank, replacing them with charged particles. You need the carbon to conduct the electrons from the suspended particles to the current collector plate.

I feel the same way when I read these articles. They make it seem like everything is an earth shattering breakthrough when in reality, they’re making a small (albeit worthwhile) contribution towards solving a problem that already has 20 other solutions with other trade-offs.

But I like it when I read about any new battery tech being scaled up do industrial scale, like the article here. That’s the hard part.

I’m doing a PhD in batteries. Not this issue specifically, but I hear a lot about different battery fields so I think I can speak on it.

The drawback is that the anode expands and contracts a lot during a cycle. This puts a lot of strain on the binder holding the film together, and on the contact between the film and the aluminum foil. This makes the battery degrade and fail after fewer cycles.

Below is an article in nature from 2020 where a group is trying to solve this issue by coating the Si platelet particles with carbon (adding complexity and mass). You can read about this issue on greater detail in the abstract and introduction. There are many articles tackling the same issue (many cited in this article), I just picked this one because it had info in the intro/abstract. Stable high-capacity and high-rate silicon-based lithium battery anodes upon two-dimensional covalent encapsulation

In addition, the expansion/contraction cycles causes the electrolyte to dry up. During the first few cycles of any battery, the electrolyte reacts with the electrodes to form passivating layers on the electrodes. When the particle contracts/expands excessively, the particle breaks apart and the passivating layer is ripped up. The passivating layer is then reformed, now on a larger area, which consumes more electrolyte. Eventually the cell fails from the lack of electrolyte.

Below is an article in nature from 2024 where a group tries to solve this issue by designing an electrolyte that creates a passivating layer that keeps its shape when the particle contracts, creating a shell. You can read more about the issue In the abstract, intro, and figures. High voltage electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries with micro-sized silicon anodes

These are solvable issues, but a lot of the solutions are either too complicated to scale up, or add too much mass/volume to make it worth it, or slow down the discharge rate. And any change anywhere, needs to be taken into account on the rest of the parts of the battery.

I don’t know what Sienza Energy did. It’s an MIT spin-off, so they probably know their stuff. All issues don’t need to be solved for a battery to be functional, it just needs to be good enough. Any new battery factory “just” needs to find and scale-up the state-of-the-art components in the right combination. There will be a ton of drawbacks, but it will be better than the last battery factory.