The really important bit, comparison to lithium ion:
>She did say that large battery banks that might be spun off from this research stand to not only have higher capacity, but also be substantially lighter than lithium ions. Although, she adds, perhaps the greatest weight savings will come not from comparing one battery cell's mass with another. “The biggest difference would be that you don’t have to have the same stainless steel bunkers in each of the cells,” she says.
Not flammable is a big deal in battery tech. We try to pack more and more energy into smaller and smaller cells, so continuing to improve the capacity makes inadvertently releasing all that energy even more dangerous.
Here's another cool project working on that problem with a solid polymer electrolyte. Video shows it continuing to provide power while being sliced into pieces with scissors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik
Only if you declare the center as infinitely perfect in every way. If you allow each axis to trade off with the others, then there is no single ideal. Fixed storage would rather have better prices and cycles in exchange for worse density. Mobile devices would rather have better density in exchange for higher prices.
(You can look at it like a path through the solution space. If you keep letting someone pick which attribute to improve, over and over, you eventually hit infinity/infinity/infinity, but different users will take very different paths to get there. At any particular count of improvements, their ideal batteries are significantly different.)
And with regard to kickopotomus's comment, you can get away with a much higher cost if you're targeting the right niche.
>She did say that large battery banks that might be spun off from this research stand to not only have higher capacity, but also be substantially lighter than lithium ions. Although, she adds, perhaps the greatest weight savings will come not from comparing one battery cell's mass with another. “The biggest difference would be that you don’t have to have the same stainless steel bunkers in each of the cells,” she says.
Not flammable is a big deal in battery tech. We try to pack more and more energy into smaller and smaller cells, so continuing to improve the capacity makes inadvertently releasing all that energy even more dangerous.
Here's another cool project working on that problem with a solid polymer electrolyte. Video shows it continuing to provide power while being sliced into pieces with scissors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-cNNYb1Ik