Chapter 688: New Way to Eat Bacon Sandwiches?
Chapter 688: New Way to Eat Bacon Sandwiches?
Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
If lithium-sulfur batteries were like the nuclear fission of batteries, lithium-air batteries were like the nuclear fusion of batteries. The method of obtaining oxides from the outside air was the upper limit of the energy density of the lithium-anode battery.
Compared to traditional lithium-ion batteries, the energy density of lithium-sulfur batteries was an order of magnitude higher. Compared with lithium-sulfur batteries, lithium-air batteries were also an order of magnitude higher, in terms of energy density. Both the volume-energy density and mass-energy density were the same, a magnitude higher.
The only downside was that it probably wasn’t suitable for mobile phones or satellites.
After all, the reason why the energy density of lithium-air batteries was high was that its oxides weren’t integrated inside the battery, but were located outside the battery. Therefore, the battery needed to "breathe".
Mobile phones were often kept in tight pockets and satellites were kept away from Earth’s atmosphere, making these devices difficult to take advantage of lithium-air batteries. However, for alternative energy vehicles or small drones, there wasn’t a better energy storage device than lithium-air batteries.
Because of this, lithium-air batteries were much more difficult to create than lithium-sulfur batteries.
Not only was there the lithium dendrite problem, which plagued all lithium anode batteries, but lithium-air batteries also had extremely demanding material requirements. After all, lithium itself was a super reactive metal. Exposing it to the atmosphere meant one would have to make it react only with the oxygen in the atmosphere.
Not to mention numerous other complex side effects.
The key to solving this problem was to find a thin film that could filter out water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases in the air and can accurately and quickly screen through oxygen molecules.
In fact, this technology
Unfortunately, the damage done to Debris No.1 was relatively large, and the layer of film was located on the surface of the debris. Even using the data collected with a scanner gun, there would still be a certain degree of difficulty to reverse engineer this technology.
Fortunately, Lu Zhou could rely on his intuition in the field of computing materials and his understanding of carbon-based materials to narrow down several technical routes that seemed more feasible. He then handed these technical routes to the researchers at the Institute of Computational Materials.
Since he was an academic leader, he didn’t need to work on every project himself. All he had to do was plan the research direction and find a reliable technical route.
If this technology succeeded, its impact would spread beyond the battery field.
From manufacturing to medical devices, a lot of fields would benefit from this technology.
The Alternative Energy Vehicle Summit in Jinling was held for a total of two days, during which Lu Zhou received a lot of business cards. Even though he rarely contacted people in the capital investment field, people in the field were extremely interested in him.
Whether it was because of the Ling Yun medal or because of Star Sky Technology’s research and development advantage, many people had exchanged business cards with him.
And no matter their intention, Lu Zhou responded politely to everyone who was interested in him.
Even though he didn’t need their help right now, who knew what the future could hold?
After all, not all projects could be funded by the state.
A week after the summit had ended, at the end of October…
Autumn was the perfect season for Lu Zhou to sit in his office and study mathematical problems. He unexpectedly received an email from Switzerland.
It was from Edward Witten.
In this email, in addition to his greetings, Witten walked about CERN’s latest research progress.
Especially regarding the "M particles".
[In regards to the "M particles" you predicted in your thesis, an exploration project has been scheduled in this month’s experimental plan. If everything goes well, we will receive the results at the end of the month. We have held many meetings for this experiment, and we are all looking forward to seeing interesting things in the experiment.
[Finally, I hope you stay healthy and work hard. If there are any updates, I will tell you as soon as possible, even though I think CERN’s press releases are faster than my emails.
[Also, do you know about a kind of tofu that looks like cheese? I’m not sure if it’s a Jinling specialty, but putting that in bacon sandwiches is very delicious, I recommend you to try it. Unfortunately, I haven’t found it in any supermarkets here… Can you send me some if you can? I’ll pay you back of course.