EEVblog #1333 - Nano Diamond Self-Charging Battery DEBUNKED!

[pfeerick]

Dave bases his opinion on a single sample pics of a through hole chip that's been taken down anyway.

No it hasn't... it's the second picture of the NewAtlas article @ https://newatlas.com/energy/nano-diamond-self-charging-batteries-ndb

And a reverse google image search for the image appears to suggest it is only present in the marketing hyperbole materials... but I didn't go through all the search results...

The thing that would be interesting to find out is the actual energy density - thus it would be possible to work out if the IC package could have a higher output source, or if 100uW really is the limit, thus making this a very disruptive technology... in an alternate reality. 

[Bud]

LOL

Holy crap, i was wondering what is the deal with IC type packaging. Now if someone could explain how they fit the supercapacitor in it. 

[Tsippaduida]

NDB promises bit too much. Has anyone looked into what these Betavoltaic components cost? They are hideously expensive even when there are no diamond manufacturing involved.

This is quite fresh technology, but the principle is known and there are even competition. In addition to CityLabs, there's Widetronics: https://www.widetronix.com/products

And to look into power densities of the original diamond-based solution you can use the numbers from http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cabot/events/2016/annual-lecture-2016.html

"The actual amount of carbon-14 in each battery has yet to be decided but one battery, containing 1g of carbon-14, would deliver 15 Joules per day.  This is less than an AA battery.  Standard alkaline AA batteries are designed for short timeframe discharge: one battery weighing about 20g has an energy storage rating of 700J/g. If operated continuously, this would run out in 24 hours. Using carbon-14 the battery would take 5,730 years to reach 50 per cent power"

Internet said that betavoltaic batteries cost around $2,200 each (unconfirmed number). And this is from current technologies, without expensive diamond manufacturing process.

They need to make several break throughs before the power density is such that phones can be powered with these. Not impossible (maybe), but don't hold your breath in waiting.

[EEVblog]

The thing that would be interesting to find out is the actual energy density - thus it would be possible to work out if the IC package could have a higher output source, or if 100uW really is the limit, thus making this a very disruptive technology... in an alternate reality. 

As far as we know, they haven't even gotten the 100uW yet, it's just a render.
Again, take a look at their very extensive investor presentation, it's got absolutely everything, right down to how much all the test equipment costs. Yet try and find a single mention of anything to do with power output.

[EEVblog]

NDB promises bit too much. Has anyone looked into what these Betavoltaic components cost? They are hideously expensive even when there are no diamond manufacturing involved.

Costing for the CityLabs 100uW unit is in the thousands of dollars per unit. Pricing is in that article I linked in the video.

[EEVblog]

Archived for reference purposes:
https://archive.is/GHVYn
https://archive.vn/GHVYn

[Domagoj T]

Question to ponder:
Let's say this can magically scale to an EV sized battery. The radiation never stops producing energy, energy unless consumed in some other way will be given off as heat. Where does the waste heat go?
Useful on spacecaft, you can heat your electronics with it. In an EV, not so much...

Even on spacecraft waste heat is a problem that needs to be accounted for.
For example, ISS has solar panels that generate about 100kW on average. But ISS also has radiators that dump 70kW of waste heat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_Active_Thermal_Control_System

[helius]

The CityLabs units are expensive because tritium is expensive. The betavoltaic generator itself is an IC: which could be cheap as chips or expensive depending on materials. I would be very interested in any pointers to whitepapers describing them, but from what I know I'd guess they would be similar to monocrystalline PV panels, maybe using a stack to increase capture radius.
The diamond stuff should be similar to commercial laboratory grown diamonds, with the important detail that the ¹⁴C storage doesn't need to be a single crystal. So even synthetic diamond dust potentially could be used. My understanding is that until recently, there was only one manufacturer of large, monocrystalline synthetic diamonds by CVD and the process details were closely guarded. Has this become a commodity process? If not, there is significant business risk for any startup that hopes to perfect such a process.

Addendum: if the electrical properties of the diamonds aren't critical, it may be possible to use high pressure techniques to synthesize the diamonds, which were perfected by the 1960s. I'm not sure if any plants are still operating with this process, maybe there is equipment hiding in the former USSR? This could be a lot cheaper than CVD considering the latter's strict parameters.

[SmokedComponent]

Power ICs in all 4 directions!! No nasty 90, 180 degree turns to shoot those scarce electrons out!
Their marketing material is comparable to those soldering stock images. Good stuff!

[SMB784]

LOL

Oh my god is that real?  There's no way that's serious.

[Lord of nothing]

Costing for the CityLabs 100uW unit is in the thousands of dollars per unit. Pricing is in that article I linked in the video.

Well if it like special Medicine who the Research is adding up mostly not for the Materials that could be a reason why its so expencive.

The CityLabs units are expensive because tritium is expensive.

Why are my Chinese Tritium Marker are so cheap?

[EEVblog]

LOL

Oh my god is that real?  There's no way that's serious.

Yes, they are serious, it's in their investor pitch document to try and raise squillions of dollars.

[EEVblog]

Archived for reference purposes:
https://archive.is/GHVYn
https://archive.vn/GHVYn

Aaaaand the documents are gone!
https://ndb.technology/pitch/
They are clearly watching.

[hendorog]

Archived for reference purposes:
https://archive.is/GHVYn
https://archive.vn/GHVYn

Aaaaand the documents are gone!
https://ndb.technology/pitch/
They are clearly watching.

You are 2nd on google for "nano-diamond self charging battery" and first on youtube. I'd say it would have hit their feed pretty quick

[SMB784]

LOL

Oh my god is that real?  There's no way that's serious.

Yes, they are serious, it's in their investor pitch document to try and raise squillions of dollars.

Why did they stop at 64 pins? They could have made that humdinger in a BGA package. Real missed opportunity to fill the "I need 1000 connections to the same voltage source" niche

[EEVblog]

Archived for reference purposes:
https://archive.is/GHVYn
https://archive.vn/GHVYn

Aaaaand the documents are gone!
https://ndb.technology/pitch/
They are clearly watching.

Luckily someone re-uploaded:
https://gofile.io/d/Iorhs5

[tszaboo]

I recently finished a project, that is using 2.5uA@7.2V on average. It is a sensor for sensor network applications. Industry 4 and all that jazz. Battery replacement are very expensive, expected lifetime (by the customer) could be decades. I could imagine using something like this, if you can meet the price target.
Also, it is smaller than the batteries. And probably dont get super hot if short circuited (safety risk)

Also, you can forget about charging regular supercaps. They just dont have the lifetime. Long term test shows, that they start leaking, and that leakage could be larger than the power usage of your device.

But the target price has to be in the range of the current Lithium batteries.

[BrianHG]

See attached clip from 'NDB_One_Pager_Seed.pdf'.



Only 2.3 million?  For tech which can eventually power cars?  Cars which use enough power to also power/heat/air condition my house for 100 years...

Though I know better, as an investor, this 'puny' figure for something so powerful when I personally need over 5x that budget for year 1 to develop a AAA grade iPhone app.

These goofballs know their product is BS and don't have the balls to actually ask for 23 million let alone 50....

[EEVblog]

See attached clip from 'NDB_One_Pager_Seed.pdf'.
Only 2.3 million?  For tech which can eventually power cars?  Cars which use enough power to also power/heat/air condition my house for 100 years...
Though I know better, as an investor, this 'puny' figure for something so powerful when I personally need over 5x that budget for year 1 to develop a AAA grade iPhone app.
These goofballs know their product is BS and don't have the balls to actually ask for 23 million let alone 50....

That's smart though, get some funding to pay basic wages and you don't have to really produce anything for the first year while you wait for the big funding to come through.

But they are going to be generous and only take $80k each for the first year:

[SeanB]

You will never get that sort of project into a plastic DIP package, it will always have to be in a fully hermetic package, simply because you need to protect the inside carbon from oxygen, and also because to collect the electrons you will need a fairly high grade vacuum as well, plus somewhere to store the generated alpha particles (helium gas) before they rise up to the pressure that will inhibit the cell operation.  So minimum will be a laser welded glass seal full size 14 or 16 pin DIP package with thin wall stainless steel top and bottom, with a small glass plate inside with the active material sputtered on it, and connected to the one power pin, with the other pins all shorted together and bonded to top and bottom covers as collector.  Laser welded in a ultra high vacuum chamber so that the inner cell is as close to empty as possible of any trace of gas, and likely also baked at 600C there for a few hours as well to get rid of any adsorbed gas in the inner parts. 

Vacuum chamber, laser, laser aiming devices, airlock to allow parts in and out are all likely to be custom made, and production rate will be low, based on a good long number of hours per cycle per expensive jig. Only things off the shelf will be the laser itself, and the turbomolecular pumps to pull the chamber down, though the airlocks will be similar to existing SEM sample entry ports, and your window allowing the laser in would probably be an optically pure diamond window.

To scale up just put more surface area of active material, and a bigger enclosure, but there you run into limits before you have to class it as radioactive, which is why smoke detectors, while actually containing radioactive material, are not classed as hazardous radioactive waste.

A rough and ready way to DIY ( if you have a glass forming ability and can achieve neon tube levels of evacuation at home) is to use the ready made smoke detector active emitters in a vacuum tube, wonder if there are any DIY videos of this out there.

[Fungus]

Well lets speculate a little Dave style, suppose that the're able to stuff lets say 100 of that DIP chip structures into a single modern package ? Suddenly a 10mW battery emerges, possible? Most likely.

We can revolutionize the world of TV remote controls for only a couple of thousand $$$ each and a remote control the size of a shoe box...?

 

[Labrat101]

Question to ponder:
Let's say this can magically scale to an EV sized battery. The radiation never stops producing energy, energy unless consumed in some other way will be given off as heat. Where does the waste heat go?
Useful on spacecaft, you can heat your electronics with it. In an EV, not so much...

My opinion on this it might have a low radiation leakage . If you remember way back they banned the old luminous watches as they gave off radiation .
As they could be a health hazard .
The Governments has Millions of tons of Nuke wast . and would cost $
$ millions to dump.   
By putting a few ug of waste into trillions of batteries /TV remote's etc.etc
and sell them to us i.e. the dumb public . they solve their problem & make money
as well in the deal .. and when people start taking them a Part to see how they
work .. ( No names mentioned Dave ) And become ill from some weird poisoning
They win again Medical services etc . And the EKG they but us on does it also have these leaking Radiation cells ??
If my old luminous watch made a Geiger counter tick what do a dozen of these do!!   
 And the waste heat is this infrared?? or some thing else heat radiation can
emanate as other unknowns  maybe harmful or not we are taking their word
 for this 

 
  RNS

[Lord of nothing]

The Governments has Millions of tons of Nuke wast .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=deadly+dust

[tggzzz]

Here's the competing technology, as noted in EDN...

[Labrat101]

Just love the phrase .
When the card senses a Power failure, EXPLOSIVE Bolts eject Moderator and control rods from the reactor's interior
within 20 us ..
This has a full rating of 20KW  That would power a few houses .
The BS battery is only 20uw   

  This would be worth having . A nuke in the cellar 
 & The 200ft extension cord bit short ... I would op for a 2000 mtr   
  + you can use 12 MS dos disk as a blast shield..
  & only $2.3 million   ... is that on  "Ali_achbar_explosive . com"

Cool find