The Lithium-Ion Battery: The Machine in Your Pocket That Stores Lightning (MACHINES THAT RUN THE WORLD) (en Inglés)
Reseña del libro "The Lithium-Ion Battery: The Machine in Your Pocket That Stores Lightning (MACHINES THAT RUN THE WORLD) (en Inglés)"
How much lightning does the battery in your pocket really hold? Between one seven-thousandth and one seventy-thousandth of a single bolt, depending on whose estimate you trust. What the battery can do, and lightning cannot, is wait. This book opens up the lithium-ion cell: how it stores energy, why it got so cheap, and why a battery that behaves for years can sometimes burn. The story runs from an oil company's laboratory in the 1970s to your nightstand, the street, and the power grid. Inside, you'll find: A battery born in an oil crisis. Stanley Whittingham built the first rechargeable lithium battery at Exxon; Akira Yoshino's team tested a safer one by dropping iron weights on it. A wall thinner than a hair. The separator, 12 to 20 micrometers of plastic, is all that keeps the two electrodes apart. From $1,474 to $108. Average pack prices per kilowatt-hour in 2010 and 2025, in 2025 dollars, and why each doubling of production cut them by about 18 percent. Two batteries, two flaws. Why the Galaxy Note 7 recall cost at least $5.3 billion, and why the replacement phones burned for a different reason. The ground beneath the battery. Lithium from the salt flats of Chile and Argentina; cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, about 70 percent of world supply by Reuters' count, three-quarters by Bloomberg's. It is for anyone who has wondered what happens inside the phone they charge every night. It assumes no chemistry and comes with more than 200 diagrams, charts, maps and illustrations. Tonight, while you sleep, it will fill again, one ion at a time.