[HN Gopher] NanoTritium 20-Year Betavoltaic Battery
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NanoTritium 20-Year Betavoltaic Battery
Author : peter_d_sherman
Score : 77 points
Date : 2020-02-05 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (citylabs.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (citylabs.net)
| bigiain wrote:
| This seems infinitely more plausible that this, which was doing
| the rounds last week:
|
| https://ndb.technology/
|
| "Releasing 3600 _whole_ electrons! Or even 14400!!!"
|
| (That's about a billionth of a 1 pico farad capacitor
| discharging. I suspect you need some reasonably exotic laboratory
| equipment to even detect 14400 electrons...)
| zackbloom wrote:
| God that website is terrible. It is so incredibly redundant
| about the value of infinite power, as if anyone would need an
| explanation as to why infinite energy would be useful, but
| gives so little detail or explanation about what the device
| actually is.
| agumonkey wrote:
| There are quite a few videos on youtube (nerdrage ? forgot) where
| people use light radioactive material to energize photovoltaic
| cells.
| tiku wrote:
| Tritium vials with a solar panel
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Poor man's RTG. Love it.
| smoyer wrote:
| I think these are awesome ... I've got an application for a very
| low duty-cycle device (operates for seconds each hour) and,
| paired with a suitable capacitor (or super-capacitor), I can
| completely pot the entire system in epoxy, mount that in foam in
| a tennis ball and still have about a decade long service life!
|
| EDIT: No, it's not a dog toy
| cwkoss wrote:
| If it's inside a tennis ball, it only stays not a dog toy as
| long as you keep it away from the dog.
| zentiggr wrote:
| And given my dog, it'd stay a dog toy for a very short half
| life after me got to it.
|
| Nothing less than Kong toys in his world, everything else is
| a snack.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Caps leak a lot. Take it into account. I would probably use
| something like a very simple buck boost dc to dc converter to
| constantly charge a battery to provide buffer that will be
| enough to accommodate spikes.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Are these actually being sold now? I first saw these advertised
| by citylabs years ago with vague wording on availability and
| maybe-pricing in the $3k range.
| arcticbull wrote:
| My understanding is there have been betavoltaic cells for a
| long time, and with improvements in semiconductor manufacturing
| technology, they've been able to move towards less radioactive
| materials such as the tritium used by citylabs. These things
| exist, but of course, tritium is not cheap.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Strontium 90 seems like a good candidate. It and what it
| decomposes into are both pure beta emitters. Beryllium 10
| also looks good, though very low power.
|
| Someone recently used nickel 63 too.
| Trias11 wrote:
| ... medical implants...
|
| Powered by radioactive battery?
| H8crilA wrote:
| Tried as early as in the 60s with pacemakers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_cardiac_pacemaker#L...
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Not unprecedented!
| https://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/Miscellaneous/pacemaker....
| cperciva wrote:
| Sure. Tritium releases very low energy beta particles; even a
| thin casing will render this safe.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I could swear that, as a kid near Chicago in the early 1980s,
| I had a tritium-backlit Timex or Casio digital watch.
|
| That said, I can't find it online...and gave it away decades
| ago.
| gpm wrote:
| I'm not an electronics person, but as I understand it this amount
| of energy is typically harvestable from ambient rf in populated
| areas.
|
| See the first few paragraphs of this paper for a bunch of
| references:
| https://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/nprivault/papers/ambient_harvest...
| csours wrote:
| What kind of battery/capacitor could you make with
| lithography/chip making techniques? Genuine question. I know
| there was an announcement about this recently. I know it would be
| far more expensive than the roll of tape that current lithium
| batteries use, but I have to imagine that Apple is working on
| this for the iPhone/etc
| Reelin wrote:
| Is this the recent announcement you were thinking of?
| https://xnrgi.com
| csours wrote:
| Maybe. I thought I saw something from IEEE; it may have been
| this company.
|
| edit: Looks like yes: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-
| smarter-grid/the-return...
| ISL wrote:
| Pricing?
| ortusdux wrote:
| I keep hearing conflicting information on the legality of
| importing tritium into the US. Is it controlled? Is it legal to
| import?
| [deleted]
| akeck wrote:
| IANAL, but I think tritium distributers must be specially
| licensed by the NRC in the US.
| post_break wrote:
| I have tritium keychains from china. Probably not legal but
| aliexpress or wish. For the gun sights trijicon is the only
| game in town to get tritium installed.
| gliese1337 wrote:
| What is the point of a 40-pin connector when the spec sheet only
| indicates that two of them are used (exactly as one would expect
| for a battery)?
| newnewpdro wrote:
| Presumably the battery+shielding sets minimum volumetric
| requirements, and those form factors meet them while providing
| easy and robust circuit integration using existing standards.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Mounting? You solder all 40 pins to hold the device onto the
| board even if you only need 2 pins. Presumably the pins are
| repeated across all sides so you can pick any pin that makes
| routing more convenient.
| jetrink wrote:
| Two reasons: it's a standard form-factor, which makes it easier
| to work with and the additional pins hold it securely to the
| board.
| [deleted]
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| I just want a sealed, finned RTG I can drop in the deep end of my
| pool and forget about.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Doable with Americium. Start hoarding old fire detectors.
| jacob019 wrote:
| So 1000 of these and I can power a 1W LED. But after 20 years it
| will only be 0.3W. This is comparable to RF power harvesting.
| What are the use cases for such minuscule amounts of power?
| Remote sensors?
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Pacemakers and remote senors are some of the big ones I know
| of. Though I don't know if modern pacemakers use them still.
| bigiain wrote:
| So who's gonna be the first to order, like, 400 of the 100 micro
| watt ones, to power a RaspberryPi web server for 30 years? (Which
| will, of course, have trashed it's flash memory by Xmas...)
| varjag wrote:
| if by 400 you mean 40000
| bigiain wrote:
| Ahh yeah. _Almost_ within an order of magnitude... (Good
| enough for government work, right?)
| rtkwe wrote:
| So what are some actual uses for these at such low power?
| gaze wrote:
| If these are going on IoT/Sensor network devices, doesn't this
| add to the e-waste issue? A lot of these sensor devices are never
| recovered. Now we have radioactive e-waste.
| exabrial wrote:
| I mean I wouldn't eat bananas and would never fly commercial
| airlines if you're concerned about that.
| egdod wrote:
| As long as the chip is in one piece, it shouldn't be an issue.
| And if the chip gets smashed open... tritium is hydrogen. It'll
| just float away and dissipate.
| ryder9 wrote:
| You should do more research on Tritium, it isn't the same as
| waste from a nuclear fission reactor
| ISL wrote:
| It adds to the e-waste issue if the device is ground up or
| burnt.
|
| Some, but not all, of the properties of tritium are somewhat
| friendly. The half-life is comparatively short at 12.5 years,
| so it isn't left for future generations. It is a beta-emitter,
| so shielding is straightforward. The daughter, helium-3, is
| quite benign. It can be readily encapsulated (see tritiated key
| fobs).
|
| If it does get loose from encapsulation, it goes everywhere
| that hydrogen goes, which is largely everywhere. On the plus-
| side, gaseous tritium mixes and dilutes quickly in the
| atmosphere. The key is not to ingest concentrated quantities of
| it. The decay energy is very low, which makes assaying for
| tritium contamination quite challenging.
|
| If you're looking for e-waste of radiological concern,
| americium smoke detectors might matter more. I'm not sure.
| p1mrx wrote:
| For context: 50 microwatts * 20 years = 9 watt-hours, comparable
| to an 18650 cell.
| slumdev wrote:
| I mean this question at face value because I don't want to be
| _that guy_ -- what are the applications?
|
| This seems like a very small amount of power with very specific
| and unusual benefits over other power sources.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| One use is in military/aviation radios to keep encryption keys
| in sram. The power can be disconnected and the key wiped in the
| event of a crash or impending enemy capture. If the key was in
| flash it might be recovered.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Lots of IOT stuff has low power requirements and VERY low duty
| cycles. You may not be able to do a lot with a continuous
| 50mA*, but if you have a sensor that sleeps for an hour, takes
| a reading, reports it (over BTLE or wifi or even an epaper
| screen), and then goes back to sleep, this chip would allegedly
| be enough to keep your device running continuously for decades.
|
| * I think some of the lower power BTLE chips can actually
| advertise continuously for less than 50mA on average
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Surveillance
| itsthecourier wrote:
| any idea of how expensive they are?
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(page generated 2020-02-05 23:00 UTC)