Archive of stories published by the unfortunate tetrahedron

Redox without Redox

Recently Braga et. al. published Alternative Strategy for a Safe Rechargeable Battery in Energy and Environmental Science. This is a subtle title for a work, if reproducible and truly invoking the mechanism described in the article, will have a lasting impact on the battery community. As…


On Leaving Batteries Plugged In: Lifetime

An astute reader asked me to clarify this for safety, which you can find here. This piece focuses on lifetime. Remember: a badly designed or defective battery should never be used at all. This piece assumes that your cell phone is not the 1 in 1,000,000


The Cathodes of the Powerwall(s)

I believe in dogfooding; I am using my musings on the Unfortunate Tetrahedron as a primer for my own students and students-to-be. This was a perfect reason to trick my current team into copy editing. It also brought out a great question: let’s see the tetrahedron applied.


On Running Things From Ambient Heat

Professor Goodenough recently provided an update to his “Braga” battery in this this brief interview with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. About halfway through he states:

Goodenough: We’ve found a lot of things you can do with the Braga glass…

On Leaving Batteries Plugged In: Safety

So for lifetime, I’ve made my point. Everything in that piece assumes that the BMS and battery are well designed and well matched.

An astute reader writes in wanting to make sure I clarify that this issue around safety for this. This…


On Inventory

In the beginning of the recorded history of batteries, there was no formal distinction between rechargeable, or secondary, cells and…

These were the top 10 stories published by the unfortunate tetrahedron; you can also dive into yearly archives: 2015, 2016, and 2017.