The new Five Year Plan!

Because inventing a whole new battery technology that has five times the performance at one-fifth the cost is a simple matter of throwing money at it.

And, while we're at it, why is anyone still building rockets?  Why isn't NASA funding a crash program to develop the Bergenholm generator?

Whattya mean, "because there's no reason to believe it's physically possible"?  What kind of excuse is that?

Improve, presumably, energy density by a factor of five.  Let's see... I don't have the number at my fingertips these days, but for a primary cell there's not much room for improvement on yer basic lithium coin cell.  I recall doing the math on that one 'bout twenty year back, when working on a project to develop a small electronic gadget that would operate for a decade without anyone having to be aware that it had a battery (and using 1993 technology).  Once we ruled out hydrazine-air fuel cells and RTGs, it looked like we were stuck with lithium as a safe-ish, self-contained energy store.

Assuming that the intended new battery tech uses chemical energy storage, just how dense can that get, anyway?  Another fun calculation, regarding single-use chemical energy storage devices:

AA alkaline cell, around 3AH * 1.5V * 3600 sec/hr = 16.2kJ.

.223 cartridge, 0.5 * 0.00356kg * (990 m/s)^2 = 1.74kJ.

Hey, look!  Those checkout-line batteries have better energy density than smokeless gunpowder!*

So what sort of chemicals are the new batteries to use?

Or will they use some other method of storing energy?  Warp the space-time continuum?  Spin up tiny black holes?  Force nuclear reactions to run uphill?

Is there any reason to believe any of this is possible?

Or is this just a new way of scamming funding, and anyone who questions it will be declared "anti-science" and "anti-environment"?

*Yes, this does mean that electrically-powered sidearms aren't obviously implausible; there's just the small matter of getting the energy out of the battery and into the projectile fast.

Comments

[Jose C Silva]

I think your point is valid, but the computations are off: 990m/s is the muzzle velocity; the propellant in the shell contains more energy than the muzzle kinetic energy, since the bullet loses some (a significant portion, I’d bet) in the rifling. You'd need to add the rotational energy of the bullet and the thermal change in the barrel and the surrounding air. :-)

But to your main point, in these new times apparently the laws of man can trump the laws of physics, so if a government mandates 250MPG average fleet consumption by 2020, it. shall. be. done.

Cheers,
JCS

[Eric Wilner]

Regarding muzzle energy vs. total latent energy of the propellant: that's true, but the figures I used for the alkaline cell are also, roughly speaking, useful output (at a gentle discharge rate, not integrating E*I over the life of the cell as E gradually declines, at other possibly optimistic assumptions).