BEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS — Today’s world is run on batteries, and keeping batteries going is a major technical challenge. For decades battery improvements have been ‘recipe’ driven, searching for exotic compounds to improve capacity and lifetime. Now, Fractal Antenna Systems (FRACTAL) reports a new approach with invention of batteries that have greater performance through geometry, using fractals and self-complementarity.
Fractals are self-similar patterns that have the same simple structure built up on many scales. Self-complementarity is a technique where a structure is defined by its own outer mask—with the same structure. These geometric methods, in math, science, and art, have long been enjoyed in popular culture through the artist M.C. Escher, and the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.
Inventor and FRACTAL CEO Nathan Cohen describes the battery benefits simply: “Fractals make the electrodes smaller and batteries higher capacity, and self-complementarity curtails the fingering that creeps through the electrolyte and destroys the battery.” The new invention has been awarded patent 9,647,271 and discloses electrodes for electrochemical batteries with self-complementary and fractal geometries.
Cohen is the world’s top expert on engineering applications of fractals, and is the source inventor on fractal antennas and components, fractal metamaterials, fractal plasmonic surfaces and radiative near-field transfer, fractal heat exchange, fractal energy […]
This press release is more speculation than news. An antenna company has theorized that antenna design may work in energy technology, and received a patent. More specifically, they have theorized that incorporating fractal design into a battery may allow the cell to produce LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reaction), AKA cold fusion. The company’s goal appears to be using cold fusion to extend battery’s charge life.
This sounds like a fascinating theory until you imagine practical application; at that point it falls apart. For example, the manufacturing facility, retail outlet, and any container vessel, train, or truck carrying the product will have thousands of cold fusion cells packed tightly together in one place. These all then sound remarkably like potential targets and don’t strike me as particularly safe. A beautiful Tesla Model S contains not one but thousands of batteries; the range might be extended with cold fusion cells but driving would then become an experience similar to Dr. Strangelove “riding the bomb.” For the rest of us, we’ve heard reports for years of a link between the use of mobile devices and cancers. Imagine the additional risks if the batteries in those devices, right next to your ear or in your lap, were conducting Low Energy Nuclear Fusion? Perhaps it’s best not to go there.
I appreciate the scientific curiosity that drives this type of inquiry, but the path forward is to decrease our energy usage, not to find ways to temporarily extend our unsustainable habits.