Tech startup: I really do make mobile phones!

Chapter 30 Buying the Box and Returning the Pearl…

The sycamore leaves outside the window filtered through the dappled sunlight of a summer afternoon, casting shimmering golden shadows on the desk.

Instead of sitting in the sun at his desk, Professor Jiang sat down on the patina-covered mahogany chair next to it, filled a kettle with water, and placed it on the electric ceramic stove, where it emitted a soft hum.

He deliberately slowed his movements, opened the lid of the purple clay teapot, took a tea scoop from the antique shelf next to him, pinched a pinch of aged Pu'er tea and put it into the teapot, but his peripheral vision kept glancing at the express delivery bag.

"So hasty, this kid's probably not having an easy time lately!" He muttered to himself as he looked at the teapot filled with tea leaves, the lid striking the body of the pot with a clear sound.

While the water was boiling, Professor Jiang finally lost his patience, grabbed the package paper bag and tore it open, his heart pounding with anxiety.

This morning, when he spoke on the phone with the BTD technical director, he boasted about the "breakthrough progress in solid-state batteries."

If we can't find anything in this information, how will we handle the situation later?
Professor Jiang smiled wryly, then took the documents out of the package.

His fingertips first touched the rough texture of the paper—not the kind of laser printing paper commonly used in laboratories, but more like cheap A4 paper from a street print shop.

He weighed it in his hand; it was at least half an inch thick, and the heavy, oppressive feeling made him breathe a slight sigh of relief.

"At least they didn't just throw in two pieces of scrap paper to fool people!" He chuckled self-deprecatingly, flipping the cover with his thumb: "A New Type of Gaseous Lithium-ion Battery Production Process" suddenly caught his eye.

The ink stains shimmered with an uneven pale blue hue in the sunlight, clearly indicating that the printer cartridge was almost out of ink.

The purple clay teapot shook violently in his palm, and a few drops of boiling water from the kettle next to him splashed out, scalding Professor Jiang's fingers. He quickly pressed down on his trembling little finger with his left hand.

This was caused by an accident during an experiment in my early years; whenever I get excited, the little finger of my right hand trembles uncontrollably.

Professor Jiang hurriedly put down the purple clay teapot, got up, found his reading glasses on his desk, slid them to his nose, and squinted, afraid that he was seeing things and had misread the title.

Gaseous state?
Lithium-ion?
Battery???

Professor Jiang is supposed to be an expert in the field of batteries, and he should be able to understand each word individually.

But putting them together is like someone trying to compress flames directly into liquid to create a lighter.

This sounds absurd and bizarre, but upon closer inspection, it seems to contain some kind of subversive possibility.

The kettle on the electric ceramic stove emitted a sharp hissing sound, but Professor Jiang ignored it, constantly flipping through the materials sent by Xu Mingyuan. His gaze wandered over keywords such as "gaseous electrolyte" and "supercritical fluid," and he became more and more alarmed as he read.

If you're one step ahead, people will think you're crazy; if you're half a step ahead, people will think you're a genius.

The gaseous lithium battery provided to Chen Mo by the system was just one step ahead of the average researcher. If they took a normal look at it, they would think it was all hype and nonsense.

However, Professor Jiang, who has been immersed in the field of batteries for many years, believes that gaseous lithium-ion batteries may not be impossible.

Professor Jiang suddenly recalled a little-known paper he had read in the journal Science twenty years ago.

A certain brilliant scholar proposed the "conduction properties of ionic matter in a supercritical environment," but it was shelved by the academic community because it could not be verified.

That's how science and technology develop. A theory may have been proposed a long time ago, but it may take several years or even decades to verify and apply it.

The documents that Xu Mingyuan sent by express mail at this moment were like a rusty key suddenly being inserted into the lock deep in his memory.

Those formulas that were almost forgotten and the hypotheses that were rejected have gradually pieced together a blurry outline in my mind.

"Liquid electrolytes can be used as separators, and gaseous ions can be used as conductive media," he muttered to himself, his fingers unconsciously tracing the structure of the gaseous lithium-ion battery in his imagination on the table.

Professor Jiang continued to turn the pages with his trembling right hand, which was also trembling along with his little finger, wanting to see if the structure of this gaseous lithium-ion battery was as he had imagined.

"Um???"

He was dumbfounded, not only because the structure of the gaseous lithium-ion battery was beyond Professor Jiang's expectations.

Furthermore, he didn't understand why, given that they had top-tier solid-state nitride battery cathode materials, they would insist on using such a complex process to create an ionic gaseous battery.

It's like you need to cool off, and you have an ice pop but instead of eating it directly, you heat it up, melt it, remove the sugar and flavoring, and then put it in a spray bottle to spray on your face. Isn't that just taking off your pants to fart?

"What is Mingyuan thinking? Why use lithium nitride polymers as an intermediate conversion material for gaseous lithium-ion batteries? Wouldn't it be better to use them directly for solid-state batteries?"

Well! What Professor Jiang didn't know was that this information about gaseous lithium batteries didn't belong to Xu Mingyuan; it was a practical technical solution extracted and integrated from discarded cases by Chen Mo's high-tech mobile phone R&D system.

Although lithium nitride polymers are indeed an excellent material for solid-state battery cathodes, there is no processing technology, no structural layout, and no packaging technology available.

It's like giving someone an ice pop without any packaging or stick; can you hold it in your hand without getting hurt?

Even if you have the materials, it's useless without structural design and application technology.

The best solution for cooling down, as ultimately achieved through system integration, is to transform the unpackaged popsicles into a "spraying water bottle" to provide relief from the heat, based on existing technology.

Although the structure of this gaseous lithium-ion battery is somewhat strange, to the point that even battery experts like Professor Jiang feel it's absurd like buying the box and returning the pearl.

You've almost reached the pinnacle of solid-state batteries, but then you see an unfamiliar mountain next door, so you go back down to climb that mountain that nobody has ever seen before.

Why not climb to the top first, and then climb another unfamiliar mountain?

What surprised Professor Jiang was that, regardless of how complicated and arduous the production process of gaseous batteries is, they actually developed the complete industrialization process.

Professor Jiang's hands kept turning over the battery data.

"What is this boron-based polymer? A catalyst!" The more Professor Jiang looked at it, the more he felt that Xu Mingyuan had gone astray: "Something that can maintain the vaporization of nitrided lithium metal polymers in a continuous ionic state, and you're only using it as a catalyst!"

If this were applied to the electrode protection layer of molten salt energy storage power stations, it could increase the energy density of traditional liquid metal batteries by more than three times!

That's right! Ordinary people might think of commercial applications like lithium batteries, but Professor Jiang is a researcher with a broader perspective.

It is understood that this substance, which allows lithium metal polymers to maintain vaporization in a continuous ionic state, is of greater use in the country's new energy storage strategy.

The current cost of a large energy storage station in China is approximately 1.2 million yuan, of which battery costs account for about 67%.

If boron-based polymers, which can increase the energy density of traditional liquid metal batteries by more than three times, are used, each large energy storage station can save at least 40 million yuan in costs.

On a grander scale, this is a great thing that benefits the country and its people!

On the contrary, gaseous lithium batteries, a small product in a vertical field, are like using the world's most advanced high-precision five-axis CNC lathe to build an exquisite carriage.

(End of this chapter)