Design for Entropy

 Time for a short anecdote -

An aunt of mine recently visited me. She had a beautiful EV, while we were seeing her off, her car just wouldn't start, she had to wait for 20 mins for an authorized executive to guide her into resetting the whole software because it had some issue. This made me think that if this was an old school gas car, she would not have needed a software to start her car, maybe she would have opened the hood or checked for coolant or engine oil, but it wouldn't freeze the whole car.

A black box technology running completely on a fancy software sounds great for a pitch deck or a VC, but everyone asks a question before buying a product, if this stops working, what do I do ?

For gas cars, the customers have a very established manual, not so much for EVs. Maybe that's why gas cars are still being bought, not because people love gas, but because they understand it, they can repair it, maintain it and it runs forever, even if its mileage degrades very badly. 

But this blog is not about cars, its about batteries, the same black box batteries (LFPs) that are increasingly being used to power the grid, and that can't be good for long term usage, LFP. Why ? Well- 

  1. All static batteries degrade, Lithium, Sodium , Lead acid, nickel cadmium, whatever else you can think.
  2. You don't know why they degrade.
  3. Even if you do, you can't really control it, you can try and fight or prevent it, but these batteries will degrade.

All the static batteries we know are sealed tight, and for good reason, their purpose is to punch in as much energy as possible in as little space as possible. (Don't try to open them, they WILL catch fire !!)

But when you are designing the battery that will be the power plant of the future, you have to stop optimizing for space and start thinking about how well you can maintain the battery for as long as possible (preferable 20+ years). And that is exactly where flow batteries WIN. Because flow batteries are like gas cars, reliable mechanical systems which can be easily repaired.


If a pump degrades, replace the pumps, if a pipe leaks, change the pipes, if a bipolar plate breaks, open a bunch of screws, replace it with an identical one. If worse comes to worst and the acid evaporates from the electrolyte and your metals precipitate out, just add a bunch of acid and your battery will be as good as new. Even if you have Hydrogen problems (like me) and are losing protons, add acid or hydrogen in the solution and you will be good to go.

I call this "Design for Entropy", because entropy (or in layman language- depreciation, soiling, degradation, breakage) is the only fixed variable in heavy industry, now it's up to you whether you design to fight it for 15 years and fail or to make such a product that works for more than 25 years despite it.


None of this is AI generated, so feel free to fact check me and looking forward to your views and help. 


Mayank Jately

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