Don Sadoway liquid metal battery / Ambri

Two distinct uses: (§2.p9) Bill Gates funding Don Sadoway's startup as a teaching/externality story; (§8.p8) the technical constraint that very few elements give the >1 V cell voltage Ambri's design requires, because IR losses in copper interconnects eat shallow cell potentials. ## Figures referenced (recurring numeric anchors, not cases) - Steel labor content: 50% in Tom's early career → 5% today (§1.p7). - 1980s steel industry productivity growth: 4% per year; manufacturing 2%; services 0% (§1.p8). - 1980s mining productivity growth: 7% per year; compounded over 20 years = 20× improvement (§1.p9). - Material cost as fraction of total product cost: ~10% (§9.p1) — restated from prior lecture. - DOE magnesium-in-automobiles research spend: ~$100 million per year for forty or fifty years (§5.p1). - Commercial jetliner lifetime: ~100,000 flight hours (§7.p2). - H₂O electrochemical breakdown: ~1.1 V (§8.p3). - Al₂O₃ / MgO decomposition: <2 V, probably <1.5 V (§8.p4). - Primary bond energy: 1–3 eV (§8.p5, §11.p9). - Energy/wavelength relation: E (eV) = 12,400 / λ (Å) = 1.24 / λ (μm) (§11.p10). - UV cutoff: <0.310 μm → ~4 eV (§11.p11). - Atmospheric CO₂: ~300 ppm; zinc carbonate formation timescale: ~1 year (§9.p9). - Magnesium anode purity spec: <7 ppm nickel (§4.p9). ## Open questions for case index methodology - The PEX cluster in the canon is named for the brass-fitting failure mode, but Tom's treatment here is purely the manufacturing-technology / cross-linking-science angle. Whether to split into two clusters or keep one cluster with multiple framing facets is a methodology decision. - The magnesium-anode case is large enough (ten paragraphs in this lecture, the spine of the corrosion thread) that it should probably be a canonical cluster rather than the proposed status here. Recommend promotion at reconciliation.

Not everyone's a Don Sadoway, but Don Sadoway can lecture better than anybody else in this department. He has a natural gift. Bill Gates told the board of directors of Microsoft that they should watch Don Sadoway's lectures on chemistry. Why is he doing that? I don't know. He likes lectures on chemistry. And he's now funding Don Sadoway's startup company. These interesting externalities.