KBattery

A small, honest, open-source experiment in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) battery chemistry that uses intact diatom frustules — the natural silica shells of microscopic algae — as the host structure for the sulfur cathode.

This repo is the public, open-source version of a project I had originally written up as a provisional patent. I have decided I would rather put it in front of people who actually know what they are doing than sit on it. If even one piece of this is useful to someone, I am happy.

I am not a chemist. I am not a battery engineer. I am a 23-year-old machinist from Wichita, Kansas, who has been pulling on this thread in his spare time. Everything here should be treated as a hypothesis, not a result.

Plain English — what is this, really?

Imagine you want to build a tiny container that can hold a lump of sulfur. The sulfur is going to swell up and shrink down every time you charge and discharge the battery. If your container is a random pile of broken glass, that swelling will pry it apart over time, and the battery will die.

Diatoms are microscopic algae that build themselves little glass houses. Those houses (called frustules) are not random shapes — they are precise, repeating, symmetric patterns full of tiny evenly-spaced holes. They look like microscopic honeycombs, domes, and arches. Architects use those same shapes in buildings because they spread load evenly instead of concentrating it in one place.

The idea behind KBattery is simple:

If you put the sulfur inside an intact diatom shell instead of crushed glass, the swelling stress gets spread out evenly, the container does not crack, and the battery lasts longer.

There is a second idea on top of that:

Coat the inside of the shell with a thin layer of titanium dioxide (TiO₂). TiO₂ chemically grabs onto the "leaky" intermediate forms of sulfur (called polysulfides) so they do not wander off and destroy the rest of the battery.

That is the whole project, in plain English. Two ideas. Stress distribution and polysulfide trapping. The rest of this repo is just me trying to back those ideas up with math, prior literature, and simulations.

What this is not

• This is not a working battery. I have not built one. I have not tested one.
• This is not peer-reviewed science. The simulations are educational illustrations of the underlying physics, calibrated to numbers from published papers. They are not experimental data.
• This is not a patent claim. I am explicitly publishing this material so it becomes prior art and stays in the open.
• This is not novel in the sense that "nobody has thought of using diatoms for batteries before." Crushed diatomite has been used. Carbon-based sulfur hosts have been used. The specific combination I am asking about — intact, cultivated frustules + TiO₂ coating, framed as a mechanical stress-distribution architecture — is what I have been unable to find in the literature. If you find it, please open an issue and link it. That is genuinely the help I am looking for.

What is in this repo

KBattery/
├── README.md                       <- this file
├── LICENSE                         <- Apache 2.0
├── docs/
│   ├── DEFENSIVE_PUBLICATION.md    <- the original patent-style writeup, now public
│   └── PLAIN_ENGLISH.md            <- a longer "explain it like I'm 12" version
└── simulations/
    ├── advanced_sim.py             <- four physics-inspired figure generators
    └── requirements.txt

Running the simulations

git clone https://github.com/KhaiB10/KBattery.git
cd KBattery
python -m pip install -r simulations/requirements.txt
python simulations/advanced_sim.py

Figures land in simulations/figures/. Each figure is annotated. None of them are measurements. All of them are toy models.

What I am asking for

I am posting this publicly because nothing is ever going to be "mine" — every interesting idea is built on a thousand other people's work. What I can do is be one of the first to put this specific framing in the open, so that anyone who has a real lab, real instruments, and real expertise can pick it up if it is worth picking up.

If you are a battery researcher, a chemistry student, a hobbyist, or just someone who likes weird ideas, here is what would help:

• Tell me what is wrong with the assumptions in the simulations.
• Point me at prior art I missed — especially if the "intact frustule + TiO₂" combination has been done.
• If you have access to a wet lab, try cultivating Coscinodiscus and see if the frustules actually behave the way I am guessing they do.
• Suggest cheaper / simpler / smarter ways to test the core hypothesis.

Open an issue. Be blunt. I would rather hear "this is wrong because X" than nothing.

License

Apache License 2.0. Use it, fork it, build on it, ship it. If something here ends up in a real product, all I ask is a mention somewhere in the credits, and that the chain of open-source attribution stays intact.

A note on motivation

I will be honest. Part of why I am posting this is that I would love for someone to look at it and think it is worth a real conversation. If that person happens to work at X, Tesla Energy, an aerospace lab, or anywhere that takes wild long-shot ideas seriously, that would be a dream. But that is not why this is open source. It is open source because I would rather see a real version of this exist than own a paper version of it that never goes anywhere.

— Khai Bustos, Wichita, Kansas