Thin, Flexible Printable Battery For Smartcards

cornflux writes "This would be a nice way to power a really smart smartcard: Power Paper, Ltd. has created an alkaline-like energy cell that is (among other things) thin, flexible, and "green." Furthermore, it is printable via a silk-screening process onto paper, plastic, and other flexible materials. ABCNEWS.com has the story."

Comments

Horrific Uses

[Alien54]

As noted on other sites, the battery is about half a millimeter thick, and is good enough for all kinds of uses.

The horror story in my head is that these things get cheap enough to be used to power animated and interactive displays on the boxes you see from products in department stores, etc.

I have visions of products shouting out to you to "buy me" as you walk down the product aisles. The real world equivalent of banner ads and popup displays.

Re:Power/weight ratio

[ho11yw00d]

If this technology is superior, it won't take long before the material is rolled into a cylinder, much like the dielectric sandwich in capacitors, and inserted into tubes to match standard cell formats.

However, I agree that it is more probable that we will never see the power/weight ratio approach existing technologies. What we really need is specifications on thickness and durability, which will be more relevant to the applications that may require this cell.

"Smart" Luggage Tags?

[cosyne]

Power Paper even envisions that its flexible battery designs can be used to help secure airports and passengers. Luggage tags and airline tickets could be printed with tiny radio antennas and circuitry -- powered by the company's battery -- to contain passenger data.

Great. Please make sure you seatbacks and traytables are in their full upright and locked positions, all you carryon items have been safely stowed in an overhead bin or under the seat in front of you, and all cellular phones, portable electronics, and luggage tags have been turned off prior to departure.

Not to mention it's a stupid idea anyway. The tages the airlines put on your bag already have barcodes- if getting them to point in the right direction for the laser scanner is just too difficult, they can easily use RFID (who says they don't already?). There's no reason to have the tag carry a battery unless it's going to display and update information in realtime.

Re:The government doesn't pick its battles well

[mgv]

Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?

Actually, you don't need to fake them. None of those involved in the sept 11 bombings would have had any trouble getting a real id card - they were all in the country legally. And that isn't likely to stop. Unless you get a fortress America and stop all those foreigners from visiting under tourist visas. Then they would have to choose to emigrate to the US to get a green card, and surely they don't plan that far ahead now? :(

Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?

Actually, there are much better reasons to get rid of guns, or at least lock them down a little more, but none of them have anything to do with terrorism. Mostly to do with the high likelyhood of shooting people you know in a fit of anger.

Every first world democracy has criminals with guns and police with guns - sometimes it can be hard to tell the two apart. But only the US has the huge rate of personal injury from the guns, mostly used in defence or anger on people known to the person who uses them.

I'm not trying to do flamebait here, I'd agree with you totally about banning guns to reduce terrorism being a stupid idea.

Michael