Why Batteries Haven't Kept Up

TimWeigel writes "Ever wonder why we can cram ever more computer power into smaller and smaller devices, but we're still (mostly) slaves to the almighty AA? This article on CNN touches on this very important facet of our lives - why the power sources for our Palm Pilots and Gameboys haven't matched the advances in computing power. In a word: physics." I had an interesting conversation with a person who's been doing a lot of research into batteries. Batteries have grown at standard normal industrial rates - which are much slower then Moore's Law, and hence, the source of our problem.

Comments

more power than a tactical nuke

[beckett]

perhaps it's good that efforts have been made to design around energy limitations. while i'm all for better power supplies, designing circuits that use as little power as possible to do a given task means that less is wasted. just look at the amount of excess processing power we have in our computers and how much unnecessary code there is in a standard application.

engineering around power limitations means smart, efficent designs, not wasteful products that just suck up energy. i think these limitations helped designers innovate.

Re:more power than a tactical nuke

[HMC CS Major]

Restricting the software industry this way kills the hardware industry .....

Chip makers (intel/amd/etc) and hardware vendors expect software producers to write expensive code, that only the newest processors have a chance of running. Thats how they push the newer boxes out the door.

Standardisation

[Sircus]

What's most interesting to me is not the lack of progress in battery technology - it's not Moore's law, but with NiCad, NiMH, LiIon and so forth, there's clearly progress. What interests me is the lack of standardisation in battery sizes. We've had AA (and AAA, and A, and so forth) forever. Why don't we see more standardisation for things like digital camera batteries, laptop batteries and so forth? I understand that there are a bunch of issues such as form factor and suitability for design, but wouldn't standard sizes and capabilities for batteries help everyone out?

There's the argument that the laptop makers (and so forth) would lose their revenue streams from replacement batteries, but they also wouldn't have to pay a premium on putting the things into the laptops in the first place, if we had newer battery standards which specified the characteristics of a set of 'standard' laptop batteries.

Perhaps I'm over-optimistic, but I'm certainly hoping that commoditisation eventually leads to not having to buy the 'special' AA rechargeables for my camera, or being able to walk into any computer store and get a new XX for my laptop...

Standard Cells

[dmaxwell]

Granted, batteries come in all shapes and sizes and can a lot for a well equipped geek to keep track of. We have to remember that, technically, a battery is a collection of cells that have been wired together. Since batteries are made from cells there are far fewer types of cells than batteries.

How is this helpful? I had a 486 laptop that I could not find a replacement battery for but Batteries Plus was able to replace the cells in the old battery. When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we recelled batteries all of the time. It was often far cheaper to rebuild a battery than to buy one new. This works for laptops too. If you want to do it yourself, Dremel tools, epoxy and superglue are your friends. Even after paying a Batteries Plus tech it can still be cheaper if you recoil at the thought of wielding the Dremel yourself.

I'll also point out that the cells in the battery are often held together by metal straps that are sort of punched into the terminals of the cell. If you want to try your hand at battery rebuilding , then you will want to run down a supply of the strips and the punch tool.

Rechargable

[TechnoLust]

True, but I wish the rechargeable batteries were more standardized. I know they need different sizes for different devices, but there could be SOME standardization. Most devices that use a Lithium Ion battery uses a proprietary size, shape, voltage, current, etc. This is partly because they design the battery around the device, rather than vice-versa, but more than likely is also a marketing decision, because they can charge you out the nose for their special batteries. Unfortunately, if they stop making those batteries for whatever reason, your equipment may soon become unusable. Even rechargables die eventually. I would be more likely buy products that use standard rechargeables, than a proprietary one.

Re:clean electric cars = oxymoron

[Fenris2001]

The point of electric cars is to move the polluting emissions from the cars to the generating plants, where it can be controlled more closely. There are already very tight limits on how much sulphur, etc. can go out the chimney at your average coal/oil/natural gas generating plant.

Nuclear plants are another story. It may very well be possible to design a reactor that produces no waste - that is an engineering matter. Building the thing is a political matter, and thus not subject to the dictates of reason.

Solar (terrestrial or space-based), wind, and hydroelectric power aren't being built fast enough to keep up with demand, mainly due to their low output and high cost.

One thing the article ignores is the development of small fuel cells that can use methanol as fuel directly. Methanol (or ethanol) can easily be made from corn, soybeans, or industrial hemp. Such fuel cells could power small devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops for days instead of hours on a few deciliters of alcohol, without noxious ozone and nitrous oxide emmissions.

You've got Nuclear Paranoia!

[Spamalamadingdong]

The risk of making a big chuck of Chicago uninhabitable and making a lot of people sick had their reactor caught on fire was very real.

No, it wasn't. The squash-court reactor operated with people standing on it; it did not generate enough direct energy to make people sick from direct exposure, let alone radioactive byproducts to make anyone sick at a distance.

Accidents do happen. And it's very hard to clean up.

Contrast and compare to poly-chlorinated biphenyls, a chemical (not radiological) toxin. Now those things are everywhere, and nobody has any suggestions for cleaning them out of the general environment.

South Africa, I belive, is in the process of building a "pebble bed" reactor which should be quite safe compared to the reactor designs used currently. It is claimed to be meltdown-proof, and the fuel should always stay contained inside of the "pebbles" reducing the risk of contamination.

The real risk of pebble beds is sabotage/terrorism. The S. Africans are claiming that such a reactor would not require a containment building, which in the post-9/11/2001 world is laughable. A pressure-vessel breach with the reactor at operating temperature would expose a lot of graphite pellets to air, resulting in a radioactive Hibachi a la Chernobyl (I don't know if an incombustible pellet coating such as silicon nitride would be sufficiently rugged to prevent this scenario). OTOH, the pebble-bed is immune to meltdown, so burying it under enough dirt to keep it from being hit by Boeing or Airbus cruise missiles should be sufficient protection.

Pebble manufacture is probably the smallest problem. If your graphite moderator is sufficiently pure, you can use natural uranium and you have no enrichment or other steps and no byproducts. Yellowcake (uranium dioxide) is probably one of the least-difficult materials to work with; it's been used as a colorant in pottery glazes.