Slashdot Mirror
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.
We could have better batteries, if people weren't so paranoid about nuclear technology. It's quite possible to create safe, long-lived, batteries based on nuclear decay -- many smoke detectors are powered by americium decay, and about a decade ago there were plans to use plutonium to power pacemakers -- but there is too much of an anti-nuclear lobby to allow anything of the sort to happen now.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Prices have kept up, though.
I have quite a few Accu-Recharge NiMH batteries that cost me about $10 for four.
It used to (about 2 years ago) cost 4 times that.
I'd say that's progress...
-twb
I know a lot of us are hoping that fuel cells will replace batteries, but how big does a fuel cell have to be to produce enough power for, say, a laptop computer? Would it be comparable in size to the batteries we have now? What about the generated heat?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
lame article: It ignores fuel cells, atomic batteries and the fact that some people do not seem to care about battery weight / power.
Example : In 1987 Apple asked potential portable computer consumers to rate, in numerical order 10 different attributes of a system they cared about most.
Battery longevity came in LAT place... even so apple demanded a pure CMOS system, including CMOS cpu for its portable mac and a non backlit screen resulting in a staggering 10 hour battery life.
10 hours of use.
Humorously with no more low power general purpose cpus in existence in 1998 comsumers rated battery duration MOST IMPORTANT, first place above performance.
Hilarious.
Apple tried to do the impossible and the "Wallstreet" 300 Mhz G3 Powermac laptop used a low power dvd decoder and dvd drive so that the entire system could do someting no ibm pc could do, or still can do nowadays as far as i know.... play an entire two hour (120 minute) dvd movie at full brightness without swapping batteries once. Just one Lithium ion battery.
non stop dvd playback.
now its 2002 and no apple laptop can do that, and i think no comperable highend PeeCee (Wintell) laptop sporting dvd, firewire, fast cpu, etc can play a movie on one battery.
We are going backwards.
Example : a Palm Pilot, even the 8 megabyte (yes 8 MB) Palm 3x, lasts almost 30 days of usage on a pair of AA "1100 milliamp-hour" standard alkaline batteries.
But the color palm eats up batteries because it uses a backlit design, unlike the ingenious Gameboy Advance low poer color screen which requires sunlight but last a long time on its batteries.
But that article is not very techie. It ignores radioactive batteries, fuel cell designs and other energy sources.
If I recall correctly, batteries are basically chemical capacitors. (Two surfaces of different electric potential separated by a resistor) Is anyone out there aware of efforts to make batteries using mechanical capacitors? We make memory chips using microscopic capacitors. What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?
The second derivative of the space-luck curve is infinite at my nexus, at least on the pong axis.
batteries. One company reports a 50:1 energy to
weight advantage over lead acid batteries. (How
does that compare to Lithium?). You add energy
electrically - a motor spins up the flywheel.
You get it out electrically - a generator takes
energy from the flywheel. To reduce friction, the
flywheel sits in a vacuum, and uses a magnetic
bearing. 17,000 RPM. They claim a 5% loss per day. It would
be nice to be able to add energy at a high rate -
like at a kilowatt. No memory. When the device
no longer functions, there are no toxic chemicals.
I'd like a laptop that runs for 100 hours between
charges, and charges in a minute. I'd like to
be able to add energy by hand crank, solar cell,
car plug or house plug without funky adapters
to lug around.
There is talk of putting flywheel batteries on
the space station. Twin counter rotating flywheels
reduce torque on the station.
-- Stephen.
Ahhh yes, but with more energy, certain better designs are possible. Things are getting too small anyway. I love all this handheld stuff but my latest mobile phone has buttons so small I have to use a pen to push the numbers accurately. Stop the minimisation rush and we will have room for proper battery holders again!
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I think that batteries have improved significantly over the last few years. I remember buying my first minidisk (Sony MZ-50) a few years back. I could get about 20hours playtime out of it. Recently I bought the new sony minidisk (still MZ series, don't remember the model), and I can easily get over 50 hours playtime with a battery that weights less.
There are a lot of examples on how batteries have improved. Just look at mobile phones. I had 6 or so batteries for my Ericsson 337 mobile. For the Nokia 8310 that I have now, I have one battery. I think that this one battery easily beats the time I used to get out of the 6 batteries I had for the 337.
I am aware of the fact that the electronics in these devices have improved such that it uses less power. However, the batteries HAVE improved aswell (they are all Li-ion now, so they can be recharged without beeing decharged completly).
I think it would be very hard for batteries to follow moore's law. The reason is that batteries have been around for a lot longer, and there is no real driving-force for getting better batteries than the ones we have.
I mean, it would be nice to get 200hours workingtime on the laptop, but really, what difference does it make? I mean, just buy more batteries. Is anyone willing to pay a lot of extra money for a battery with 200hours instead of 10?
However, if you're traveling it is a bother to carry all the chargers around.
Also, finding a power plug might be an issue.
It would be so much easier if the devices could use a standardized charger.
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
Al the devices on that page have their own type of batteries inside. What we need is wind up batteries of standard sizes.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Remember a few years back, an inventor released an alkaline battery recharger to the market that would recharge ANY alkaline battery hundreds of times. It was only on the market for a few months before the battery industry bought the inventor out. Now we have crippled alkaline chargers with "special" batteries that only work on unique chargers (no cross brand compatibility, it's mechanically engineered to be incompatible).
The multi billion dollar battery industry will always act to protect their revenue stream. They have a cash cow and are not about to give it up.
I'd have thought the DOJ would have acted on the cartel but it appears to have slipped below their horizon. Industry 1, consumer 0.
We could just as easily argue that computer chips have improved in integration and performance in small packages, but still lack behind in power consumption.
A and B sized batteries? Were they somewhere between the AA and C cells? Why did they die out, if they existed at all?
The battery equivalent of the 80186 processor and the DC-5 aircraft.
"I'd rather be gay than religious or American!"
This is one of the things that really excited me about Transmeta. Here was a company that seemed to be saying "no, it's not top of the line performance, it won't run Quake, but it can do all your work and keep your laptop running a long, long time." Unfortunately, all the OEMs seem to be stuck in a bigger/better/faster mindset, and don't realize that some of us actually miss the early days of laptops.
Now you've got the same damn thing with palmtops. I'm hearing about iPaqs now that only last 8 hours before they need to be recharged? Fuck that, give me a black and white Palm any day.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
"The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car."
:)
Gone offtopic, but i think the air-powered car is a better solution than a battery powered car. The air-powered cars in production in Spain are a nice example: you charge the car with a home-compressor, and it gives you 200 miles autonomy (present model).
The exhaust is obviously pure AIR. I'd enjoy the day people put their faces near an exhaust tube to refresh themselves
unfinished: (adj.)
It's actually very easy to beam energy with VLF EM radiation. Nikola Tesla worked it out a century ago. Go read what happened to him. Hint: electrical power companies don't like the idea of people being able to "tune in" to power for free.
Evidence suggests that it's better for the batteries to be stored charged. They can be recharged at any time, so they're more likely ready for use.
Things I dislike are that they seem to last half the time of NiMH, per charge. Unlike NiCad or NiMH, their voltage drops slowly with use. This makes my walkman's pitch drop slowly. NiCad or NiMH hold voltage until almost out of juice, so the pitch stays nearly constant.
Rechargable alkalines have extremely poor cold temperature performance. This is bad for powering my telescope in the winter.
Yet, rechargable alkalines do OK at things that alkalines do - like power wall clocks for months, or sitting in a child's toy awaiting use. My experimentation set has already paid for itself and the charger.
I wouldn't use them for a laptop or pda.
I do use NiMH for my Handspring Palm. No, the unit does not recharge them. I pop in my spare set of AAA's every now and then.
At the moment, batteries are a way of life. Rechargables are cheaper. If there are rechargables, I use the device. I'm not using it up - I can always get another cycle out of the batteries. A battery that gets 100 cycles has got to be more environmentally friendly than a battery that gets one cycle.
-- Stephen.
That's the hollywood idea of gasoline.
Gasoline in a tank generally has very little oxygen present, and the liquid gasoline WON'T BURN. Otherwise, a puddle of gas would instantly vanish like flash powder, instead of burning on the surface.
In fact, if you had a plastic collapsible container with zero vapor volume, the gas would be inert. Do whatever you want to it, it won't burn, until you let oxygen at it.