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

Nuclear paranoia

[cperciva]

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.

Re:Nuclear paranoia

[BeBoxer]

Um, how exactly would you build an "antimatter generation plant? Or more specifically, where exactly are you going to get antimatter to use as fuel? There aren't exactly big natural deposits lying around. Antimatter might make an excellent method for storing and transporting energy someday, but it is not itself an energy source. It's just like hydrogen in this sense. You can do lots of interesting things with it, but it is not a fuel source because you have to make it and that process takes more energy than you get out of it.

The first nuclear power plant was fired up in metro Chicago! if they thought it was dangerous

Actually it was dangerous. Starting up a nuclear reactor in a squash court in downtown Chicago was dangerous then, and it's dangerous today. Just because nothing went wrong doesn't make it safe. The risk of blowing up Chicago was probably about zero. 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.

The public's fear of nuclear power is not entirely unfounded. Fissonable materials are extremely dangerous to humans. You don't really want to be shipping it around all over the place like gasoline. Accidents do happen. And it's very hard to clean up.

On the other hand, some countries are still actively developing nuclear power. 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. Of course, you still need a plant to manufacture the pebbles themselves, and that plant could turn into a mess if not properly run.

NiMH

[lostchicken]

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...

Fuel cells realistic battery replacement?

[Goonie]

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?

lame article, ignores fuel cells, atomic batteries

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

what about capacitors?

[liet-kynes]

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?

Flywheels

[suitti]

I'm surprised the article didn't mention flywheel
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.

Re:Flywheels

[Morphine007]

They claim a 5% loss per day.

Isn't that a little high? I'm no expert on batteries but it would seem to me that this idea would be useful only for something along the lines of continually adding energy to these things (until just before the material would reach its breaking point) and then do a large deceleration to capacitors to store up a shizerload of charge for burst transmission, like say to a lazer.... hmmm...

Re:Flywheels

[GigsVT]

Yeah, and if you drop it, it explodes with the force of several pipe bombs. I seriously doubt kenetic energy storage is going to be feasible in the near future.

Re:more power than a tactical nuke

[fruey]

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!

Maybe it's not so bad...

[muffen]

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?

Re:Actually

[bergie]

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.

/Bergie

Re:I can always wind it up

[oever]

Al the devices on that page have their own type of batteries inside. What we need is wind up batteries of standard sizes.

This is something that has bothered me for a while

[Galvatron]

With the computer technology we have, we ought to be able to make exceptionally low power laptops. Fuck the color screen, and the high processing power, just give me enough to do word processing, spreadsheets, and view course material in PDF format and make the batteries last 8+ hours. There's nothing more frustrating than getting on a 6 hour flight and knowing that you're laptop's going to be out of power half way through the flight.

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.

Re:OK, but do your own research

[fferreres]

"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 :)

Re:OK, but do your own research

[RollingThunder]

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.