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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.
Calculus has! Everyone needs integration!
Batteries have come a long way - at least lets say, more devices use rechageable battery packs now then before. Remember when everything, and i mean, everything that did not plug directly into the wall, used an alkaline? At least now many things just go back on their base and charge back up.
Don't Tread on Me
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.
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
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...
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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
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?
:o).
Another reason not touched by the article: compatibility. How many people here would replace all their AA-weilding devices if new batteries wouldn't work in them? Actually, knowing the slashdot crowd, all of them would. But hey, that's the whole point! There's a market for a newer, better battery.
I always hated my TI-85, fresh batteries at the start of a school year would run out just days before the final exam. My last calculus exam was a whole lot of squinting at the screen with the contrast turned up to 9
The speed of time is one second per second.
No. Americium decay doesn't power the smoke detector, it's part of the detection circuitry. It provides neutrons that are used in a sort of single purpose mass spectrometer. The power is provided by batteries or the mains.
Best Slashdot Co
As for your smoke detector example, IIRC the americium is used as the smoke sensor itself, not as a power source.
I'm all for the use of nuclear technology where appropriate, but having substantial quantities of radioactive material in everybody's Game Boy doesn't strike me as appropriate.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
My gramps has a clock you just have to shake instead of wind up. Why can't a palm or other device work the same? Put some mechanics in there.
Put it in a paint mixer for a few days and have it run for years...
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.
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.
I think a Palm uses much mroe energy than a clock, so you'd be shaking it every 15 minutes.
"They're holding us back big time," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, "a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke."
sombody slap this guy silly(ooh, someone already did). bateries have evolved big time. the battery in the old 386 laptop in my closet couldn't power a modern lalptop thru' the bios(okay, it probably would, but not much longer).
The real problem with recarable bateries is people. of you leave the battery fully charged, lat say over the summer, it's broken. the cemical compunds have reacted and formed stable elements(wich won't produce power). I hate to see poeple who leave their cell phones plugged in the wall so it's full when they take it with them once a week.
---
I have a Canon Powershot G1 digital camera. It uses a proprietary lithium-ion battery, about the size of a C or D battery, but more square in shape. This battery is fantastic. The camera can run for hundreds of photos, you can leave the viewscreen on, and use the flash a lot before you have to recharge. Through many charges it seems to have no degradations in performance.
On the other hand, I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop which has a lame battery. It is also lithium-ion. When I first got my laptop the battery would last about 3 hours before having to recharge. About a year later, it would last barely 1 hour. Dell knows their batteries don't last very long and only warrant them one year (despite the 3 years I have on the rest of the machine!). I found this out when I contacted them 1 year + 1 week after I bought the laptop. I ended up writing a small windows app called BatteryLog to help track your battery performance. You may want to give it a try on your laptop before your year-warranty runs out.
So basically, it's more than just the technology of the battery, it's also the design and manufacturer. There are some good ones out there!
With Methane-powered fuel cells coming out, why bother about batteries? With methane-powered fuel cells, you can eat beans, stick a hose up your butt and surf pr0n 'till you collapse into a puddle of.. something.
Stop the brainwash
The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car.
Would somebody please stick a note to that author's forehead - you recharge your exhaust-free car by plugging it into a radioactive and/or hot'n'smoky power station...
I'm still hanging out for that orbiting solar collector/microwave beam thingie!!
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
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.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
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.
Dump those $15 battery chargers, get a good one, and you'll only need one Set of batteries for every appliance for the rest of your life.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
In a word: physics
If physics can't compete, let's see how many people will want to generate their own energy anywhere by winding up their electronics!
It is the users/marketers insistance on cramming more "functionality" [aka bloatware] in that gobbles battery life. Quit whining -- we do this to ourselves. The technology is an innocent bystander.
"I think a Palm uses much mroe energy than a clock, so you'd be shaking it every 15 minutes."
Yes, but that's ok for a Windows laptop - finally an excuse to vent your frustrations on it. The "Come on you bas***d! WORK!" annoyed-shake suddenly becomes effective when you provide the CPU with more juice ^_^
Maran
The beauty is, if your complex function is analytic (smooth) everywhere (or almost everywhere), then differentiation is just the same as in the case of single varable functions of the reals ({f:R->R}), only the variable is a complex number.
For example,
d/dx(exp(a*z))=a*exp(a*z)
for a complex variable z and a complex constant a.
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?
Consider the "need to know" shortcuts in this article. For example "1859, when the first lead acid battery was made in France". This was the first cell using Planté type plates which are still in use today, but the history of lead acid and other cells goes back a bit further than that. It's a reasonable shortcut, but it does illustrate that this kind of article only skims the very surface. If you want insights, you have to go and do your own research.
On the other hand, they do make an important point: "Of the billions [of cells and batteries] sold each year, most wind up in landfills and incinerators". Well, that's pretty much true of AA type alkalines and carbon-zincs, but actually clunky old automotive lead acids are now recycled 95% of the time. NiCad's though are death in a tube: nobody wants to touch the bloody things. NiMh's and Lithium Ions are a little nicer, if you can find a local recycler who will handle them. Power Express used to accept small amounts of NiMh's and LiIons by mail, but they've changed their site and I can't find any mention of it now, which perhaps indicates the volatility (ha ha) of the recycling market. If you want some sleepless nights, have a look here for a decent overview of what you can and should be recycling.
Oops, but then we slip into the land of delusions again: "Batteries, which have long been derided for polluting the environment, will soon do their part to clean it up, MIT's Sadoway said. The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car."
Uh huh. Like the T Zero? Again, the site has changed, and I now can't find mention of the technologies, but from memory, it's either 300kg of lead acids (shorter range or quicker death from deep discharges) or nickel metal hydrides (landfill ahoy) with quoted replacement costs and times of $3000 and 3 years for the lead-acids. Yes, that's 100kg of lead, acid and plastic to be recycled every year for every vehicle, or about half a pound (and $2.75) a day. OK, it can be recycled, and the problem is concentrated rather than distributed. But it's a lot of nastiness to deal with, and remember that rules only apply to nice middle income people. Scurrilous low income types are just going to abandon their twenty year old wrecks (complete with 200kg of lead) in the nearest ditch, street corner, or even front yard. We'd better be prepared to treat these things as environmental time bombs and have policies in place to collect and recycle them, with or without the owner's consent. Designing in a large recycling burden just makes less sense than investing in a clean and long lived internal power source.
I think that the intro sums it up: the problem is chemistry. There's only so much energy you can store in a sealed unit. If we want significant energy density from a renewable source and no ongoing recycling nightmare, then we have to go to hydrogen cells or even good old fashioned alcohol burners. Sealed cell technology is not the long term answer to our energy needs, and we can't just blame the manufacturers for that, seeing as how it's us that keeps buying their products by the billion then (mostly) throwing them in the trash.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Battery distributers make profit from selling batteries at a large markup. Why would they fix that?
Get a free ipod.
There is some "new" technology in batteries out there. I read about this 2 years ago (I think right here on /.) and I haven't heard a thing since. NEC published this press release about an AMAZING "Polymer Proton" battery. This indole/quinoxaline polymer electrode technology looks like it would blow lithium ion out of the water. The article says they were planning commerical availibility for October 2000. Anybody hear anything more on this?
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
Sounds similar to those Seiko Kinetic watches. I'm not sure if they are mechanical doodads or actually generate an electrical charge.
This technology would definitly be nice for a PDA if it can scale to provide enough power. Hopefully Seiko didn't grab some generalized patent on this idea =/.
What, are you kidding me? Game Boy Advance goes for 14 hours on it's AA batteries. This is due to advances in efficiency, not batteries. Isn't that what we should be more concerned about?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
"Dump those $15 battery chargers, get a good one"
Any suggestions?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
How feasible is it to use electromagnetic waves to transport energy? IANAP (P=Physicist), but a science fiction fan, who once read a short story how solar energy was collected and "beamed" from an orbital to the earth...und woe to any airplane that flew through that beam.
I was only thinking that since batteries are a problem (because of size and durability) why not take them out of the gadget. Actually, even without being a PhD in Physics I could probably think of many reasons why not, but could anyone tell me how and if this could be feasible?
Naturally if such a energy transport system were to be possible, it would only be feasible in mostly urban areas with infrastructure resembling that of cell phone networks.
- Is it possible to transport _enough_ energy (and not lose too much in the conversion?
- Would a direct line-of-sight be necessary, and would crossing it be hazardous?
- Would it be possible to "encrypt" this energy to make it possible to subscribe and protect from freeloaders?
- What types of waves (and/or photon beams?) are best suited for this application?
- How long would it be before we all die with brain cancer because of the free energy being transmitted around?
unlike the ingenious Gameboy Advance low poer color screen which requires sunlight but last a long time on its batteries.
You were doing pretty good until you called the GBA screen "ingenious". Even in bright light, that thing is horrible. Literally, no hyperbole, that screen is the worst screen ever created. Bar none.
Having your batteries last a long time doesn't do you any good if your EYES wear out after five minutes.
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I don't know. The battery in my Sony Clie is pretty spiffy. Also I am getting longer burn times with a lighter battery with the nightrider digital pro I bought last year. Batteries are getting better, you just have to find companies that actually care enough to use them in their products.
They're two different tools, used for different tasks and designed differently as a result. It's like you're trying to compare how many miles per gallon you get in a motorcycle vs. a chainsaw. One of those measurements won't make much sense.
Your G1 draws far less current at a far lower rate than your laptop. Your laptop has a hard drive that's probably constantly spinning while you're using it, while your camera's only motor is in the zoom lens. (OK, you might have a microdrive, but that doesn't stay spinning nearly as long as the drive in your PC.) Your camera's backlit screen has about 5 in^2 of illuminated area, but your laptop's screen is closer to 180 in^2, a 36 times larger screen that draws close to 36 times as much power. Flashes are also not a constant power draw. Finally, its off to your CPU to check current draw. Camera CPUs are more closely related to dedicated microcontrollers than they are to the general purpose CPUs found in your laptop. Microcontrollers are designed for minimal current draw, they power themselves down nicely (and frequently. While your Pentium was designed with low power laptops in mind, it still draws a frightfully large amount of current in comparison to the little processor inside your camera.
If you were able to wire up your camera's battery to power your laptop, you'd find you'd get maybe ten minutes of battery life. There's not magic inside that battery, and that's basically the point of the whole article.
John
John
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
Hell, my Inspiron 7k is able to watch a movie on a single charge and I got that 3 years ago!
Do some looking into how long rechargable batteries last.
They aren't really rated in months or years, though that's how the warranties are written.
Rechargable batteries are rated in charge cycles. Charge cycle == discharge and recharge the battery, doesn't matter if it is a partial or a complete discharge.
NiCd batteries are rated for about 400-500 charge cycles.
NiMH batteries are rated for about 400 charge cycles.
Lithium and Lithium Ion batteries are rated for about 300 charge cycles.
Battery charge capacity falls off as a function of charge cycle lifetime. The closer to the end of your 400 charge cycles, the less capacity you'll see in your batteries.
How many times have you recharged the battery in your laptop? How many times in your digital camera?
Yes, the batteries in your digital camera will start sucking after about 250 or 300 charge cycles. Expect to have to buy new ones about that time. Or buy a new camera, which will come with new batteries, whichever.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
My minidisc claims 50+ hours and I can get at least 24 straight with headphones. That's a far cry from 8 (if your lucky) wi9th 2 AA's in a cassette or CD. Maybe it has to do with the motor though.
Another fun thing is that you can essentially ignore discontinuities when you integrate complex functions.
OK, that's not quite true, you have to make a path around the discontinuity, but you can take the the value as the limit of the detour radius approaches 0.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Yeah, until you try to make that power portable. Try to move it. Then you get that whole flywheel "angular momentum/gyroscope super resistance" thing going on. Kiss that energy bye bye.
Honestly, energy always eventually goes to its lowest state... but I don't think that kinetic flywheels are the way to store it, because by design you know there is some constant form of resistance that is draining it.
You would have to have some serious math and technology to get this one together. Feels unapplicable.
Well maybe there is a reason batteries haven't advanced. According to the article Paul Saffo says: "a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke." Just imagine how much regulation and radiation there would be.
non stop dvd playback. now its 2002 and no apple laptop can do that
You have no idea what you're talking about. Both Apple laptops currently on the market can play "Titanic" (a little over 3 hours) without swapping batteries, assuming you start with a full charge and don't do anything else while you watch the movie. I've done it myself, on a 14-hour non-stop flight to Australia.
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.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Transmeta hedged their entire business model on getting partners early on after the release of the Crusoe and hope Intel or AMD didn't eat their lunch. Intel and AMD did just that, not only did they eat their lunch but they kicked their ass for their lunch money. Duh. I mean come on did Transmeta SERIOUSLY think AMD and Intel weren't working on really low power chips and probably had prototypes working already? Shit yes. They just didn't have a reason to release them as there was no third party competition for the lower power x86 chip market until Transmeta came along.
You're also forgetting that the display is far more inefficient than the electronics spitting data out to it. A reflective LCD display doesn't use as much power as a backlit display but that comes as a cost of usability. Reflective laptop displays would not work out very well. A small reflective screen works fine because enough incident radiation is hitting the focus of your eye. With a larger screen anything outside of your focus is going to be hard to see which means reduces periphrial vision on the screen. Backlit LCD screens are huge power wasters, only half the light emitted by the backlight even gets to your eye. This is why the iPaq has such shitty battery life, it is a backlit screen that is acutally pretty damn bright. The next big thing in portable electronics is going to be OLEDs. Since the light isn't passing through a filter the display is more efficient and thus consumes less power. As it is your LCD display sucks about a third of the power your laptop uses. Another third is being sucked up by your 5v periphrials like your hard drive and CD-ROM.
You miss the early days of laptops where they weighed ten pounds and worked for about an hour? I certainly don't. You get ten times the work out of a modern 1GHz P3 laptop than you did out of that old 100MHz Pentium in a much lighter package and uses the same if not less power.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Here's a good poll question:
What would you do with the power of a tactical nuke in your pocket?
Please don't say CowboyNeal...
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Nuclear batteries (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) usually use Pu238, an isotope of plutonium that is useless for creating nuclear weapons. The problem is that at several thousand dollars a gram for the Pu238, they are far too expensive for most applications.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I've found that there are moderators out there who, if they disagree with you politically, are jealous of the display of intellect you show on a particular post, or just plain don't like you, the following happens:
They click on your user info page, and mark down all your last few comments when they have moderator points, thus wrecking your karma, and destroying the visibility of your posts.
There was someone who did that to me, because he didn't like my perfectly valid (if opinionated) post.
Thus, abuse of the moderation system.
Of course, this post will be marked offtopic, even though deep-nested comments should NEVER be marked offtopic due to the fact that normal discussion almost always goes off in other directions than the topic, but, I digress...
I would have marked you back up had I not already spent my moderator points.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
People are always pushing Lithum Ion, or Ni-MH batteries, I assume because they don't pay any attention to the Ni-Cad world.
It's been quite some time ago now, (so I'm not sure exactly how long) seems it was about 3 years ago that I was first introduced to Panasonic's Hi-Capacity NiCad batteries. They were about $20 for the recharger & 4 Batteries AA @ 1100mAh. That was a lot cheaper and more powerful than the radioshack hi-capacity batteries that were only ~800mAh at the time (and of course the radioshack reps were telling me they were the most powerful around!).
Those batteries lasted as long as disposable batteries in 2AA situations. Unfortunately, all NiCads I've come across are 1.25v, so the more batteries, the shorter they seem to last. Fortunately, most devices I use only need 2 AAs (Psion 5mx, Mini-disc, CD Walkman, etc) and the one device I often used that needed more (my Sega Nomad) had an external battery pack, which I connected two more AA cases on, and it worked like a charm.
The other interesting thing to note, those batteries are working to this day, and apparently aren't any less powerful than they were to start with (still lasting as long as Alkaline AAs).
So, my whole point is that very good rechargeables do exist, and nobody uses them. The second point being that NiCad manufacuters should look at perhaps two 0.75volt batters (each half-AA height) stacked, so as to get the full standard 1.5v.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Not bloody likely... most laptops now use Lithium Ion. I wouldn't recommend opening those.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
http://www.evworld.com/archives/interviews/balak .h tml
(follow links from article for more info)
IBM announced years ago better battery technology - it appeared in the highest end Thinkpads, and is based off Lithium and other elements (it isnt Lithium-ion), but of course, they are too expensive for say... disposable radio batteries... So, perhaps it is the economies of it that matter... after all, Lexmark, Epson and HP often sell printers at a loss - why? Because they clean up on the consumables... not that I think it is, because I have no knowledge of such, but why wouldnt the battery industry be any different? The less batteries you sell, the less you make. As new battery innovations come out (which usually are negligble and barely if at all noticeable on the "home front" AA, AAA, C, D sized cells), the prices usually go up as well... so though battery life may be increasing slightly, so is the price - at a slightly greater than inflationary rate.
Dont know, and dont care - it's really irrelevant since the item that the article incorrectly touched on was fuel cells, which ARE available and in use for things such as cell phones and other devices already. Supposedly they are more efficient, last longer, and there are methodws of recharging them (though not yet available)... so the technology does exist, and can be used to replace batteries if only more work were put into it. (currently such fuel cells are disposable instead of refillable).
- Robert
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I really don't want to see anyone walking around with radioactive batteries. Sure youy can read "Snowcrash" and make the assumption that using radioactive isotopes as power sources is a good idea but you would be mistaken. For example, californium, who's isotopes have generally short half-lives, is a candidate because of the heat it generates. A one kilogram block would but out 10,000 horsepower in heat for about the first half-life period, and of course half and half again after that. Wow, you could power anything with that, but that is the problem.
A laptop would have twice as much energy as it needs for the first half-life period. We have enough waste heat to deal with. The laptop would have just the right amount of power for the second period. It would not have enough power for the third period. This is a gradual drop off in reality. So your Laptop would have a period of too much heat inside followed by a period of not enough power.
Gather enough spent laptop batteries and wait 20 years and you have plutonium, one of the intermediate states of decaying californium.
Fuel cells in laptops suffer the same problem. Computers convert almost 100% of the power they consume into heat. Fuel cells convert hydrogen into electricity and heat. So nearly 100% of the power derived from a fuel cell powered laptop would be converted to heat. So much heat that active cooling would be required. That would consume power, and generate more heat to produce the power to cool the laptop. Catch 22.
Theoretically a great source of power but for practical applications absolutely worthless. Your summation ruins an otherwise lucid and informative post.
The article is about batteries for a reason. No other power source is viable for some applications. Laptops are the primary showstopper.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The semiconductors being produced today are made with diode junctions much larger than those produced in fairly small University labs fifteen years ago. The trick is to get a lot of these things in a small space - so fabrication is the limiting factor.
A lot more effort has been applied to semiconductors than has been applied to batteries or fuel cells. For example, zirconia based fuel cells have the potential to be cheap, once the fabrication costs can be brought down.
The greater the angular momentum of the flywheel, the more energy you can store, so the bigger and the faster the better. Once the energy requirements of laptops go down, it could be a possibility (for example, like the wind up radio). Currently hard drives and screens consume a lot of power. I had a calculator that needed to be plugged into the wall once, and now most calculators can run on solar cells in fairly low light. I hope to see a laptop running on as little power as that.
Repeat after me: When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we resoldbatteries all of the time.
(Note to the humour impaired: -1 Not Funny, not -1 Wrong.)
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If it is, and there was a sudden, legal, and safe demand for it, I think its price would drop dramatically.
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
You may be thinking of U-238, aka depleted uranium. Pu238 production was done by the Department of Energy using a unusual and expensive production process, not the normal process used to convert uranium to Pu239.
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I never claimed my posts were "wonderfully intellectual," what I claimed was, that they are "perfectly valid (if opinionated)."
... going to be modded down into oblivion, and they wind up getting modded up to +4 or +5.
:)
Karma-whoring at it's lowest
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
There are large quantities of U238 (depleted uranium) left over from uranium enrichment processes. Arms reduction treaties and the retirement of obsolete nuclear weapons have resulted in a large number of Pu239 "pits" that are currently stored in secure DoE facilities.
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No. Their half-lives are far too long. For an RTG, you need a radioactive isotope with a relatively short half-life, such as Pu238 or Sr90. See here.
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