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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.
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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
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.
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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?)
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 :o).
Yeah, Tetris really sucked up the batteries in High School Calculus.
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.
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 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
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!"
Even the highest energy density capacitors are easily out stripped by the lowest energy density batteries. Granted thay have made huge strides in the past years with the Ultra capacitors and at some point break even with batteries. You can now get multiple Farad capacitors but that is still peanuts in comparison to an AA battery. On the other hand research may at some point allow them to catch up or surpass batteries.
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.
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.
---------------
Vpered na Mars!
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
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
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.
Several studies were done by various organizations in the late 80s and early 90s (and its your job to look them up for specific examples) to determine if electric cars were really "green" if you took the emissions from the production of electricy to recharge them in to account.
The results...even when energy production for recharging is taken in to account, electric cars were found to be MASSIVELY less of an impact on the environment than their internal combustion brothers.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
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
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?
the maha mh-c204f. you can read about it at thomas distributing.
i have this charger, and use it with ni-cds and ni-mhs, and it works great. really saves money. i use nimhs in my discman and my palm, and soon in my minidisc player. i highly recommend both the charger and thomas dist.
complex
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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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
Lithium-Polymer technology exists and is widely used in devices like Sony's MiniDisc portables and (better) laptop computers, such as Apple's Titanium PowerBook G4 which gets a staggering 8-hour battery life. The economics of the commodity market of the Wintel universe do not allow for this level of engineering and premium battery technology, so people settle for higher power consumption and lesser batteries that run for about 3 hours.
That not really the user's fault. The cell phone should be designed to stop charging the batter unneccesarily.
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
If I recall correctly, batteries are basically chemical capacitors. (Two surfaces of different electric potential separated by a resistor)
Batteries and capacitors are quite different. Batteries use electrochemical reactions that produce a near-constant potential (voltage) across the terminals, until the reactants are used up.
Capacitors work by polarizing a dielectric material [a physical change, not a chemical one] between two closely-spaced plates. The terminal voltage is proportional to the amount of charge (time integral of current) the capacitor is holding.
Modern capacitors are approaching the energy capacity of batteries. A 50F 2.3V capacitor holds 132 J of energy, which is equivalent to 120 Amp-seconds (or 33 mA-hours) at 1.1 Volts. This capacitor costs CDN$17.88, compared to $2.17 for a 250 mAh AAA NiCd cell. (prices are from Digikey in quantities of 1000)
So the capacitor's about 8x the cost for 1/8 the capacity of the NiCd.
We make memory chips using microscopic capacitors. What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?
One big limitation is that we only make our memory chips one layer thick (vs. multi-layer capacitors), and that these capacitors are optimized for storing information, not energy. The more energy stored per cell, the more heat is wasted every time that cell switches state.
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.
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.
Sigh. One more time, for everyone who missed it. NiCad cells have a FUNDAMENTAL problem. They grow whiskers of Cadmium internally when recharged by simple reverse-DC , which causes internal short circuits. This is why they lose capacity. This is why a large capacitor discharge can sometimes recover them. This is why they suck. If someone makes a good charger (i.e. one that reverses the charging current periodically like the rest of the electro-plating industry has done since the year dot) then NiCads are fine. They are just VERY VERY picky about how they are recharged. What you are seeing is a stream of new chargers on the market (e.g. the one I bought from RadioShack in New Orleans last week). Now, why has it taken so long? Because you can also recharge dry cells (safely!) with such a charger. Now, boys and girls, can you think why Duracell, Ever Ready et. al. might not want such a product on the market>
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.
Please go and learn some electro-chemistry. NiCad cells (i.e. the SMALLEST POSSIBLE UNIT of storage) produce 1.2 V, against 1.5 V for zinc-carbon and alkaline, and 2 V for lead acid. You CAN'T MAKE a 1.5 V NiCad battery. That's why NiCad 9V batteries are so poor - the cheap ones used to be only 7.2 V, with the expensive ones being more like 8.4 V. Neither were much good when you needed a real 9 V battery.
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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