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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.
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.
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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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.
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!
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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
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
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