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Batteries Continue To Suck
pvt_medic writes "As technology continues to grow, and we see more and more of a shift to portable electronic devices in our daily life, we are still constricted by one simple thing: Batteries. Newsweek has an interesting article about the lack of development in battery technology. 'Ironically, in our headlong rush to create sophisticated untethered computing, the most problematic technology turns out also to be the oldest: those nondescript metal cylinders that never seemed to be included with our Christmas toys.' And for those of you who would like an extensive overview about batteries, ExtremeTech.com has a nice overview."
lets make with the cold fusion already.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Seriously, what about all those great Slashdot battery articles we've seen over the past few years? The amazing advances that were supposed to revolutionize our portable electronics? I've been wondering about them recently. Was manufacturing these theoretical advances just too difficult?
"nondescript metal cylinders that never seemed to be included with our Christmas toys"
Why is he talking about Nukes? I mean, yeah, you never seem to get them (Top of the list, five years running! But do my parents see fit to get one? NEVER!), but what place do they have in an article about batteries?
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
There is actually a real use of these, see http://www.ballard.com/tD.asp?pgid=700&dbid=0
Its pretty cool, because you always hear about fuel cells, but almost never see a commercial application.
Hopefully once they make it smaller...
"Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke." - Paul Saffo
I suppose that would be somewhat hazardous wouldn't it.
At least a current day leaking battery will leave a nasty burn mark on my table, not burn thru the table and into the concrete floor underneath.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
The adult industy is the answer! They just need to make less efficent vibrators, than something will be done.
why the generic alkalines only last for 5 seconds in my digital camera. I mean, maH is maH right? voltage is voltage? what the hell.
Thump Thump Thump. Keeps Sucking. Nothing outlasts the...
Sig it.
Quit bitching or open-source the laws of physics.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Seiko has a watch that runs based on your arm motions. Think Geek also sells a flashlight that recharges itself by jacking it off.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
They could be built now, from radioactive waste, using the same really simple technology used aboard space missions..
Such a small amount of material per battery would make it safe, but would last years... ( not forever, but with teh way things are designed these days, at least long enough for the device to fall apart...)
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If only we could harness all of our wasted energy. Like those watches that gain power by your movement. Devices should be looking to get energy from as many sources as possible. Solar, moving etc. Do I have the answer on how to do this? Hell no, I'm just some punk on Slashdot with crazy ideas that are technically impossible. When *they* create wireless power, I'm definitely investing in their business.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Yes, yes I'm sure it all comes down to greed. Because you know, there's no way they wouldn't price longer lasting batteries higher than lower costing batteries. I mean to make up for the loss in volume. Oh and there's no incentive for any of the various battery companies to one-up their competition and grab market share by making a more efficient/longer-lasting battery. That's why we see that energizer bunny all the time, because it's unprofitable to sell batteries based upon length of life.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Perhaps improving batteries is simply a more difficult problem. Some problems are genuinely harder than others, and which are harder than others is not always intuitive. While there are certainly industries willing and able to stear technological development for their own benefit, I doubt the battery industry is one of them.
-Hil
power, size, and longetivity: choose any two
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Since desktop computers can suck hundreds of Watts from the outlet to drive powerful CPUs that can execute bloated applications at a reasonable speed, programmers have become very sloppy. In a portable device that is no longer possible. Maybe this will expand a job market for people who know how to run efficient code.
"Fuel Cells:
The wonderful side of this dream is that some engineers expect it to be reality by the end of 2001"
Err... whats the hold up? Are they finishing duke nukem first?
Best Christmas present ever:
Pack of batteries with label: Toy not included.
-Adam
I commute by bicycle. Now that it is getting dark early, and I bike through heavy traffic, I have several bike lights:
- One 10-Watt halogen light with a lead-acid battery. It's lasted me for several years, but is starting to loose it's charge.
- 2-3 blinking lights which take any old AA & AAA batteries.
I'm getting sick of having to toss the discharged alkaline batteries all the time, and am looking for a replacement.
Since I'm comparing the prices of the different kinds of batteries and chargers, I'd also like to compare the different toxicity levels.
Are NiMH's safer then NiCADs or Alkalines?
Ironically, my lead-acid battery gets the most frowns, but it seems like it's actually one of the least toxic options. There are several places near me which recycle lead-acid batteries (They strip the batteries, neutralize the acid, and take the lead; all in-house).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
All I know is when I got my first mercury alkaline batteries in 1966 to power my Ross 3 inch reel-to-reel tape recorder, they lasted over 2 years with daily use! the second set lasted about 6 weeks. I think batteries are like light bulbs, there's no profit in making them well
If battery technology isn't going to progress, how about some changes to the building codes to add more public power outlets? Perhaps improvements in power supplies to make them smaller would help as well.
It seems simple, but even with recent inovations in other energy storage (fuel cell, etc), we won't see anything small (battery-wise) coming to market for some time. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
It's possible that batteries have indeed gotten better and more efficient but that the technology that we've been using them in has gotten more and more power hungry?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I don't think that there is such a battery pitfall. My iPAQ Pocket PC uses it's own built-in lithium battery and that could easily last me a week a regular usesage, with a few games here and there. Furthermore, my Nomad Zen MP3 player gets over 12 hours of life on it's built-in lithium battery, as well. That's well more than I need considering this: It is extremely easy to hook up these built-in battery units to the wall/computer to recharge. When I get home after the day I just plug my pocket pc into the cradle and let it charge and sync, and my MP3 player charges from the USB cable that I already have it plugged into to transfer files. I'm not a mobile phone user, but the two examples I listed are very high on the portable electronics market and I haven't noticed a problem with battery life at all.
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
How about one of those blood sugar powered setups. Then your laptop could help you lose weight without all that inconvenient moving around. I can see it now. "I need to finish this paper by midnight, bring me more Krispy Kremes NOW!"
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
It's not batteries that are the constriction, it is slow IO hardware.
Imagine what you could do if your hard disk could read data as fast as your processor could handle it (think RAM-like or cache-like speed)
Two things, first one is used the other is probably new (used batteries aren't much good)
second, they are selling the battery to make a profit. It is common practice for companies to sell maintenance items at a high markup for years after initial production. see the car industry.
I agree they are expensive, sometimes you can get the newest technology laptop batteries for older laptops and get a great increase in usage.
Like these?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
That article in Extreme Tech *looked* interesting until I noticed the date: June 2001.
Just goes to show the poster's point about the lack of truly revolutionary development in the battery field. But *please*, don't describe a two year old article as an "overview."
It's better described as "history."
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
A few years ago I got to meet with some folks from Eveready and a number of charge controller companies, and trust me, there's quite a bit of R&D that goes on.
For disposables, consider that we've gone from carbon-zinc to alkaline to lithium chemistries. In the case of Eveready, they have the L91 lithium AA, and it's pretty amazing in terms of power density and battery life (about 3X alkaline.) It's now about 10 years old.
Rechargables have gone from lead-acid to Nickel-Cadmium to Nickel Metal Hydride and also Lithium-Ion.
Keep in mind we're talking about a chemical device here that's storing larger and larger amounts of energy as times goes on. More energy = more potential for bad things to happen. Since it's chemical we're dealing with chemistry, materials science, and environmental factors (heat/cold, issues of outgassing, etc.) There's a lot more going on than a simple metal tube here.
A lot of the work that goes on is hidden -- it's hidden in the fact that the battery works for more than a few cycles. Many battery chemistries are very touchy when it comes to repeated cycling, for example, while others if not formulated (or charged) correctly would outgas or swell and explode. If any of you remember the good old days of carbon-zinc, it was routine to have things destroyed by leaking cells. That's one of the reasons the battery manufacturers actually offer warranties on the devices using them. (Think about that: It's like Exxon giving you a warranty on your engine if the gas harms it.)
While the future is probably fuel cells (I'd bet on methanol cells in particular, perhaps like Neah Power is working on) it'd be wrong to think that batteries aren't improving -- or that they won't be around for a long, long time.
Obviousally the writer is so young as to not remember the evil that is the NiCad battery.
Today's batteries are unbelieveably nice and great compared to the utter crap we had to use just 7 years ago.. NiCad batteries would get a memory effect, last very short times and have abyssimal storage capacity.
batteries have came a long way, and they will continue to improve... how about making processors and displays that dont suck down amps of power?
the problem isn't the batteries, the problem is the horrible inefficency of today's tech!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
All the big gadget people out there (including me) are all waiting anxiously for fuel cells to come along and give us super long usage times for our devices. But what I suspect will happen is that fuel for fuel cells will become the next ink jet print cartridge, with manufacturers charging insane prices for refills. The price you pay for plugging in your laptop will be a fraction of what a single fuel cell refill will cost. And of course you can expect the same manufacturer technical lock-ins as ink, except now with even more warnings like "Use of non-approved refills will result in EXPLOSIONS AND DEATH, buy only certified refills UNLESS YOU ARE INTERESTED IN BLOWING YOUR HEAD OFF. You've BEEN WARNED, JACKASS!"
1. If there was a chemical reaction that could produce energy on the nuclear level, it would disrupt nuclear processes - So whatever elements it happened between would transmute each other on contact. Look around. Do you see any natural element below the radioactive ones on the periodic table that is undergoing alchemical style (i.e. lead to gold style) transmutation to another element? No? Then there is a peak limit for how much power you can get out of any chemical battery, and it's lower than the weakest natural nuclear reactions observed. 2. The most electromotive elements are the reactive metals, like Potassium, Calcium, and Sodium at one end, and Florine and Clorine at the other. The reactive metals burn on contact with cold water, and the problems with handling the reactive gasses are legion. Batteries generally work with an anode and a cathode of two different mentals or metal compounds. Electrodes are generally made from metals in the middle of the electromotive range, like Pb, Cd, Cu, Ni, and even Hg, and their compounds. To get better energy storage per weight than zinc, nickel or cadmium just about always means working with something more reactive for at least one electrode. So "better" batteries are generally more environmentally damageing, or pose bigger health risks to humans working with them. 3. There is a metal with electromotility better than oxygen or clorine gas. It's called Gold. Unfortunately it is hard to get gold to react with chemicals, it's heavy, and it's just a touch expensive.
Who is John Cabal?
Diesel submarines have batteries that last for years. What do they use?
The public accepts the idea that batteries die and need to be replaced, so therefore, battery companies make money. What would be their incentive to create better batteries? So that the public would have to purchase them less frequently? Then we'd probably just end up paying the difference for the better battery. I doesn't sound like a good business model to take a cut in profits to make everyone's life a little bit easier. I don't really think there's much of a public demand to reform the battery industry, so therefore there's no need to do so for the industry. Just keep up with the technology.
I guess on a side note, my rechargable batteries are a godsend. While you can debate the economics of it all (40$ for a charger and 4 batteries), I just like not having to worry about having batteries for my MP3 player [Nike PSA64]. I use it primarily for working out, I go through a battery every week or two, throw it in the charger, and then replace it. They've lasted all summer and still give me numerous days of life. Prior to purchasing them, I was going through batteries like a mad man, buying a pack every two weeks to keep up with my working out. I think its the best solution for anyone who goes through a lot of batteries...
"In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve." -Winston Churchill
How is it that "batteries don't last as long as I'd like" turns into "there's no development put into batteries" in some people's minds? There's lots of time and money put into developing better batteries because if someone creates the better battery they will make lots of money.
The lack of headway is the chemistry, not the funding or effort. There's a finite limit on the amount of energy you can safely store and retrieve chemically from a given volume. A lot of development is focused on getting higher energy/volume ratios, lithium polymer and methanol fuel cells are good examples of this branch of development.
Looking for better battery chemistries is much more difficult. Between environmental concerns and ridiculous patents trying to market new chemistries isn't a cake walk for any company. There's a lot of materials that can be used in batteries. Not all of them are things you want ending up in land fills or in the hands of complete and utter morons.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Until you short one with something you care about. 50C of charge flowing down something in a fraction of a second (or 50-500A of current) is not what I want to think about. "Instant disintegration" comes to mind.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
Try the local hobby shop, or look for one of these. You can easily charged old ni-cads or NiMh batteries in less than an hour using a 'peak detecting' charger like that. Overnite chargers run at .1C or less (C = battery amp hour capacity) and can be left on w/o overheating. The fast chargers blast 'em with 1 or 2C which works, as long as you cut it off when they are charged or they overhead and get damaged. The 'peak detecting' chargers can tell when the battery is full and automatically shuts off. Works great.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Actually, the greatest (and most under rated) inventor in western history, Nikola Tesla, has already created it. For some unknown reason, J.P. Morgan refused to back it.
Batteries have come so far, but microprocessor power conservation has come a lot farther. Laptops have backlights and hard drives (which haven't come as far), but there are cpu's meant for embedded systems that get 100 MIPS+, have a few hundred k to several megabytes of onboard memory.. and flash for permanent storage. All told, these setups are not that special and consume only about 10-30 mA under full load.
If you only need about 10-20 MIPS, then there are embedded systems CPUs that will run for months on AA batteries. If it doesn't seem like much, keep in mind the 286-10 was only several mips.
1) Energy in a given space has nothing to do with exploding. TNT doesnt explode without a detonator, Plutonium needs a critical mass and a neutron source, etc etc.
2) Since the original electricity is a trivial cost of batteries, the question is how much energy we can keep in the battery, not how much we use to get it there, so this is utterly irrelevant.
3) Vacuums apply to pressures, not energies. Have you seen the sun exploding lately because it's more energetic than the surrounding vacuum? (No, sorry, flares dont count.)
Real problem with batteries: inorganic chemistry hasn't made any huge progress lately.
Solution: capacitors. GM is planning to use them instead of car batteries in the relatively near future.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
Fuel cells suck ONLY because no one ever commercialized fuel cells 30 years ago.
Fuel cell technology should have been the next leap forward. But it's taken a long time because most investments in fuel cell has been centered around space applications... where light weight, high-performance electrical power is a requirement.
An incredible amount of fuel cell technology was developed in the 1960s and 1970s for space programs - and when you make money on space programs, the bean counters know that there is no reason (financially) to look at other potential markets. That was simply a sign of the times.
Unfortuantely, now most fuel cell expertise has been lost to the retirement of industry experts. Much of the "innovation" in recent years is merely a rehash of research done 30 or 40 years ago, but forgotten because no one back then had a vision for using fuel cells to replace (terrestrial) batteries.
I contend that many modern fuel cell related ideas and patents are really old ideas that have been rediscovered by a new set of researchers unfamiliar with the developments of the past.
It's like we just lost 30 years of ful cell development... too bad, because if the corporations that originally developed this technology had their shareholders in mind, they'd have a slightly longer vision and would be leaders in a new industry.
According to the How Much Is Inside article on batteries, Duracell D-cell batteries costing $3.69 powered a flashlight for 116 hours, while some unknown brand costing 48 cents lasted 40 hours. This means Duracells cost 3.2 cents/hour and the other brand costed 1.2 cents/hour.
Who would have thought batteries could last that long, or that the brand would make such a difference?
A rechargeable battery that puts out 1.5 volts instead of 1.2 like current NiCds and NiMH batteries. That way you can use them in devices that were designed for alkalines, e.g. boom boxes and portable TVs. Using currently available rechargeables sucks, because you have less useable time with the device because the voltage was low to begin with.
And like what was mentioned in another post, faster charge times. I would drive an electric vehicle everywhere if I could go 200 miles (with no slowing down towards the end) per charge, and a completely full charge only took 10 minutes.
This one is the Shimano NX-30, and it will power a 6 watt front headlight.
Maybe not as bright as your old 10-Watt, and sure, there is a little drag, but it's not bad, and you get to stop charging your bike lights for good. And $60 for the functionality of a battery *and* a front hub is a good deal.
spreer
The battery pack for my Nikon 5700 uses 6 rechargeable NiMH batteries. I can take 200+ photos with one set of batteries. Using flash lowers that to about 150 photos. I usually take an extra set with me just in case, but I've never had to use them. I'm well pleased with the batteries.
Just a few years ago I owned a simple 35mm camera that used a non-rechargeable proprietary battery. It was expensive and good for only a few rolls of film. Yeah, things have improved since then.
There are two ways to increase the life of a portable device. Either give it more juice, or cut the current draw.
It seems to me, that there is a brighter future in making existing technologies more energy efficient, rather than increasing the load of the power source.
Contrary to popular belief, life is not a bitch. It is far far worse.
Outlets in the US are 120 volts DC. FYI. And your lightbulb example is hogwash. Lightbulbs will burn out no matter what. It has to do with the resistance in the filament which causes them to glow in the first place. Think of it like a dam, when you flip the switch on, the current suddenly meets resistance at the weakest points of the bulb, where the filament attaches. Occassionally it will superheat and boom, light bulb goes dead.
/. which is why you used them. But, regardless, if A is a square and B is a square that doesn't mean C is a square.
Here, go read up on how light bulbs and flourescent lights work.
Now if you're through making wild accusations, perhaps you can explain what precisely operating systems and printers have in common with batteries. I'm not even going to attempt to argue with you on those points on
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
A battery that knows whether or not it is in use. Perhaps it would be possible for another voltage to trigger the chemical compounds in the first place, that is, when there is no voltage across it, the chemicals are relatively inert. A while ago I read (possibly on slashdot?) of a substance which is a liquid when any current is going through it, and a jelly-solid when it isn't.
Now the downside to this avenue is that each battery would have a battery (likely internal). However this wouldn't have to be nearly as big-- by design, make a very low current required to start/stop the chemical process in the larger battery, which is now free to be much more caustic in nature. Now the battery may still explode from mal-use, then again a passive fuse element could also be added which makes sure the battery permanently becomes in it's inactive state.
I'm not saying we know how to do half of this, it's just one option we can persue. Another option is fundamentally chance the amount of electricity anything handheld uses. This would be happening right now, but every time we make something more efficient, we make it faster so that it's consumption is more or less equal (usually more).
I find that my 1950 mAh NiMH rechargeables last longer on each charge (> 10 hours) than brand-name alkalines, let alone the Sorny versions that choke after a few hours in my mp3 player. You can probably pick up a charger and 4-8 battaries for $30-40. For me it paid for itself in a matter of weeks, and I don't constantly find myself without batteries for my walk home.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
The instructors was somewhat insane, but what he said makes sense. He's also a considered a leading authority on Extra-Terrestrials. For as insane as he was, they classified a bunch of basic research he did into application of nuclear physics. You also couldn't find a problem in the book he couldn't solve. He was really smart about his physics, and it's applications. He taught all of the electronics classes.
It's also backed up by my emperical evidence of picking up the light bulbs that are 130v instead of 120v last longer in fixtures over the last 5 or 6 years. They aren't any more expensive then the bulbs you pick up a Walmart.
Kirby
hu... outlets are 120 volts AC. you wouldn't want near a 120 volt DC outlet! and he was talking about the peak at ~170 (though he said rms, which he's wrong but he really meant peak). the rest of course, is dead on.
btw, there IS longer lasting light bulbs that almost never burn out. i can't remember the reason why they are longer lasting though
Yea I realized my mistake right about when I clicked submit. A and D are just a little too close together.... Good thing I'm not an EE or we might see some dangerous products coming out.
I'd actually be curious to know how they did that, thicker filament maybe? Less wattage? Different method all-together?
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
The non-rechargable batteries gotten much better, going from the Zinc cells to the modern alkalines -- the capacity has gone up greatly (a factor of 10 or so?) And then there's the non rechargable lithium cells that can hold MUCH more (and costs more too, of course.)
Also, and perhaps even more importantly, the rechargable cells have gotten much better recently. Maybe fifteen years ago, you'd buy 500 mAh AA NiCd cells ... now most people buy 1800 mAh NiMH cells, and for a few dollars more, you can get 2100 mAh AA NiMH cells.
(Quick aside, NiCd vs. NiMH: NiMH have more capacity, but usually cannot deliver as much current in a very short period. NiMH cells do not suffer from voltage depression (often mistakenly called `memory'). NiMH cells are not as environmentally unfreindly as NiCd. NiMH cells usually don't last quite as long as NiCd cells. But for the most part, for most applications, NiMH and NiCd cells can be used interchangably.)
And more recently, Li-Ion and Li-Poly cells have really come of age. These cells often have energy densities and power densities several times greater than what NiCd and NiMH cells have. Li-Ion cells were extremely fragile and could not handle abuse at all, but the new Li-Poly cells are overcoming many of these shortcomings.
Ten years, electric R/C planes were very rare. Now, thanks mostly due to the improvements in batteries, they're found all over the place, and they can perform just as well as the glow and gas powered planes in many cases. All three types of batteries (NiCd, NiMH and Li-Ion/Li-Poly) have improved greatly recently, and all three are quite popular with pilots today.
(Li-Poly especially looks incredibly promising for the future -- today, some planes with motors powered by them can often fly a full hour on a single charge, and things are getting better all the time.)
In short, I don't agree with Michael Rogers at all -- there's all kind of developments being made in batteries. It's just that they're not happening fast enough for him :)
(Semi-relevant aside: I have a TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computer. It's powered by 4 AA batteries, and it lasts a very long time. Perhaps the problem isn't the batteries -- maybe it's the laptop makers who use CPUs that use so much power!)
What happened to the super capacitors? You know, caps with such a high energy density that they could be used to replace batteries in many applications.
Nonsense.
1 Farad = 1 Amp at 1 Volt for 1 Second
As anyone who knows capacitors can tell you, a farad is a huge unit. To put things in perspective, common, everyday capacitors often have capacitances measured in picofarads (a picofarad is one-thousandth of one-billionth of a farad).
Now, how much capacitance would it take to equal a single AA battery?
A typical AA battery might be rated at 2200mAH at 1.5V. It doesn't actually keep that voltage up the entire time, but let's just pretend that it does.
2200mAH = 2.2AH = 7920As
So, a typical AA battery delivers 7,920 amp-seconds at 1.5V. An equivalent capacitor would need to have a capacitance of around 11,880 farads. That's to equal ONE AA battery. No such capacitor exists, and even if one did, it would be absurdly dangerous to handle.
The strength of a capacitor is its ability to deliver its power very, very quickly. That's why a big capacitor would be so dangerous -- imagine discharging all of the power in a AA battery in a ten-thousand of a second. The strength of a battery, on the other hand, is its ability to deliver (relatively) unbelievable amounts of power, but it can only do so over much longer periods of time.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Moderators, in what way exactly is this "Informative"???
I'm sorry, but cheap alkalines are a good solution if you have a flashlight that you hardly ever use but that's about all they're good for. It does nothing for the case of the laptop or PDA, and they're envinronmentally unfriendly for anything that is used a lot or has a high draw.
130V bulbs last dramatically longer because their filaments run much cooler than 120V bulbs (they have larger and thicker filaments, hence a greater surface area to dissipate heat). This is great for longevity, but it comes at a heavy price in efficiency. The lower filament temperature shifts the bulbs emission spectrum towards the infrared (Planck's Law) reducing the amount of visible light produced. This reduction in efficiency will require more electricity to produce a given amount of light. When all is said and done it takes far fewer resources to make higher temperature bulbs that are more efficient than to keep one long life bulb chugging along. Of course, if resource/energy efficiency is a concern halogen and fluourescent bulbs are far better than any conventional incandescent.
There are also other techniques to increase the longevity of regular bulbs. Since the most likely time for bulb failure occurs at switch on, using a switch that only activates at a zero-crossing of the voltage waveform minimizes the turn-on stress. The inrush current to a cold bulb can be on the order of 10x the running current (an incandescent filament is an extremely non-ohmic load because its resistance varies dramatically with temperature). It's this high current that causes high stress on the filament (the motor effect can cause the filament to twist violently). From what I've read, this technique is often used on navigational beacon lights (these lights also use over-rated bulbs to gain lifetime at the expense of efficiency).
Another technique to minimize turn-on stress is keep the bulb running 'warm', that is to pass enough current to keep the filament at a temperature just below that needed to produce visible light. The relatively high temperature raises the resistance of filament, thus dramatically reducing inrush current. According to some theatre techs that I know, this technique is extensively used in theatre and television where a light failure could ruin a show.
I might look into making such a thing myself someday, if I get sufficiently bored or I could use it for credit in some lab class. As it is, I'll more likely switch to all rechargables and accept the hit in mean time before power loss in those picky devices.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
Yes, reactors are noisy relative to batteries. They have hot fluids being pumped around in heat exchangers and driving generating turbines.
Listen up all y'all. It is time to testify.
Maybe the problem isn't the batteries, maybe the problem is what we expect them to do. Sure a laptop that runs Unreal Tournament 2003 at 100 fps is nice, but when was the last time you saw anyone playing it off their battery.
Portable eletronics will always need to be more rugged and less power hungry then their stationary brethern, without exception, no matter how good batteries get. So here is a bright idea.(let me know if this gets too deep for you) How about we stop expecting portable electronics to be as powerful as non-portable electronics?
Sure try to make better batteries, work as hard as you can at it, but keep in mind what Lone Star said to the Druish Princess Vespa: "Take only what you need to survive"
No, and by that I mean zero, laptops need a DVD-R. Almost no laptops need any 3D accelerator. Why, on god's green earth, do cell phones need a camera? Why does a PDA need enough hardware to play videogames? Do you buy a cellphone for a camera? Did you go shopping for a portable video game system and say to yourself, "Hey this GBA is pretty cheap and has really good games, but I am looking for something that is 4 times as much and is hard as hell to play games on?"
Opmization is what must prevail. Making one machine that does everything, will not work. Give the people what they need. No one is buying a phone for its camera. They buy a camera for that. Power saved. No one needs to burn a DVD while flying from New York to LA. Power saved.
I mean look at the Game Boy. The first took 4 AAs and lasted 4-6 hours. The Game Boy Color took 2 AAs and lasted 10 hours. The Game Boy Advance takes 2 AA and lasts 15 hours. Batteries have not gotten that much better, but today's Game Boy users are spending 1/8th as much on them.
Programmers need to care about memory and processor usage again; engineers need to care about power consumption again. Do you really think that an mp3 player really needs to take 20MB of space? Power saved.
Batteries aren't the problem. People are.
SW
While NiMH batteries (and NiCad and to a much lesser extent, Alkaline batteries) will self discharge over the course of a a few weeks to a few months depending on the battery, you can greatly slow down the rate by storing the batteries in the freezer. I keep all my charged up batteries in the freezer sealed in a zip-lock baggie where they will store for a long time without losing much of their charge.
...or a solar cell used to recharge the compound that best recharges with a slow, small current? Ah, but we need fast discharge, yes? Don't they make these things called capacitors? I am kind of shocked that nobody else has mentioned solar power. Seems obvious. -T
^..^
this is a deltaV (greek delta, triangle, i can't type) charger (rate of change in voltage). the other type of intelligent charger is deltaT (temp.) dV work on the principle that when a battery is at full charge there is a 'blip' in the (voltage-time) graph which you can detect with some simple digital logic. not only can these chargers charge fast, they *have* to else this point is not as obvious and they're more likely to miss it (bad!) dT work by sensing the sharper rise in temperature after a battery is full.. not as clever imho but a good backup. just thought someone might find that interesting, if not n/m :p
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
However, carbon nanostructures are perhaps the most promising areas of energy storage research. When someone finds out how to do with nanotubes what people have been doing with nanofilaments, then we're going to have hydrogen storage approaching half the energy density of gasoline, at which point fuel cell transportation becomes much more attractive. (And considerably safer than gasoline storage, although such nanotube H2 storage can be very easily engineered into a powerful bomb beyond anything you can do with gasoline.
Anyway, I also like the Lithium polymer stuff and am sure that will be the next big advance that the consumer sees.
I've got a minor in physics, I understand the basics of electricity.
When was the last time you actually saw a bulb blow while it was running? I've never seen it happen in all might life on an incandesent light bulb. Ever. It is something about turning the bulb on, he claimed it had to do with where on the sine wave you are when it's turned on, and how many hours it had been run. I didn't have enough material science to argue with him. It's what my college instructor told me, I took in on faith, all his demonstrations of weird properties worked just fine. As some says further down in the thread, it could be done just as I said it could, however, it'd be highly ineffecient powerwise.
Toner, batteries, light bulbs and razors in a capitalism economy, it is in the best interest of a small cartel of people to control the cost and the quality of product. Just as the OPEC nations can. Because it makes the most sense for the consumer of the product to get the longest lasting (if they have the same efficiency), the cheapest toner (that has the same quality), and people buy the blades for the cheap razors they bought.
The reason it generally works out, is that the consumer is relatively uninformed, and doesn't think things thru, and/or can't vote with their money because it's a cartel, there are no options. A small group of companies work this area pretty hard. Companies do in fact make cheaper toner then HP or Lexmark. Last I knew, Lexmark was legally challenging people under the DMCA and patent law.
Oil cartels tightly control the supply of Oil to keep prices high. The RIAA was found guilty of price fixing. Microsoft was found guilty of anti-competitive practices, including using OEM's as leverage to keep people out, and have historically just bought any product they couldn't beat.
Just because it is in the best intersest of the consumer to produce more Oil. Just becaue it was in the interest of the consumer not to have the RIAA price fix. Just because it was in the interest of the consumer for Microsoft to compete fairly doesn't mean that is precisely what happens. The interest of the consumer isn't what businesses in a capitalistic society are all about.
If a battery producer could theoretically create a set of batteries that had 100 times the power in them, that cost them the same to produce, it wouldn't be in their own best to sell them. If the battery industry was a cartel (I don't know that it is), it wouldn't get released. It is not in the interest of the company to do so, so it doesn't get done.
The claim that a company would willing release a product that would cut profits by 100 times is insane. Sure they'd own all of the market, in smaller market. That's not smart business. Now, if they tried to charge 100 times the price, they couldn't batteries have a sweet spot in terms of price that the price needs to be between $2-$20 for a pack of batteries at a local grocery store.
Lets say they make batteries that will last 100 times longer, and be priced at times times as high, and cost the same to make. Lets say the current industy is worth $10Bil a year. You'll take a $10Bil/year industry, and now turn it into $1Bil/year industry. Oh, did I mention that your fixed costs are the same, so your profits go down faster then linearly. So your profits will be divided by at least 10. If I told my boss I had a great advancement on technology, but as a side affect it would shrink the market by 10 times, he'd fire me, or more likely, he'd pay me all the money I ever wanted to never tell anyone that.
Tell some VC guy, you have a way to make a battery that will last his entire life, and he'll tell you, he won't fund you to make batteries to compete with Duracell, because you
When you switch one on, the tungsten filament is still cold, and - like most metals - the resistance of the filament is lower at lower temperatures.
This is what causes a major surge in amperage, and this is what actually 'breaks' the filament. The cold period lasts only a split second, but this is enough to fry a weak spot in the filament.
The weak spots are formed during 'normal' use, since it is virtually impossible to create a wire with even with along its entire length. A part that is only marginally thinner than the rest, will have higher resistance and hence voltage drop and power dissipation than the rest of the wire. This higher temperature will cause the tungsten to evaporate faster, and condense slower, on the already weak part of the filament - causing the weakness to get weaker until in eventually poops out under start-up conditions.
The funny thing is: some ordinary bulbs can run for decades continously, but don't even think of switching them off and on after that!
There is an entire class of industry that revolves around the fact that their products are disposable.
Batteries, Light Bulbs are two of the oldest members. Neither set of manufacturers have any kind of incentive to make their products last SIGNIFICANTLY longer. Their revenue streams are BASED on the fact that you have to replace them.
The faster you go through them, the cheaper they are.. (carbon batteries are cheap compared to Alkaline, which are cheap compared to NiMH), becase they can make up the different in volume. But they still have to make money.
So, what incentive do they have to make a battery that lasts substantially longer? I shy away from replacing my laptop batteries until the absolute last moment, because they run about $120 each, and most people that have one will tell you that a used laptop battery (charge/discharge, lather rinse repeat) will only last about a year, maybe 2 before your runtime is in fractions of an hour..
It's simple economics.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
That bit about NiCd batteries having "memory" but not NiMH? Not true. Yeah, they got the crystalization part right, but they ignored the usual cause. Too many people (manufacturers and users) used dumb chargers and overcharged the batteries causing them to release hydrogen and oxygen. The resulting charge/discharge curve led people to think this was the memory effect, when it really wasn't.
Battery chargers today are much more sensitive to the charge state of a battery and as a result they're much less likely to overcharge a battery.
According to the GE manual on NiCd batteries, there really is a "memory effect" on NiCd batteries, but it relates to their use on board spacecraft in orbit where charge and discharge cycles are very regular. This effect is slightly different from that which results from overcharging the pack. Most people don't charge and discharge their battery packs so regularly.
In the case of the batteries in orbit, the full capacity can be restored by one or two irregular charge/discharge cycles. However in the case where you overcharge the batteries, you actually lose capacity in the battery.
By the way, overcharging a NiCd battery is less damaging than overcharing a NiMH battery. The former can recover some of it's capacity by exposure to air to recover the hydrogen and oxygen gasses it released, but the latter generally doesn't.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
I've seen reports lately of batteries blowing up.
Nokia: Other Batteries Explode
Google
While you make a good point that battery technology has failed to make the leaps that other technologies (like disk drive technology, for example) have, the issue remains, increasing energy density may cause explosions (batteries blow - literally), other technologies in comparison don't have similar failure modes (few, if any, disk drives cause serious injuries).
I don't use a regular flashlight due to the low use time, breakable bulbs and the need for spare batteries. The Eveready LED folding lantern is a small brother to the florescent folding lantern. Great for reading and lighting the entire inside of a tent. 200 hours of light means a spare set of AA's is just insurancen not a nessacity. If you want a tiny spot of light like the Forever Flashlight provides, the Brinkman long life LED light runs on 2 AA batteries. I like to see more than just a spot, so I haven't ever changed it's batteries yet. It's useful for looking for signs in the dark where a wide pattern light won't reach the distance. The brinkman is about the size of a AA maglight and is waterproof. The Inova X5 is just about industructable, weather tight and the brightest of my LED lights, but is the most expensive to feed. It uses 2 camera lithium cells so a battery change is about $12. The CampCo 3 LED torch uses 3 regular AAA batteries and feels light and breakable like the forever flashlight. It works OK, but it seems lightweight and flimsy. The Coast TechTorches are a good personal light complete with belt carrying case and screw on diffuser. They put out a lot of light in a small size, but they use N cells so they are ot the cheapest to run, but they are much cheaper to use than the Inova.
So in a nutshell, I use the Eveready the most in the tent and home for book reading. I use the Inova for daily use because of the brightness and it fits nicely in the Mag Light belt pouch. I keep a Brinkman in the car glovebox as a standby and the CampCo by the bed for the trip down the hall in the middle of the night.
Fry's has the Forever light on it's shelves. I tried one. It puts out much less light then any of the above lights. With it's lense, it has a small light pattern like the Brinkman. With the Brinkman I get hundreds of hours of brighter light without having to shake it and it's much smaller. The AA batteries are not hard to find. Most of the time I want a wider pattern to light a bigger spot than my footprint size spot on the ground.
The truth shall set you free!