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Lithium-Sulfur Batteries Unveiled
mobilemag writes "Sion Power is showing off its new Lithium-Sulfur battery design this week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC). SION believes that its new Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) batteries are the answer to the power hungry devices on the market today."
http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/electri cal/ultralife/
Good for the heart, bad for the fart.
Just in case the server crashes and burns (like they usually do),I have put up a mirror.c om/content/100/102/C2838/
The mirror of http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C2838/ is at http://mirrorit.demonmoo.com/r_384/www.mobilemag.
Note to Mods: When I post mirrors, it's a best guess. I don't know for certain whether or not the site will go down!
Now I don't need a farty dog!, I can just blame it on the laptop!
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
its sulphur
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
and the dash stands for......e! It's vaporware people! Either way, the NiCad consorteum is sending out hitmen as we speak.
Li-S could be easily packed into the tinniest devices
That means it'll be great for powering my tinny DVD, my tinny digital camera, in fact anything tinny and of far-Eastern manufacture.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
What about heat? I know that isn't always a big deal with batteries, but if you've got a device like a laptop, it can become a huge issue. I can imagine these powering the PowerBook G6 or something.
Right, so much for 'news'. Call me when "still 3-5 years away" becomes "now available", then we'll give it a good look. As for fuel cells, they have been coming "Real Soon Now" (C) since... What? ... 2000 or so? Chances are we'll be stuck with Li-Ion batteries for quite a few years to come.
Hate me!
" Li-S is still 3-5 years away." Wow just in time for 4.6Ghz longhorn laptops!
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
How about instead of making better batteries, we make it so the electronics don't use as much electricity? I think working on effeciency would be better. If someone is more knowledgable about this subject, though, feel free to correct me.
blog & fiction: jd87
Well, these batteries might smell bad, but atleast they won't be depressed about it.
This is a special excite
This
We've taken your colonies.
We've taken over as superpower.
We're taking over the language.
Don't like it? Learn French.
It all comes down to how many mah (milliamp-hours) the battery can output, and the voltage/drain curve (not sure what the correct name for this is), and I don't see either of those things on this website. So until then, don't bother getting excited.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
We goddamn better be using fuel cells or I'm gonna be pretty pissed.
More battery info here
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Moltech is already working on this. And they plan to release it in 2003 .. which means that it should be in the market .. However the parent article claims the batteries will be released in 3-5 years
Time for "Pull my finger" pranks where someone pulls on your finger, and you boot up the iPod to provide the rotten-egg smell. Hilarious hijinx ensue.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Get your cock out of your mouth, no one likes you anymore anyway.
Where do you think sulfur comes from to begin with?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
It doesn't say anything about the cell sizes. (It does say "with a better power/weight ratio than anything on the market, Li-S could be easily packed into the tinniest devices"
The thing that's so attractive to me about NiMH's is they come in standard AAA and AA sizes. I make sure all my electronics take those (instead of say Lithimum Ion, which is usually proprietary), and then I can run everything on the same "fleet" of batteries.
I hope this tech follows suit. (I imagine it won't at first, but will eventually)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
At least our cocks are long enough to reach, you ignorant colonial tosspot.
So now you'll have to worry about smelling like rotten eggs when you charge up your PDA.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
its [sic] sulphur [sic]
Scroll all the way to the bottom if you need help finding the address of their UK office. Also, work on your grammar and spelling; it's appa(u)lling.
Presumably, the price of the new battery will be higher than existing batteries, and it sounds like it could be a big annoyance factor to be worse than existing batteries. Would anyone spend the extra money for something that isn't that much better than what we have now? Supply and demand, and all that.
Or am I missing something?
dtach - A tiny program that emulates the detach feat
there won't be any more of it, merely it'll be in a different place. as JesseL said above, "where do you think it comes from to begin with?"
Q. what would the battery industry give me if I developed a lightweight, portable, inexhaustible power supply?
A. A horse's head in my bed.
Unknown host pong.
The major reason we need these ultra-fast and hot Pentiums in our machines is crap, inefficient software. Look at Longhorn: it wants 2G of RAM and a two CPUs.
A friend of mine has a RiscOS box running a 100MHz ARM cpu. It is slicker than my Winshit PC with a 2GHz processor.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We produce tons of sulfur waste every day simply because it's an abundant element to begin with. It may not smell nice when mixed with other things (as pure sulfur in its crytal form is nearly oderless), but it doesn't pose a significant health risk.
Heavy metals, petrolium distilates, and other exotic chemicals are still the greatest threat to landfill leaching.
All in all, with only 300 charges, I'll keep my fingers crossed they come up with something better.
Across the street at the Windows Reverse-Engineering Hardware Conference, a group of hackers got one of the Lithium-Sulpher batteries to work in a laptop running Linux.
Unknown host pong.
So, what will be the impact of this kind of battery on the environment, once it is disposed? Anybody can speculate?
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
Linux-Sulpher batteries unveiled...
According to http://www.army-technology.com/contractors/electri cal/ultralife/ the Lithium MnO2 battery from ultralife provide 50% more power. According ultralifebatteries.com, the C batteries are highest rated at 4500 mAh @ 2V. The NiMH C batteries are available upto 5000 mAh @ 1.25 V. This means that Lithium-Sulfer has only as much power capacity as NiMH.
Did I miss something?
...i always said 'thank god there's only one new jersey'
For Crissakes people, if you own a car you're driving around with a Lead-Acid battery. Guess what type of acid it uses? Sulfuric. As in it has sulfur in it. Does your car smell like farts or rotten eggs? Not unless you're farting in it.
UPS systems also use AGM (absorbed glass mat) lead acid batteries. Don't smell any farts coming out of your UPS, do you?
Likewise, no, your laptop or PDA will not smell because of a battery containing sulfur. You'll have to keep blaming your flatulence on the dog.
Wasn't that the name of one of those "mico webservers on a chip" things? i recall a classmate messing with something like that.
"Power hungry devices on the market today" had to be written by a marketing drone. Only commercially-obsessed marketing drones use inaccurately hyphenated phrases like "memory-hungry" and "power-hungry."
The phrases are meant to de-sensitize people to gluttony so they will drive 4.5 ton trucks with 18-inch wheels to the grocery store.
That Longhorn will be able to run on a laptop more than 30 minutes!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
With gaming laptops weighing in at nearly 10lbs. and a battery life between 50 minutes and two hours, it seems they are less than portable.
Perhaps the Lithium-Sulfur batteries can provide a reasonable amount of time without adding weight--bringing portability back to laptops. Afterall, all of the wireless technologies are useless when you're tied to an AC outlet.
For portable personal-pleasure devices...
Umm...I mean something running GNU/Linux ofcourse!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
In fact all the toilet paper you use and all the paper you use, is made from trees which are broken down using NaOH and Na2S. Thats why paper mills stink so much.
Veramocor
If there were commercially available and low-cost fuel cell batteries that ran on butane, gasoline or methanol - I would all over them!
The hacking potential alone - sure, the initial ones might come as "non-refillable" or only refillable with special "cartridges" - but a dedicated hardware hacker could pull out the PEMs and such easily. Then it would be a simple matter to combine them and make a custom fuel cell for all kinds of uses.
I am in the (long) process of building a small electric vehicle (recumbent chassis using bicycle parts). Currently, I plan on using lead-acid gel-cells (good amperage, fast recharge times, rugged - but they weigh a lot) - I would love to be able to swap them out for a fuel cell. Right now I can't (without spending a whole lotta $$$).
I hope in the future this will change - and just like I can now with NiCd and NiMH batteries, I will be able to find them "surplus", and begin to hack on them to do what I want them to do...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
and the dash stands for......e! It's vaporware people!
I thought it said they were shipping samples now. The several-years business is about when they might be competitive as a general service laptop battery.
= = = = =
But that looks like pretty TOXIC vaporware.
Not that the other battery technologies don't contain toxic substances, of course. (Cadmium, for instance, is pretty nasty if you ingest it.) But high-energy storage devices like this are prone to catching fire if they develop an internal short. As a number of users of cellphones with Lithium batteries discovered not too long ago.
If a lithium-sulpher battery catches fire I'd expect it to emit a lot of sulphur dioxide. That's a serious poison gas and a really painful way to die.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Spelling of this lad is okay (Oll Korrect). "its" normally stands for "it is". "It's" normally stands for "belonging to it". And, "their/there/they're" are interchangeable. "Your" is "you are", etc. It is a new Internet speak, so to speak. Get used to it, dude...
SION believes that its new Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) batteries are the answer to the power hungry devices on the market today.
Really?
They're an answer to Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft?
Can someone point me to a list of potentials for different elements as used in a battery, to figure out the voltage from two compounds?
Is so that when you're working late in a confined machine room, 3 hours past midnight, the smell of burning sulphur will remind you that you're in Tech Hell...
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
It's a good thing
True story.
it's tire
No. It's the diapers. I really feel sorry for 30th century archaelogists as they dig through mountains of partially-decomposed diapers. And what will they think? ....
Smells kinda fishy to me....
Did you know you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
They are supposed to be better, right?
Huh? My PowerBook weighs 4.6 lbs. I barely even notice I'm carrying it. It's no worse than having another textbook in my bag.
The battery lasts five hours. What's the problem?
Troll?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Since when is sulfur toxic?
I read that these new batteries are only good for about 300 charges. Doesn't that seem like a pretty small amount? I am sure that there are people out there who charge their laptop once a day. How would you like it if your battery only lasted one year?
*ssss* wtf was that? oh, my notebook.
The PbBook!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You just have to carry a sixpack with you wherever you go. Ahh, the convenience of laptops!
I think I'll stick with the technology that does not require the constant refilling and disposal of containers. Or the purchase of same. How much is it going to cost you to use your laptop away from power? It just does not seem like a practical approach at all.
You'll be sorry when you're at a hotel and have to pay $8 for a hit from the mini-bar to go roaming, while I get to plug in and re-charge for free!
Possibly for cell phones if it could power the thing for about a month, that might be useful. But a computer that's going to run dry in 24 hours? I'm not sure how many people are going to want to bottle-feed the computer so often.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
now this is what i like to hear, "unveiled", not "in r&d and we wont actully see any commercial product for a gazillion years, if at all"
I know what you mean - one of my favorite bicycle rides takes me past an outdoor sulfur inventory - this sucker has to be 30 feet high, 200 wide and 400 feet long, a giant block of brilliant yellow. If you put that much cadium in a pile outdoors, Environment Canada would probably skip regulatory enforcement and just fucking shoot you. Sulfur is stinky, no doubt about it (mercaptans, you know), but in the volumes involved in batteries, it's just a non-issue.
Well dude, the reason why is not that the lignin is broken down by those compounds, but because they burn the black liquor (the gooey black crap you get from cooking the chips and separating the fiber) in the recovery boiler to recover the sodium sulfide and the sodium sulfate. The burning process yeilds mercaptans (long organic molecules with an HS stuck on the end) which are among the stinkiest substances known to man. The sulpher occurs naturally in the wood, and ends up bound to the sodium as the result of cooking the chips. The salt cake from the boiler is hauled off to recaust where they react it with calcium hydroxide (made by reacting calcium oxide with water - they get the calcium oxide from cooking limestone in a kiln) and stuff the result back into the digester and the whole thing start again. My old man designed a black liquor oxidation unit that really cut down on the mercaptans coming out of the recovery boiler - didn't do a damn thing for the environment, but it sure made the town folk happier.
why have people forgotten about hardware/software efficiency? instead of using x86-based lap heaters, why not develop more low-power hardware around crusoe and or ppc-based processors.... ? my ppc laptop (500mhz G4) runs cool with no fan and accomplishes everything that a standard research student would be doing, plus many advanced modelling/GIS/rendering/image processing/ and map making functions... all with a 3hr+ battery time on 6 yr old Li-ion batteries...
furthermore: stop writting/using bloated software!!! i can run my word processor/ of choice on a couple mb or ram, with the HD spun down for hours.... on a machines with less than 20mb of ram and a 33mhz processor... of course i use these same applications on more modern hardware.
point is: efficient software/hardware can save much more power than these new batteries can provide. yeah, new batteries are great- but why does simple computing have to be so damn energy intensive???
On a semi-odd and definitely irrelevant note, I got my hands on a presentation done at a conference of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.
Part of this conference was talking about a standardized driver's license/photo ID card. (Which they took great pains to say wasn't a national ID card since it wasn't being issued by the federal government.)
Anyway, it's based on a bunch of ISO standards, and the ISO standard is to call the document a "driving licence."
I've got pages and page upon pages of bitching about the fact that these people couldn't deal with the spelling of "licence" (though oddly "driving" doesn't bother them one bit.)
So while we might have won sulphur, we may lose license.
...can I use these new batteries, u bought, for my toys? they say, the batteries satisfy the power-hungry devices
Okay, I have been working with Lithium Chemistries in batteries for 4 years now as a member of the UMR Solar Car Team (http://solar42.umr.edu).
First a few things about Lithium based batteries. When they say a cycle life of 300 or 500 cycles that means the 80% thresh hold. In other words at 300 or 500 cycles, the "lifetime" of the battery you will still see 80% capacity when all those cycles are through. That doesn't signify the end of the battery either, we have some LG Chemical Lithium Ions (176 Wh/kg) that are 4 years old and still doing well. The problem is that after 2 years the chemicals inside the battery start reacting and could theoretically internally short, causing a dead battery, fires, or the classic cell phone battery explosion, yes that can happen. For this reason we are going to be disposing of those batteries soon, they pose a chemical hazard, you should also do that after 2 years with your cell phone battery just incase.
In comparison to Nickels, Li batteries are much better 90-95% charge efficient (what you get out compared to what you put in). Nickels range from 60-75%. They are MUCH more energy dense (175 Wh/Kg - 500 Wh/Kg (theoretical limit I think)) while Nickels range in the 75 Wh/Kg range. And oh yeah Lithiums don't get hot, one crucial issue with Nickel based batteries is the end of charge temperature can hit 150+. Also cycle life is better Nickels can get about 200 cycles before they hit the 80% mark, and well that is only if you treat them very nicely. Lithiums are more forgiving with some missuse (just don't over volt them).
So all in all Lithium Chemistries are pretty much the best battery format out there now, and for a while too. Lithium is the most energy dense element after all. This is why everyone is switching over to them for just about any serious work. sure cycle life is low, nothing compared to a Lead Acid, but companies are working on that, hell 5 years ago a lithium cell that lasted 200 cycles was impressive now Kokam sells Lithiums with 500 cycles and still 80% life with a starting capacity of over 200 Wh/Kg, roughly 4 times as energy dense as a Lead Acid.
Thanks for reading if you made it this far.
With any luck, we'll be able hook up some Dilithium batteries on laptops. Heck, if Moore's law keeps holding, warp cores may yet be needed to power your average 3.4EHz Pentium X.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to you!
Who said you can't get a fuel cell pack and a battery pack, that fit in the same slot?
So when are you going to use the Fuel Cell pack?
That's my problem, I can't see how the answer is anthing but "never".
I take that back, if you were traveling for a few weeks in places with no electricity (including vehicles) then a fuel cell might be easier to keep powered. By what percentage of anyone is that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The properties of an element contribute to the properties of the compound (e.g., fluorine sucks up electrons, which is why trifluoroacetic acid is so much more acidic than acetic acid / vinegar), but like so much else in life, it's very context-specific.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
But you must not forget that plutonium is a heavy metal and toxic. Guess why we are proud to finally produce lead-free batteries, microchips and such? So disposal and processing of plutonium based products will be some nasty job. The radiation -- as you said -- is not that big of a problem, though inhalation of plutonium particles in almost the tiniest quantity will very likely lead to cancer, since plutonium is known to highly carcinogenic.
This and other articles state that the toxicity of Pu is not that critical, since it will be immobilized in sediments or soil. But I do not fully trust this argument. Pu just like Pb is stored in living organism to some extent, and will probably accumulate in animals along the food chain. Maybe this is not a problem in the short term, like it was a problem with lead from car fuels, but probably in the mid to long term.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
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You call that a slashdotting? You should be ashamed.
Fair play. Guilty as charged.
(still sulphur though)
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
Well, admittedly I use a whacking 187MHz, but yes, even a professional video Editor that NEVER crashes.
Once I had a lot of electricity problems at home so I took at work an UPS and brought it home. My boss told me that it will smell. After some hours of work it really did smell. Not much, but enough to turn this fucker off and bring it back. My boss told me "I told you so"... heh.
Just give me my Mr. Fusion and a power adapter cable, and I will be cooking with gas...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
what about refillable fuel cells, so you could just fill it up with petrol or butane or something?
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Or am I missing something?
Only that this is probably what Apple has already been using in their iPods.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How is this different or better than the lithium phosphate polymer based batteries from Valence . com?