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Battery Development Off The Beaten Path
Roland Piquepaille writes "Let's face it. Our computing devices are going faster year after year. But our laptop batteries don't show the same performance improvement. They still work only for a few hours, just a little bit more than ten years ago. Several companies want to change this, according to this UPI report, 'Nanotechnology improving energy options.' For example, mPhase Technologies plans to introduce smart batteries based on millions of silicon nanotube electrodes. These nanobatteries, to be introduced before the end of 2005, will last longer than traditional ones and will be respectful of our environment. Meanwhile, Konarka Technologies wants to reduce the weight of batteries with its flexible solar-fueled nanobatteries. You'll find more details and pictures in this overview."
Batteries is one area that has been laging behind the rest of the tech indutstry. With all the growth, batteries are very similar in technology to where they were 10 or 15 years ago.
All the big talk is about fuel cells. Will these batteries really show much improvement or is it another marketing ploy
Evolution or ID?
I thought Buckyballs killed fish?
"I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating. And in fourteen days, I had lost exactly two weeks. Joe E. Lewis
Maintaining the same life in devices that have exponentially grown in power consumption sure seems like improvements to me.
-/bin/true successfully doing nothing day after day.
...and thus having to deal with warranty cases for batteries on a daily basis, I am still waiting for the battery that holds longer than the warranty periods on 'wearable parts'... With one charge that is.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
It's about time, finally our protable devices won't have to trade off performance for longevity.
Of course in the not so distant future we will need to find new energy scources as our consumptions rise. Which of course would stem from manufacturers no longer trying to make energy efficient portable devices.
VENI, VIDI, VICI, DIXI
Seriously, "respectful" is a very odd word to use there. If you're talking about "they are recyclable", or "they can be disposed of without leaching chemicals bad for [people, plants, animals] into the water table", then say so. Inanimate objects do not feel nor care about the welfare of life on earth.
--
Evan "The sign into Davis, CA proudly reads 'Nuclear Free'. What a negative town."
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Perhaps this can be tied into yesterday's Slashdot story with athe Army?
Hmmm.
With computers getting faster and faster, doesn't it seem like batteries ARE getting better, simply to keep up with the higher power requirements of new devices. Sure you still only get 2,3, or 4 hours of battery life... but would a battery from 1990 even provide half as long a life as a battery from 2000 or 2004?
Sig!
prohibitively expensive.
So is just about everything till the patents expire and commodity-level competition kicks in.
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I dont know about you all, but Ive never really had that much of a problem with the life of my charges -- im rarly away from a 110v plug for more than a few hours (unfortunatley).
What we really need is a standard induction charging scheme. Where I can carry my gadgets around, and not worry 'bout carrying one-wall-wart per device around all the time. If Im at *your* house, I put my device on your charger for a few minutes while we have a tea... if im at work, i set it on my desk (as i do now, sans the specific wall-wart ive left at home).
Putting the devices on an induction-charging station would make the duration of the charge moot... it would CERTAINLY be much longer than time spent between these pads....
Batteries have been in development for the better part of two hundred years (ignoring posible evidence of even earlier batteries used for electro plating in greco-roman periods) the fact that after this much time the tech is for the most part a a platue is expected, to be fair the advances that we are having now are very impressive when you think about how much work has gone into this field.
electric computers on the other hand are just over 50 years of serious development, advances should be more rapid in this field.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Exactly. If sufficiently efficient, it might also eliminate the need for a petrol engine entirely - after all, the only reason that hybrid cars (or diesel submarines...) exist is that the battery is a less efficient power source than burning fossil fuel. It's all about improving the power-to-weight ratio of your propulsion system, whether it's engine + petrol, battery + motor, or both.
(Of course, the electricity to charge the battery still needs to be generated, but even a conventional fossil fuel power plant is a lot more efficient and less polluting than a small internal combustion engine)
Since we obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics in this house, young lady, by definition it will take more energy to synthesize a fuel that can be obtained naturally.
The fuel that explodes, as you trollishly point out, has the nice property of having a remarkably high energy density, which means a little goes a long way. Again, those pesky laws of physics and chemistry rear their ugly heads.
I'm sorry that reality is not which you wish, but maybe the problem is not with reality, but rather the wishing?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Battery hype has been around for a century. If you've followed the electric car industry, you're familiar with the frustrations of listening to new battery technology claimants. A basic problem is that more powerful battery technologies tend to require more reactive materials, ones further from the center of the electromotive scale. Lithium has been made to work, but it took a long time and a few laptop fires. Sodium-sulfur batteries seem to be too dangerous. There are some workable chemistries, like silver-cadmium, that require overly expensive materials. Thus, there are some high-power battery technologies which have been successfully demonstrated but aren't going mainstream. The mPhase people aren't even at that point.
This is a consistent problem with Piquepaille's blog. He comes across some overhyped press release and writes it up as a "technology trend". He seems to want to be the next George Gilder, who you may remember as a pundit from the days of dot-com hype.
I am not sure what you mean in that there have been no changes in battery technology. Just because the run times have not changed does not mean there have not been improvements. So 4 years ago we were running on Pentium 400 Processors with 12-13" screens as normal. Now we are running on 2.0-2.8Gig machines with 14-15" screens as normal. With the same or better run times. Not only that, but the batteries are smaller and less expensive. Just because run time has not changed does not mean that the battery technology has not improved. It only means that as the performance of the device using them improved, the battery makers improved the performance enough to keep the run times the same. I think that is an achievement.
It only seems like power sources are not improving, but they are. We just don't notice because our devices use up all that extra power. I wish there were more development of low-power CPUs and displays - when is OLED due?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
not by smart batteries, but by smart chargers.
When I was at U-Mass lowell, we had a guest speaker who worked with search and rescue robotics and was trying to start a small company to sell them to fire departments. He used dewalt drill batteries, in 18v configurations.
being in a robotics course ourselves, a lot of our questions focused on them. Being expensive and shortlived, the speaker explained that the newest line of dewalt drills had some sort of mechanism to 'recognize' different batteries. to keep the life long-lasting and decrease wasted charge time, the charger would be able to tell how many charges it had given this battery, would know when to stop, and would know enough not to 'hot charge' a battery that just came off of use.
of course, some other people want to do away with storing potential electricity alltogether, given the large amount of weight/stuff you need to store it. that's where stuff like fuel cells come in. store a fuel that we can easily convert to electricity instead, that might be lighter and take up less space and might hold more potential electricity.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
It's marked funny because it's an obviously idiotic suggestion that people assumed was a joke.
Really, you want to put plutonium, polonium, or other dirty bomb materials in the hands of the general public? The same public that currently tosses NiCd batteries into the trash when they're done with them? SRGs are a wonderful idea for military, for space, and for other heavily regulated and monitored uses (where RTGs are already used), but they're a horrible idea for the mass market.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Actually it is. The real problem i.m.o. is not the batteries capacity, but the power consumption of the hardware : the fact is that the processing power of the processor is not related to the power needed to run : the thermic isolation (remember the 'panda project' this three dimensionally designed CPU which was half colder than any other one or something like that..) can do a lot, as well as all the stuff around : unuseful excited components, bad quality of the circuit, etc ...
But another major issue is probably (still according to me) the power management.
would your G4 last 6h if the HDrives didnt stop, the CPU run a bit lower when unplugged from external power supply ?
So: I take it that batteries can not be well improved anymore. But probably all the surrounding stuff could be ?
*squeak*
Here, here. I think it's obvious the problem is not that battery technology has lagged. If it had, our computers would be getting WORSE battery life as performance increased, but instead it's stayed about the same. Meaning that battery improvements are progressing at EXACTLY THE SAME RATE as processor improvements, but the one is shadowing the other.
In short, want better battery life? Get a shittier machine. Battery life on my wife's 2 year old iBook is better than that of my brand new Powerbook. Smaller display, older video card, smaller hard drive, slower chip, no DVD...each of these sucks my power bigtime.
Same with the PocketPC vs Palm Pilot argument from a few years back. I heard a lot of whining about the PocketPC's 4 to 6 hour battery life from Palm proponents getting several days. Of course, their screens weren't backlit, weren't colour, didn't have sound, they had no compact flash card to power and the processor was about 10 times less powerful. Of course, they would commonly turn their machines off every five minutes rather than play MP3s on them all day. But oh, how come the more powerful machine has worse batter life? Dumbasses, do the friggin math.
I'd love to see what the LI+ battery from my Powerbook could do in my old 386 800x600 CGA laptop. That got 4 hours of life on 9 NiCd cells!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
If there was anything in the article that screamed "bogus" to me it was the following quote:
"We can get to the point where the initial cost can be competitive with the electric grid," McGahn told UPI. "If we had a 10-mile-by-10-mile square, we could power the country."
Excuse me? Really? I have a hard time believing that there aren't a couple power utilities snapping this up if it's true. I suspect this is at best a bit of hyperbole. And as such have to question the reliability of a reporter that would print such a statement unchallenged.
But maybe I'm just cranky at having an 8 pound laptop with half the weight being battery...