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."

Comments

Lagging behind

[millahtime]

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

Re:Lagging behind

[__aazuyo6398]

Also, I'm not an expert but I don't think it will work for the following reason: For the very first stoke this will work fine, but after the pressure escapes through the exhaust port. The remaining air in the cylinder is still heated so you will no longer get any thermal expansion from that same air. To do this correctly, the air in the cylinder would have to be replaced with an inlet valve. You would also have to have 2 of these since there is nothing to bring the piston back down. This is assuming you're not using some spring or relying on the momentum of the shaft somehow. Just my non-expert two cents.

Respectful of our environment?

[HBPiper]

I thought Buckyballs killed fish?

Power Consumption?

[bintrue]

Maintaining the same life in devices that have exponentially grown in power consumption sure seems like improvements to me.

Seems like batteries ARE getting better...

[megaversal]

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?

Re:Price?

[Short Circuit]

prohibitively expensive.

So is just about everything till the patents expire and commodity-level competition kicks in.

Induction Charging

[SubtleNuance]

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....

You do realize

[Nf1nk]

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.

You're not jaded, you're simply ignorant

[Gothmolly]

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?

More crap from another blog

[Animats]

The mPhase press release sounds bogus. What seems to have happened is that they licensed a technology for manipulating very tiny drops of fluids from Lucent and then hyped it into a "breakthrough". There's no indication that they've ever developed a prototype battery at all. It's not clear this approach leads to better battery densities. There's no mention of what battery chemistry they have in mind. They don't even indicate whether this is for rechargeable or primary batteries. It't not clear that this approach will even get a better surface to area ratio than existing approaches. Or that making a battery in a wafer fab would be cost effective. No way are those guys on track for a product in 2005.

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.

Power sources are improving

[RAMMS EIN]

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?

battery life can be markedly improved

[Richthofen80]

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.

Because consumers can't handle them.

[Valdrax]

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.