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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."
Do you need nano-tweazers to replace your battery then ??
This is the sig that says NI (again)
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 have always wondered why nuclear batteries have not been used in more electronics. They last practically forever!
"Here's a spoiler: You're will die alone."-Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Does anyone else see a problem with a battery that requires a voltage change in order to provide power? Will we need old fashioned batteries for our new high-tech batteries?
if you think this is bad, you should have seen my last sig
"These nanobatteries, to be introduced before the end of 2005, will last longer than traditional ones and will be respectful of our environment."
What odd grammar. "Can you not see I am respectful of the environment?! Do not disrepect the spirits of your elders, buy Mr. Power Extra Subueteo Batteries now!"
How there is so little development in the energy sector.
Im serious.
Weve been using the same fuel for ages. That fuel explodes.
Perhaps Im jaded, but why, exactly, cant we economically synthesize fuel? (Perhaps that goes against the laws of thermodynamics?)
Meh.
Im bitter.
... you insensitive clod!
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
If they could only make smaller hamsters, they could fit more in each battery. Thankfully we can plan on having nano-hamsters any day now thanks to the wonders of genetic engineering!
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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
I think these new battery developments has more than just applications for longer-lasting batteries for laptops, PDA's and cellphones.
It could also mean substantially lighter battery pack units for hybrid drivetrains. A big issue with hybrid drivetrain cars is the fact the battery pack does take up quite a lot of space and also contributes to the deadweight of the car. By switching to these newer battery technologies they could reduce the size of the battery pack, which means more interior space and possibly even better fuel efficiency since when the gasoline engine is running you use less fuel because the car is now lighter.
I didn't see anything about the proposed cost of such a battery. I would guess it would be prohibitively expensive.
That said, CPUs and other components are designed these days to eat up less and less power, so perhaps there isn't even a need for more efficient energy storage?
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
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
They have gas-battery powered cars, so how about gas-battery powered laptops? And for the long airline lights just make sure it can handle jetfuel.
It's too bad nobody has found an effective way to "resuse" the heat generated by laptops to recharge the batteries.
Maybe we'll come full circle and have wind-up laptops; as your laptop starts slowing down, just wind it up.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
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!
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
One thing is for certain, they won't give these batteries away. If they tried to no one would take them...
Imagine "Battery sir... no charge"
For problems, seek only the simplest solution, complexity brings with it more problems.
I always thought the seeming lack of battery longevity improvements was more from end-user manufacturer designs than from technology improvements.
It seems to me that the manufacturers of products that use these batteries know what an acceptable length of time between charges is for their product and may not see the need to improve much upon that. What they do is convert the improved length-of-life to smaller electronics. They reduce the size of their product (smaller battery) while maintaining how long it can last between charges.
Why do I have a vision of tiny little robots running on thousands of little treadmills...
Oh wait, that's a perpetual motion machine...
Super-iron battery
An article in C&ENews (16/8/99) describes a new high-energy battery developed in Israel using iron as the cathode material. The new batteries store 50% more energy than the alkaline battery which uses a zinc anode, manganese dioxide cathode and potassium hydroxide electrolyte. The new cathode material which replaces the MnO2 has been termed 'super-iron' by Stuart Licht, Baohui Wang and Susanta Ghosh its inventors, however, it is not iron metal but an iron(VI) compound. iron(VI) is an unusual high oxidation state of iron which is strongly oxidising, an important property of a cathode material in a battery. These ferrate(VI) compounds have formulae such as K2FeO4 or BaFeO4. In operation the iron(VI) is reduced to the more stable iron(III) according to the cell reaction:
2MFeVIO4 + 3Zn -- FeIII2O3 + ZnO + MZnO2
The problem with using iron(VI) compounds before has been their stability. However, the researchers discovered that they were stable for months in KOH if the iron(VI) compounds were free from nickel(II) or cobalt(II) impurities. The material has a high energy density and a high electrical conductivity so it can be discharged rapidly. The cathode is also compatible with nickel hydride anodes and shows some degree of rechargeability. It is a long way from laboratory to supermarket, but we may well see 'super-iron' batteries on the shelf in the next millennium.
(Science 285, 1039, 1999)
******
I just use pocket fusion!
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.
Last year I had an 800mhz AMD Duron Sony Vaio that lasted about 45 minutes on battery (if I was lucky).
This year I have an iBook G4 with a battery that lasts 4-7 hours. I'd call that a performance improvement.
This post was meant for battery power vehicles, but the tecnology applies to small devices as well. Battery technology is massively in advance of where they were 15 years ago. Viable battery powered vehicles are hear now. They're just still bloody expensive.
The current battery technologies are:
Lead acid: 200 year old technology. Give this a performance index of 1. It's cheap and simple.
NiCd: Heavy metals but good high current. Performance of 2x the lead acid. Performance 2.
NiMH: Getting rid of the heavy metals. Lighter as well. Performance of around 3x that of a lead acid battery.
LiON: Light, performance 5 x that of a lead acid battery.
They obviously get more expensive the more advanced they are. You can expect to get around 70-80miles out of a lead acid battery. Multiply that by the performance factors for the newer technologies.
New technologies, still up and coming. Used in small scale applications, mobile phones, laptops.
Li-Poly. Lighter and can handle more cycles than LiON but not much more power.
Lithium Sulphur batteries (Li-S) promise to more than double the capacity of LiON batteries, 10X that of a lead acid battery. That's a 700-800 mile range on a single charge, not even Diesel vehicles get that. I think these will do the job of killing petrol vehicles. Superior performance, superior range.
Basically. You don't discard the batteries when they wear out. Trade them in at 100,000 miles and get a "new" or refurbished set.
This *is* all nifty technology but still expensive due to manufacturing capacity.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
... some one from the Uk spy services went to Exide batteries because their spy radios were hampered by the fact that the current charge density / weight / volume of batteries was too low and resulted in low battery life or a spy radio that was bigger and heavier than the spy who was supposed to carry it...
The Exide mas was asked if they could increase the charge density somehow, the response was immediate, "Yes."
The spook was somewhat nonplussed, as this was not the answer he was expecting, so he then asked if Exide could do it, why didn't they?
This response was also immediate.
"We sell more batteries."
That was 60 years ago, why does anyone think anything has changed?
(esp when detroit is now producing SUV's that get worse mileage than 50 year old 500 cubic inch big block engined cars)
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
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
...a giant horse water trough full of water and algae, on wheels? We read about Electric Algae yesterday on /., right? DO WE FORGET SO SOON? :oP
do() || do_not();
These nanobatteries, to be introduced before the end of 2005, will last longer than traditional ones and will be respectful of our environment.
I miss the good old days, when you could chuck a battery into the woods and melt the skin off passing wildlife. Yeah, those were the days.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
How about reducing power consumption instead of increasing battery life. Yes, I know that people are working on lower and lower power CPUs etc, but these are just low powered versions of our conventional, tied-to-the-wall desktop machines.
For truly low powered processors, we need asynchronous logic. Current CPUs, when nothing is happening, close down bits that they think are not being used and slow their clock rate. This reduces, but does not eliminate, power consumption. Asynchronous logig, on the other hand, whenit is not doing anything - does nothing. Nothing clocks, nothing changes state.
Then the displays. We need ambient light displays, as opposed to self-illumiated ones. We don't usually sit in the dark, to why have a dispalay that assumes we do? Some of these are being sold as "digital paper" or similar. Unlike CRT, LCD or Plasma, when the display is not changing, they consume no power. Only B/W so far, I believe - but I would rather a B/W display I can read than a ulesless lump with a flat battery.
Which means that we need to rethink the OS. The steady state of the screen must be still. We are fattening ourselves up on animated this and that. We need to rethink this. We need to research hoe to make the pointer flip the minimum number of pixels as it moves. A flashing cursor is a waste of energy: find better ways of indicating the current position. Maybe WYSIWIG is too expensive: go back to type-and-preview: only a single character changes for each keystroke, so only about 30x20 pixels need redrawing. And scroll by a few lines at a time, so that you don't have to scroll often.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
1. Lead acid is somewhat forgiving, and can theoretically last forever if you are mostly careful not to do a deep discharge. Most other designs have a finite number of cycles.
2. Price. It's an old technology. Car manufacturing has driven the development, and you are pretty certain to get a functional battery that does what it's supposed to.
There are two downsides.
1. No deep discharge. Once the voltage starts to drop a little, you better get back home to recharge or the battery will be dead (not sure of the chemistry involved.)
2. Low temperature functioning. Lead acid batteries cool down as you draw current from them. If you take them out for a midnight ride in the winter, you will find your voltage dropping much quicker than you expect. NiCads actually generate heat as you discharge them, and so can keep functioning even in freezing conditions.
As I understand, for these second two reasons, most commerically available bicycle lights are now NiCad. This should mean you can go for a three hour bicycle ride and draw twenty watts of light. However, it does mean that you have to replace the batteries every other year or so (depending on usage.)
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
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").
In this months Popular Science, they were running a brief article in the "What's New" section (sorry, not available online) that talked about a company using the technology in the "bed-of-nails" nano-battery to make materials that could be made either extremely hydrophobic or hydrophilic with the flick of a switch. This has the potential of making rather efficient mechanical systems by increasing the effectiveness of lubricants a great deal. Interesting that it's also being used to make batteries.
Their RPC cells seem to have a power and convenience advantage over almost everything else.
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...
There is a feul cell in development that takes glucose from the bloodstream, converts it to electricity and urea. It is supposed to be used for things such as pacemakers. If you eat 4000 calories per day and hook one of these up to your laptop, you can provide a constant 90 watts and still lose weight!
Soon, the stereotypical nerd will be sickly skinny.
www.olin.edu
Finally, there are gas and diesel powered cars that get better mileage than hybrids, and I am talking demonstratable mileage, not what you see on the EPA tag.
Yes, you see those in Europe, but those vehicles tend to be very lightweight to improve fuel efficiency even further. The Volkswagen Lupo diesel is a good example of this, but this version of the Lupo is so lightly built that I have serious worries about its highway safety.
Meanwhile, the current Toyota Prius get around 48 to 52 mpg in most people's driving styles, and it has the type of interior space you normally associate with a Honda Accord, for gosh sakes! And unlike the VW Lupo, the Prius is probably a much safer to be in case of an accident.
I don't see how that follows. The batteries are mostly used for regenerative braking and for storing enough power for acceleration. The reason they are so large is that if you discharge them all the way it tends to damage the battery so they are only slightly discharged. THIS is the real problem with hybrids, if you had a battery technology that could handle being fully discharged you could remove a lot of battery mass.
TDI volkswagens get about the same mileage as a gas hybrid. They are definitely slick.
Then again, the CRX HF (1.3 liter I think) got about 50mpg freeway, but the CRX is a deathtrap, it's too small to have meaningful crumple zones. The hybrid civic is much safer, as odd as that sounds.
As for using diesel-electric or gas-electric like a locomotive, how do you figure that's going to be more efficient than a small gasoline engine hooked up to a modern transaxle? The kind of electric motors used in a hybrid are about 85% efficient at best. Even using a dedicated generator or alternator at the power input side, I doubt you'll get better than 90% efficiency, and the motor will still be around 85% efficient. 15% is a lot of driveline loss for a rear wheel drive car with a transmission, floppy drive shaft (drive shafts flex a lot more than you'd think) and these transaxles will have considerably less. Locomotives aren't diesel-electric because it's efficient, though they wouldn't be if it were horribly inefficient. They do it because it's a lot easier to control power delivery to the wheels (and thus the rails) using electric motors than some big complicated gearbox.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're forgetting about regen braking. My Prius actually gains energy when I drive to one particular place - through some peculiarity of the steep grades and one-way streets involved I end up with more power in my batteries than I started with. If the car's already warmed up, the engine won't kick on at all for the whole ride (unless I feel the need for sudden rapid acceleration).
Anyway, since it effectively wastes zero gas on startup (crank is already spinning with valves open, startup takes far less than one second once the valves start cycling and fuel is provided) I suspect the on/off cycle is a lot more efficient than you think. Check out some of the independent write-ups of Toyota's "hybrid synergy drive" and I think you will be quite pleasantly suprised.