Batteries Becoming Limiting Step For Portable Toys

grqb writes "Reuters is reporting that strong growth for portable devices such as laptop computers, game and music players, PDAs and mobile phones is expected to pressure battery manufacturers to improve their products, which are quickly becoming the limiting step in portable technology development. The lithium-ion battery technology that is commonly used hasn't changed in several years. The race is on to find battery technologies that are lighter and have increased life, but major breakthroughs don't seem to be on the horizon other than the lithium polymer battery, which can squeeze roughly 10-20% more life than lithium-ion. Micro fuel cells that run off of methanol are touted to be the next major wave for portable power, although logistics and price still make these fuel cells long shots, which is why Nokia recently dropped development of this technology."

Comments

Obvious solution

[nizo]

Bring on nuclear batteries. Or is the Duracell lobby to strong for them to ever be legal?

Err....

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

We're already having problems with enough PE being stored in batteries for them to explode occasionally... Is everyone certain that MORE energy being stuffed into chemically based batteries for toys that children play with is a good idea? I mean, there comes a point where selling something 'new' increases its danger level a bit higher than we're willing to go, right?

Re:The Problem: Batteries don't last long enough.

[Have Blue]

One of the problems with a nuclear battery is that the energy it produces is constant regardless of whether or not the device is operating. That means something has to be done with the energy when it's not being consumed, and that means it gets emitted as heat. That is a problem, to say the least, for anything meant to go inside a container (such as a pocket).

Re:The Problem: Batteries don't last long enough.

[AKAImBatman]

And the (tiny) problem of smashing the battery open by mistake and releasing enough radio-elements in the environment to poison your entire neighborhood for decades doesn't bother you?

Depends on the design. A thero-electric battery (e.g. Pielter or micro-Sterling) could easily be encased in a steel cladding that would prevent the materials from ever being released short of being heated to a molten state. This probably wouldn't work for beta-voltaics, but a strongly sealed battery would achieve the same effect.

Did you know people with pacemakers who die are cut open to recover the darn thing before they're buried, to avoid exactly what I just described, on a much smaller scale?

Did you know you have this wrong? The pacemakers are recovered to be refurbished and reused. Plutonium is very expensive, so Pace Maker receipients were required to sign a contract that allowed the device to be retrieved after death. AFAIK, there are no concerns about contamination due to the fact that the pacemaker casing would easily outlast the life of the plutonium power source. Linky

Battery technology...

[satguy]

...has swallowed large amounts of R&D money since batteries were first invented/discovered. Yes, improvements are most often incremental, and differing technologies offer different qualities (Li-On maintains voltage 'til almost complete discharge; GNB (now Exide) Absolite batteries work down to at least -60 C. with a normal 20-year service life), NiMH avoids NiCd's memory effect, but stop working at 0 C./32 F.).

Demand for tiny, high-capacity stored power sources has never been greater than today, and the R&D budgets are ever rising, but forecasting when the next serendiptuous discovery of a new technology will occur is not easy...

Re:Battery technology...

[fearofcarpet]

Demand for tiny, high-capacity stored power sources has never been greater than today, and the R&D budgets are ever rising, but forecasting when the next serendiptuous discovery of a new technology will occur is not easy...

All the belly aching around here... Sheesh. We're working on it, ok? The DOE, DARPA, Office of Naval Research, Air Force, etc etc etc are handing out money for battery projects and I assure you that the next new battery technology will NOT be serendipitous, rather it will be the result of years of (frustrating) research building on discoveries dating all the way back to wet towels and copper discs.

Battery technology is slow to develope because it is not easy to pack a bunch of electrons in a tiny space wedged up against a huge electron sync and then ask them to not only sit there and like it, but to merrily hop back up the hill after being discharged, then sit around on the electrode until we ask for them again. You can't just stuff them in a box - they repel each other. They are happiest when they can delocalize over a network of big positively charged nuclei, but the problem with electrons is happy = low potential = low half cell potential = the need for many cells = big form factors... You get the idea.

Now take all that and add to it Nature's silly idea of charge balancing. When electrons flow they create a chrage imbalance that must be exactly balanced by positive charges. Now positive charges don't grow on trees like electrons, they tend to be HUGE by comparison and they like to swim. Now batteries with liquid electrolytes just aren't pratical so we have to use various glassy polymers and "gels" (or dry cell or whatever) that are fabulous ion conductors, but crappy electron conductors. It took years of research to find a medium that lithium ions could flow through without getting stuck right away and what we ended up with isn't even that great...

Battery technology will have to move in one of two directions and be coupled with dramatic cuts in power consumption by portable devices. First, fuel cells. These are great because you harvest electrons from REDOX reactions rather than stuffing them into lithium intercalated graphite or whatever hideously unstable electrode configuration is demanded by the charged state. Of course they can't be recharged and right now they suck because, and where have I heard this before, the best ion conductors (which you still need for fuel cell batteries) only perform well at a balmy 80% humidity and (and I'm not 100% sure on this) about 50 deg. C... The other option is "nanotechnology" (hang on, have to smack myself for using a buzzword) which could allow us to tuck thin films or tiny spheres or scrolls or whatever into very small spaces. This is important because it allows us to use very small half cell potentials to produce large open circuit voltages by wiring up thousands of teeny-tiny cells in our "nanobattery" (smack, smack) arrays.

So either go out and invent safe nuclear batteries or tiny hamsters that can fit on tiny hampster wheels that can fit inside my iPod and go weeks without hamster food, or accept the fact that battery technology is a real bugger... I mean we (scientists) aren't that lazy; some problems are just harder than others to solve. Why can't we get all over the electrical engineers to make lower power consumption devices? Can we harp on Taiwan for not trying hard enough to bring OLEDs to market? Maybe we should just build robots that turn us into batteries...

Re:The Problem: Batteries don't last long enough.

[fearofcarpet]

2. You're probably sitting on a highly unstable, very dangerous bomb right now. See that Lithium-Ion battery in your phone? It just happens to be a powerful explosive.

Not to nit pick, but lithium ion batteries are made from inorganic metal complexes (that are not explosive), polymer/electrolyte blends (again not explosive), and graphite (I sure hope that isn't explosive). The "explosive" element comes from the heat generated from rapid discharge, much like car batteries which are made from lead and aqueous sulfuric acid (not even flammable), but will most certainly explode if shorted. The "unstable" aspect arrises from the lithium "fingers" that tend to grow between the electrodes which causes, you guessed it, rapid discharging of the battery. At any rate an equal mass of an actual "powerful explosive" (high explosive if you prefer) would make the battery look like a match flame.

I'm not knocking the nuclear battery idea, just pointing out that ALL modern batteries are explosive, so don't poo on lithium-ion batteries for being batteries - they can't help that.

Re:Nuclear batteries won't work

[AKAImBatman]

Thereby making it trivial for anyone with Wal-Mart access to put together a "dirty bomb"?

Repeat after me: Dirty bombs don't work. They are a media scare and nothing else. Campaigns of FUD are designed to fool idiots into believing that everything they read in comic books is true.

Good. Now go here, read, and understand.