Plastic Batteries Coming Soon?

Roland Piquepaille writes "Engineers at Brown University have built a prototype of a hybrid plastic battery that uses a conductive polymer. The system, which marries the power of a capacitor with the storage capacity of a battery, can store and deliver power efficiently. For example, during performance testing, 'it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.' Still, it's unlikely that such a device can appear on the market before several years."

Comments

Finally!!!!

[ZiakII]

Something to use in my sega nomad!!!

Re:Finally!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Roland Piquepaille is a fucking nut-sack smoocher

Re:Finally!!!!

[robbiedo]

No contest to my Turbo Grafx Express. I should know I still own both.

Ouch

[CrazyJim1]

'it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.', slurred the engineer with the scortched tounge.

Re:Ouch

[KennyP]

Gotta watch testing a new battery like that with the old-fashioned method...

Visualize Whirled P.'s

Re:Ouch

[TeknoHog]

Actually, the resistance of the tongue would probably limit the current to a safe level, even if the battery were capable of much bigger current than today's batteries.

-- TeknoHog, ruining perfectly good jokes with technical facts since 1978.

Re:Ouch

[tsajeff]

Try that with a car battery and let me know how it turns out.

Re:Ouch

[veganboyjosh]

ok gene simmons.

Re:Ouch

[znode]

How it turns out: Airway compromise due to soft tissue injury produced further problem during tracheostomy. Emergent airway management is discussed. Post-healing sequel resulted in loss of voice and prevented normal oral feeding.

Re:Ouch

[bergeron76]

This won't come to fruition because the Saudi's would will probably buy up this technology (as they have most other "silver bullets" to Oil Dependency). They give a few million to the alternative energy designer for his idea, and basically just pay him to never bring his idea to market. I personally know people whom have sold their prototypes / product rights to foreign "nationals" (aka, powerbrokers in foreign countries, just not government or "officials" for that country).

GOP: Grand Oil Party / God Only Party

Five to ten years...

[MythoBeast]

Why is it that we keep hearing about this kind of advancement "to be available in five to ten years", and yet the storage capacity of batteries has been stagnated for at least that long?

Re:Five to ten years...

[jellomizer]

Batteries tend to improve linearly while electronics tend to improve exponentially. So this really makes batteries seem like they are stagnant. If batteris went at the same speed as electronics. A nuclear power-plant will be in a AAA Battery.

Re:Five to ten years...

[enharmonix]

No kidding. 100 times the power is useful, but I'd like something with 100 times the life. Meh, it is probably like Hyde (That 70's Show) says, "There's this car, man, that runs on water, man! On water!" I believe the technology is out there to make a battery that can last longer than a week. It's just a conspiracy to get more money from me when all my gizmos run out of juice on a weekly basis.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Name Anonymous]

Because manufacturers make less money if we have to buy fewer batteries.

In a related rant, that's paritally why we don't have more fuel efficient (or alternative to gasoline) cars now.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's in total conflict with your sig... :)

Re:Five to ten years...

[luder]

Well, unless I'm missing something here, if it delivers 100 times more power than an ordinary battery then it also increases it's life:

P = V*I
100P = V*I
I = 100 (P/V)

For example, most powerfull easy to find rechargeable AA batteries can deliver 2.5A, or 3W, at 1.2V.

P1 = 1.2 * 2.5
P1 = 3W

This battery can power a 3W, or 2.5A, device for an hour.

With an increase of 100 times more power we have:

P2 = 100 * P1
P2 = 100 * 3
P2 = 300W

The new battery could power the 3W device for 100 hours, instead of the 1 hour that the current battery can do, or a 300W device for a single hour.

Re:Five to ten years...

[flooey]

Well, unless I'm missing something here, if it delivers 100 times more power than an ordinary battery then it also increases it's life:

You're confusing power with energy (which is easy to do, considering your "power bill" is actually a bill for energy used, not power). What it's saying is that its peak power delivery is 100 times that of a normal battery, so at a given voltage, it can deliver 100 times the current of a standard battery. It could well be able to store the same amount of energy, though, which means that if you're running it at its improved full power it dies in 1/100 the time of a normal battery.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Eideewt]

Yeah! I bet that if they wanted to, they could make batteries that could be "refilled" (so to speak) when they ran out of power. Conspiracy.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it, most can be recharged.

Re:Five to ten years...

[ceoyoyo]

You'd think, wouldn't you?

There's a little more to it though. When you're talking about batteries there are two things to consider (if you're only talking about electricity supply).

First, there's the power it can supply. More accurately, you're probably interested in both the voltage, and the current (multiply them together and you get the power). Most devices, from light bulbs to computers, require a certain voltage to operate. At the same time, you want to be sure your battery can provide sufficient current -- can it supply electricity fast enough to keep the device going.

So that's power, a rate of energy. You can convert it into Joules per second.

The other thing you're interested in is how long your battery will power your device. For that you need to know how much energy it stores, not just how fast it can release it. That is, Joules or, more commonly in batteries, Watt-hours, miliwatt-hours or, assuming the rated voltage, amp-hours or miliamp-hours.

It's the same with power plants. Your power plant might be rated for 500 megawatts, meaning it can supply 500 megawatts, we assume pretty much constantly, but your power bill will charge you for kilowatt hours.

Re:Five to ten years...

[donaggie03]

I'm guessing parent was being sarcastic.

Re:Five to ten years...

[enharmonix]

Heh :) Yeah, I thought about mentioning that fiasco. I really dug the whole rechargeable thing, supposed to save me a lot of money. Doesn't work quite so well when family members throw away $20-$30 worth of batteries every time they borrow the digital camera. I would all but write it down: "These are rechargeable. They cost me a lot of money. Please don't throw them away!" I get the camera back: "Hey, where are my batteries?" "Uh, they died so I threw them out. Don't worry, I put new ones in..."

Not that it matters now, though. We have a rugrat and a toddler so we'll have to wait until they're older to do rechargeables again... assuming Big Battery is still even selling them ;p

...

Black helicopters!

Re:Five to ten years...

[evilviper]

Well, unless I'm missing something here, if it delivers 100 times more power than an ordinary battery then it also increases it's life:

You're missing a LOT, but you'll get modded up for it anyway... The article even says it's only about 2X the capacity of current capacitors, shortly after the 100X notation.

When they say 100X more power, they mean it can deliver current 100X FASTER than a battery at a certain voltage. That actually does very slightly increase the useful life of a battery, but that's not 100X.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Dun Malg]

Because manufacturers make less money if we have to buy fewer batteries. In a related rant, that's paritally why we don't have more fuel efficient (or alternative to gasoline) cars now.

I've heard this argument in various forms for 30+ years, and it's as big a load of nonsense as it's ever been. Let's start with cars. How, exactly, does General Motors (or any other car maker) benefit by selling you a car that gets worse gas mileage? They are not in the oil business, and even the slightest hint of collusion with the oil industry in that regard would have the NHTSA crawling up their ass with a microscope. Hell, they're already up their ass with a microscope with CAFE regulations. On top of that, they have no vested interest in the fuel production industry to begin with. They make cars! If Chevron sells 20% more gasoline, they don't sell any more cars because of it. Think about it rationally: if Ford had found a way to make a regular car get 80mpg using some Magic Carburetor Technology (to reference the urban legend in its 70's form), they could make a killing in the marketplace. Why haven't they done that? Because the Magic Carburetor doesn't exist.

By the same token, the battery company that comes up with a product that delivers 3 times the amp-hours of similar competing battery will make a bloody fortune while all their competitors sit around undercutting each other on price trying to sell their crappy stuff to the lowest market segment.

Honestly, do you conspiracy nuts even think about what you're saying?

Re:Five to ten years...

[Firethorn]

I'd make them replace the rechargable batteries then. I'd tell them that the batteries are rechargable, give them the charger, and make sure they're charged up when they get them.

I'd also point out that if they don't return everything, including the batteries, they have to pay to replace them.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Alef]

Well, unless I'm missing something here, if it delivers 100 times more power than an ordinary battery then it also increases it's life:

The power output of an energy storing device says very little about the amount of energy it can store. An ultracapacitor (used in hybrid cars) can deliver huge power but has considerably lower energy density than conventional batteries. See for example this plot from wikipedia.

Re:Five to ten years...

[zogger]

They aren't in the oil business? And you know for a fact all the major and medium level stockholders in the auto companies don't also own energy stocks, directly or through cut outs and trusts?

Anyway, as to the miracle carburetor, smokey yunick had one, when he was mechanics editor at popular science, it worked as advertised. It was the cover story one issue and I have a photocopy copy of the patent and the article in the magazine. He made several cars with that design engine and they got *fantastic" mileage and very good power.

a little from the wikipedia entry:

"Aside from racing, Yunick's innovations include variable ratio power steering, the extended tip spark plug, reverse flow cooling systems, a high efficiency vapor carburetor, a high efficiency adiabatic engine, various engine testing devices, and a safety wall for racetracks, made of discarded tires, which France had refused to consider. He was granted twelve patents. He also experimented with synthetic oil and alternative energy sources such as hydrogen, natural gas, windmills, solar panels, as well as involving himself in developing the gold mining and petroleum industries in Ecuador"

You can google around for his adiabatic engines and cars he built, there's a few references on the web for it.

Re:Five to ten years...

[LightCecil]

Aren't these companies in the business of making better cars too? Sure that Magic Carburator doesn't exist. But you know what? Maybe they ought to make it exist. They can put billions of dollars into designs for cars, why not work on making the individual parts better while they're at it? The fact is, they don't want to make it better, because that means people won't buy as many cars. The industry's position is always the worst for the customer.

Re:Five to ten years...

[TavisJohn]

Leela: Oh Lord! Teeth do not belong in your pants Professor.
Farnsworth: Well I can't keep them in my mouth. They're nuclear powered!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Leela' s_Hurdles
http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/futurama/futurama507 .htm

Re:Five to ten years...

[jonbryce]

In Europe, the car manufacturers, including General Motors, are steadily improving fuel efficiency of their vehicles, to the point that a european car can do about the same number of miles per litre as an american car can do per gallon.

This probably has something to do with the fact that british petrol costs about the same per litre as american petrol does per gallon.

Incidentally, there are cars here that do 80mpg. Not by using some magic carburetor technology, but by things like not being the same size as a London double decker bus and using hybrid engines.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Jeremi]

I believe the technology is out there to make a battery that can last longer than a
week. It's just a conspiracy to get more money from me when all my gizmos run out of juice on a weekly basis.

Don't tell anyone I told you this, but I haven't had to change the battery in my watch for over a year.

Re:Five to ten years...

[shrubya]

Popular Science? You mean the magazine whose next issue claims car-sized invisibility cloaks are just around the corner? And makes similarly ridiculous claims that don't pan out every single month? If that's your most reputable reference for a purported technology, it's LESS likely to be true than if you said it was invented by elves.

Re:Five to ten years...

[Artifakt]

Actually, the "magic carburetor" has been invented at least 5 times. All such designs will get at least 80 MPG or better straight off the assembly line. Then a week after install, they are out of spec enough that they are getting 40 MPG, and by the end of the first month, only 20 or so. This is why car companies went to computerized fuel injection over a decade ago.
        Some of the major auto makers still build carburetor based designs in their labs now and then, looking for one that a controler chip package can keep tuned at better than fuel injector levels for at least a year or so. It is theoretically possible for an ultra-large surface area carb, such as some of the dual ram's horn designs, to beat injectors long term, but making it practical is not as easy as theorizing. So, you are right, magic carburetors don't exist (given a few adjectives such as "commercially viable" or "decently durable").

Re:Five to ten years...

[hernick]

Yes, you are missing something very important.

You've introduced three units in your calculations:
  * Power (P, in Watts W)
  * Voltage (V, in Volts V)
  * Current (I, in Amperes A)

However, these units only measure energy at a single point in time. But we're dealing with finite energy sources. We need to introduce another unit:
  * Time (T, in Hours h, or in Seconds s)

Let's take a new look at your formula, adding a variable for time:
  P * h = V * I * h

Now, let us consider a the same NiMH AA battery that you looked at earlier. To know how powerful that battery is, we need two know two things:
  * Its cell voltage: 1.2V
  * Its capacity rating: 2.5Ah (normally quoted in mAh / you'd see 2500mAh in the specs)
  * It's maximum power drain: 2.5A

These two numbers tell us that roughly, this AA battery can deliver its quoted voltage of 1.2V for one hour if the current drain is 2.5A.

P1 = 1.2V * 2.5A * 1h
P1 = 3W * 1h = 1.2V * 2.5Ah
P1 = 3Wh = 1.2V * 2.5Ah

This battery can power a device with a power draw of 3W (equivalent to a current draw of 2.5A at a voltage of 1.2V) for one hour. It has a capacity of 3Wh (equivalent to a capacity rating of 2.5Ah at a cell voltage of 1.2V).

Let's assume that these are the specs for our new battery:
  * Its cell voltage: 1.2V
  * Its capacity rating: 2.5Ah
  * It's maximum power drain: 250A

Now, this is where you get it wrong. What we're doing is increasing the power drain by 100, not increasing the capacity by 100.

P1 = 3W * 1h = 1.2V * 2.5A * 1h

P2 = 3W / 100 * 100 * 1h = 1.2V * 2.5A * 100 * 1h / 100
P2 = 3W * 1h = 1.2V * 250A * 0.01h
P2 = 3Wh = 1.2V * 250A * 36s
P2 = 3Wh = 1.2V * 2.5Ah

So, the new battery could power the 3W device for 1 hour, or a 300W device for 36 seconds.

Now, in reality, this new battery/capacitor hybrid is likely to have a far lower capacity rating (quoted in mAh on the box) than your typical NiMH AA cell. Also, the typical AA cell has a higher maximum power drain, which can be increased further by cooling the battery as you discharge it.

Also, in the real world, things don't work out quite as nicely as in these equations - there are power losses that vary based on a lot of factors. How fast is the battery discharged? How hot is it - and the more quickly you discharge it, the hotter it becomes, the less efficient it becomes. Is it a continuous discharge load or are we looking at spikes that give it time to cool down?

Anyway. This battery isn't quite the revolution your flawed calculations would indicate.

Re:Five to ten years...

[JourneyExpertApe]

Yes, you are missing something here. You're confusing power with energy. Power is the rate of energy transfer. Storage capacity is the amount of energy a battery can deliver. Here's what the article has to say:

"It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery."

The plastic "batteries" can deliver energy fast over a short period of time, like a capacitor, or they can deliver it slowly, like a battery. But their storage capacity is currently quite low--just twice that of a capacitor. One of these couldn't even power a 3 W device for an hour.

Re:Five to ten years...

[mcrbids]

Your Post:


Why is it that we keep hearing about this kind of advancement "to be available in five to ten years", and yet the storage capacity of batteries has been stagnated for at least that long?


Your Sig:


Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.


Isn't that a bit, eh, contradictory?

BTW: batteries are DEFINITELY improving. Remember rechargables a la 1980, these dumb nicad thingies that never really worked all that well? Compare that to today's NiMH batteries that outperform many alkalines, and are also rechargeable.

I'd call that a heck of an improvement...

Re:Five to ten years...

[kimvette]

And I have rechargable alkalines that are six years old now. Their capacity is decreasing so it's time replace them (they've been recharged several hundred times) but I cannot find rechargable alkalines anywhere any more. :( I really liked rechargable alkalines - decent life, higher voltage than NiMH. I've thought about just recharging standard Energizer or Duracell alkalines (all mass-market alkalines are theoretically rechargable) but they're not designed to be charged, and are not vented, so . . .

So, I look for rechargable NiMH D-Cells (AA cells are readily available). Can't find them anywhere. Eveready advertises rechargable Energizer D-cells on their web site, but does Sprawl*Mart or Home Depot, etc. stock them? Of course not. But even if they did: 1.2V per cell vs. 1.5V.

No-Name/Off-brand Ni-Cd are readily available, but who the hell wants NiCd batteries?

I miss rechargable alkalines. Damn the Ray-o-Vac folks to Hell for discontinuing their environmentally-friendly rechargable alkaline batteries.

Re:Five to ten years...

[owlstead]

And yet the Greenpeace car that has such a milage that even hybrids cannot outperform it sits in storage for 8 years now. The automotive industry: "yes, but people want comfort as well". Dunno, but for a car that uses half the gas needed for a normal car, I and a lot of other people are quite willing to sacrifice a bit of comfort and/or features. Especially in Europe where gas is very expensive.

http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/smile/tech/t able.html

Re:Five to ten years...

[JourneyExpertApe]

"It could well be able to store the same amount of energy"

From the article: "It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor."

Sounds like this is just an improved capacitor design. I understand why the reseachers would want to hype it up by calling it a new type of battery (publicity and research grants).

Re:Five to ten years...

[bill_kress]

Another point that your calculations make clear--it would be AMAZINGLY dangerous. If you bridge the terminals of a AA nimh battery it will get quite hot, in some cases dangerously so.

So if you did the same with something that had the ability to deliver 100x the power, you would probably end up in the hospital (if, for instance, it was in your pocket and the bridge was your keys which has happened to me a couple times).

On the other hand, it would be a great boon for electric cars. The batteries (if really like capacitors) would be infinitely rechargeable and recyclable. It would allow for a much lighter battery mass if you knew you were only going a short distance--you could actually tailor the weight of batteries carried to the distance traveled (which would be nice).

Another advantage--With the advanced energy transfer, it would recharge in a fraction of the time.

Re:Five to ten years...

[KDR_11k]

As the infamous counterfeit Nokia batteries have proven, that's already the case with LiIon. Short 'em and they'll rip your hand off. Counterfeit batteries lack the short-circuit protection which means if shorted (don't know what causes that in a mobile phone but it happens) they explode, taking the device they're installed in and nearby tissue with them.

Re:Five to ten years...

[KDR_11k]

That's partially because diesel fuel is pretty much nonexistent in the US and because car manufacturers build "bigger" (powerwise, not necessarily size) engines into cars sold on the US market as that market has more demand for power and less for fuel efficiency.

Re:Five to ten years...

[enharmonix]

Don't tell anyone I told you this, but I haven't had to change the battery in my watch for over a year.

My lips are sealed! I remember that lady who called GM about her car getting 500 miles to the gallon, then a "mechanic" came to her house to service her car and suddenly it was back to 12 mpg. It's true, too! It happened to a friend of my aunt's hairdresser's cousin. If word of this ever got to Casio, they might send a "watch repairman" to your house!

I also heard there's this car, man, that runs on water, man! On water!

Re:Five to ten years...

[luder]

Ok, I see I was really missing something :-).

I'm very thankful for your answers, I learned a lot and cleared out some obscure doubts on the matter. THANKS!

Re:Five to ten years...

[stonecypher]

Now, in reality, this new battery/capacitor hybrid is likely to have a far lower capacity rating (quoted in mAh on the box) than your typical NiMH AA cell.

Actually, as cited in the article, the new polymer battery has roughly double the capacity of current Li-ion cells.

Re:Five to ten years...

[stonecypher]

How, exactly, does General Motors (or any other car maker) benefit by selling you a car that gets worse gas mileage?

GM doesn't. Ford, however, who has large financial stakes in the fuel provision industry, does.

They are not in the oil business

Actually, it's the other way around. The oil business has been buying significant voting interest in vehicle manufacturers, and when looked at from their perspective (and the size of their wallets,) it makes a hell of a lot of sense. GM has actively resisted the practice, putting several poison pills into their corporate bylaws designed specifically to prevent this sort of manipulation. Funny how GM has been making America's most fuel efficient cars for the last ten years.

Now, the well-educated conspiracy theorist will suggest that this is just because GM knew peak oil was coming and didn't want to get dragged down with the other ship (and that's probably true; they've been experimenting with alternative fuels for decades,) but the point remains.

and even the slightest hint of collusion with the oil industry in that regard would have the NHTSA crawling up their ass with a microscope

The current laws allow parent "umbrella organizations" which already existed to purchase stakes in both oil and cars, provided they're otherwise diversified. Why do you think Chrysler started so many weird side businesses (my favorite example of which is a roofing materials manufacturing company) ?

Granted it's only a fraction of what up-front consumption rate manipulation would allow, but it's better than zero, from their persective.

Hell, they're already up their ass with a microscope with CAFE regulations

Yep. And current regulations are being tightened to prevent this sort of malarky. However, oil has a very powerful lobbying industry, which slows reform down, and has a lot of very, very smart lawyers who find loopholes to let them pull it off legally for a few more years each time.

We've been waging this war since the 1960s. We're winning, but it's slow going.

On top of that, they have no vested interest in the fuel production industry to begin with.

Even if there wasn't a formal interest, the oil marketplace is served by a very few producers, almost none of whom are significantly subject to US corporate law. Look where the oil is coming from: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia. These are not bastions against commercial corruption.

Granted ExxonMobil is prevented from behaving this way, but ExxonMobil is essentially a ginormous middleman in the way that McDonalds is. The producers are the problem here, not the refiners. To follow the McDonalds parallel, you're looking at the resteraunt when you should be looking at the cattle ranchers.

Think about it rationally: if Ford had found a way to make a regular car get 80mpg using some Magic Carburetor Technology (to reference the urban legend in its 70's form), they could make a killing in the marketplace.

In 1940, Tucker released an automobile that got almost 40 miles per gallon. His top of the line model, the Tucker '48, got 36. Ford's best fuel economy in 2006 was the Ford Escape Hybrid, which got 33 miles per gallon. Do you honestly believe that there's been no progress in the last 60 years?

Besides, 80 mpg isn't actually unreasonable. The problem is getting 80mpg in a car at over 25 miles per hour, in a vehicle with amenities that will sell (the weight of the car is significant,) which is built in a way that if there's an accident, not everyone dies. To give you a sense of scale, Suzuki makes and sells a motorcycle that gets 216 miles per gallon. On one 11-gallon tank, you can make it from Las Vegas to Washington DC. That's not fringe science.

If you make a car out of composite fiberg

Can you imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

... a beowulf cluster of these?!

The engines canna take it no more!

[davidwr]

Kirk: More power Scotty!
Scotty: The engines, they canna take it no more, they'll blow for sure
ENERGIZER BUNNY INTERRUPTS: *clang* *clang* *clang*
Announcer: Compared to regular dilithium crystals engines powered by new Energizer Polymer crystals last twice as long.
ENERGIZER BUNNY: *clang* *clang* *clang*
[fade to black, Enterprise exploding in the background]

Re:The engines canna take it no more!

[WilliamSChips]

I thought dilithium crystals were just storage mechanisms for antimatter...

Re:The engines canna take it no more!

[laffer1]

I thought they were used to control the matter anti-matter reaction. ok this is the answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilithium

Re:The engines canna take it no more!

[noidentity]

I take it you've seen a preview of the upcoming remakes of the original Star Trek?

Re:The engines canna take it no more!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop arguing about fake science. Learn real science instead.

Re:The engines canna take it no more!

[WilliamSChips]

It's not a fucking remake, they're just making the special effects look less like a 2-year-old did them.

Is this the Batacitor?

[Anonymous Coward]

All we need now are the grailstones to charge it and off upRiver we go!!

Average time-to-market?

[linkedlinked]

How long, on average, does it take for a new technology (especially battery related) to reach the market, after an announcement like this?

I ask, because I've been reading slashdot for over 4 years, and it seems like there's a healthy number of "revolutionary power supply" breakthroughs, or "batteries that will change your life (for cheap!)," and today, my new laptop still dies after an hour and a half.

I don't mean to be a cynic, but it really feels like these ideas never make it out of the lab.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[MtViewGuy]

I can understand your skepticism, but this breakthrough--along with MIT's research into using carbon nanotubes to build superior supercapacitor storage devices--could drastically change the world as we know it for two reasons:

1. It opens the door for a truly practical electric car, one that uses a far smaller battery pack (which means more passenger/cargo space and less battery "dead weight" to lug around) with very long range and recharge times about the same as one refilling the fuel tank in a passenger car.

2. It makes it possible for large-scale storage of electric power, meaning power generated by wind turbines and/or solar cell farms can be stored for future use when the wind speed is low and during the night.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[cp.tar]

It opens the door for a truly practical electric car, one that uses a far smaller battery pack (which means more passenger/cargo space and less battery "dead weight" to lug around) with very long range and recharge times about the same as one refilling the fuel tank in a passenger car.

Hey, if the batteries are small/light enough, even if the recharge times are measured in hours, surely recharge stations could simply give you a fresh one in exchange for your empty one... If necessary, they could make sure the battery's fully emptied (ah, oxymorons) before it is recharged as well.

That would enable you to carry an extra, too...

Re:Average time-to-market?

[GnarlyNome]

with an energy denisity that high you don't have a battery ...you have a bomb

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

with an energy denisity that high you don't have a battery ...you have a bomb

So then it would be just like a gas tank, right?

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It may be that the technology was thought to be too expensive to make, some liability issue or other unforseen complication. The demands on a prototype are far different than they would be in a commercially available unit. The commercially available device will have to be able to accept many kinds of abuse without hurting anything, and must work well over much wider temperature and air pressure ranges than simple STP that the lab will have.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Orange Crush]

So then it would be just like a gas tank, right?

Gas tanks don't explode in the real world like they do on movies & tv. Gasoline needs to be in a fine mist to become explosive--a puddle of gasoline will only burn as quickly as it can breathe in oxygen. A capacitor on the other hand can release all of its stored energy instantly. A big enough cap to power a car would go off like a bomb.

Obviously they'll have safety circuitry to prevent that from happening in the event of a short . . . but I still haven't heard how they intend to make them safe in a car crash, when the capacitor itself might get ruptured or crushed.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[bagsc]

As opposed to exploding Li-Ion? Or gasoline tanks? I think we're gonna need to dance with the devil to get to the next level in batteries.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Eideewt]

No one would ever drive a car powered by something that could explode.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[darthwader]

They do make it out of the lab, and you do see them. We just don't have the breathless "this is cool" announcements when they start to be commercially available, we get it when they are invented.

Ni-Cd was a "wow, this is cool and will be on the market in 2 to 3 years" technology once. So was Li-Ion. Heck, so was Alkine (a long time ago).

Your laptop still dies after 1.5 hours because some engineer decided that 1.5 hours was all you needed. Some of today's laptops draw 2 or 3 times as much current as older ones, and some have smaller batteries. So battery technology has improved radically in order to get the same run-time.

The laptop designers need to trade off processing power, run-time, weight, cost and size. Because of constantly improving battery technology, they can improve many of the factors without hurting others. But they still need to make that trade-off, and they seem to have have picked a run-time to remain constant. When this new technology does find it's way into production, I don't think it will result in laptops with 2 or 3 times as much run-time. I think it will result in smaller and lighter, and more powerful, and possibly cheaper laptops. That's the pattern we've seen for the past few years.

If you don't like the trade-off they made, you can purchase a 3rd party batter with much better run-time. It may cost more, weigh more and take up more space than the one in your laptop, but you'll get the runtime you want. I suggest you look at http://www.electrovaya.com/product/powerpad_produc t.html for some batteries that are designed for max life.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[emil10001]

2. It makes it possible for large-scale storage of electric power, meaning power generated by wind turbines and/or solar cell farms can be stored for future use when the wind speed is low and during the night.

Couldn't windfarms just sell their energy back to the grid? I guess that it is very dependant upon the economics of energy, but it would seem to me that in any case it would be much easier to just feed the produced energy back into the grid, get paid for that, then pay for what you use in your home. This way, you still have the opportunity to get paid for what extra energy you produce, while still being able to purchase what you can't produce. It would also depend on your goal, if your goal was to get off the grid, this type of storage would be great. But, if your goal was simply to save money, it might be a lot easier and more economical feeding back into the grid.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[popeye44]

Well at least yours last an hour and a half my dell just goes up in flames....

Re:Average time-to-market?

[jonbryce]

At the moment, they do just sell back to the grid. You can do this up to the point where windfarms supply about 10% of total electricity (these are british figures, it will depend on the country in question). Currently it supplies about 1% (again British figures).

At some point, if you want supply your entire electricy requirements from things like solar, wind, tidal and hydro, then you need some way of storing the electricity until it is needed.

Hydro can do this to a certain extent, but certainly in Britain, pretty much all the suitable sites for hydro are already in use, and this doesn't provide enough electricity to meet peak demand. Mostly we use gas powered stations to meet this.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Millenniumman]

A gas tank won't explode nearly as badly as a gigantic battery. It may catch fire easier, though.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[smartdreamer]

I understand your point. Maybe we are not there yet with batteries, but you can take advantage of real techonogical improvement in your life using CFL light bulbs! 20 years back, they sucked, but now they require 4 to 5 times less Watts for the same lumen output and they last 10 times longer than traditional incandescent lamp. As previously covered on ./ before

Who said you couldn't make money out of saving the environment? Just remember to dispose them properly when finished since they contain mercury.

It is possible to benefit from tachnological progress in energy consumption. Batteries are the next big thing to improve. Be patient my friend, it's coming.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[spirit of reason]

The newest lithium ion batteries don't explode either. A123 Systems has demonstrated that their batteries don't explode under various stress tests. You can see a video of one of them here.

Their batteries aren't as energy dense or have as high the specific energy as the current stuff used in laptops and such. But they have some pretty extreme power densities. If there were a power source for it, the standard fast charge is 15 minutes.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[marcosdumay]

"but I still haven't heard how they intend to make them safe in a car crash, when the capacitor itself might get ruptured or crushed."

We still have the technique we use today to make safe batteries... Encapsulate several little batteries, and use them toghether to make a huge one.

The strenght of the container you put your battery on decreases proportionaly to its size, but the ebergy it contains decreases with the third power of the size. So, the real question is: How long until we are able to manufacture (and use) super-capacitors that are small enough to be safe?

Re:Average time-to-market?

[ndg123]

A very very long time, because the component parts making up a battery are covered by multiple patents, and its almost impossible to enter the market now based on a new invention alone. Instead you have to sell or licence it to an existing market player for it to be used. Besides, this is just a lot of 'meh' - polypyrole, doped with something ? been done for the last 10 years. And that estimeed inventress appears to be holding a petri dish with some samples on, not a ready made battery. Beware any article that comes from a press office and not a peer-reviewed journal.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[rapidweather]

...my new laptop still dies after an hour and a half.

Also, there is the replacement cost of a laptop battery, they fail after a few years of use. By that time, the new laptops have increased in power and performance, so I tend to want to weigh the cost of a new battery vs just getting a new laptop. New battery, delivered, perhaps less than 15-20% of the cost of a new laptop, but consider this:

1. Toshiba T1910CS, 4 MB of RAM, DOS/Windows 3.1, lots of handy Toshiba utilities, such as Windows 3.1 or DOS floppy disk creator, so you can give everyone a set of DOS or Windows 3.1 installer floppies. Upgraded everything, so it has Internet Explorer and can dial up using the PCMCIA modem, and surf the web. Windows 3.1 did not do that unless upgraded (a lot).
   Cost $999.00, memory upgrade 16MB, total 20 MB, $350.00.
   Screen now almost gone, very dim, and battery is dead. Will run, and you can see the display if you turn off all the room lights. I can run Arachne on it, and some have installed linux, the link above shows that.
   
2. Toshiba 4015CDS, 32 MB RAM standard, upgrade to 160 MB about $50.00 (friend couldn't use the stick).
   Windows 98, 4 GB hard drive. Will run my livecd linux (see screenshots, below) directly from the hard drive, using loadlin and some menu batch files, completely freeing the CDROM Drive. Battery is dead. New one probably over $120.00 delivered. Laptop when new was (gasp) $2100.00. I buried the receipt in a time capsule to be opened in 100 years (just kidding).

One advantage to the 4015CDS is that it can run linux which is easier on the hard drive (and the battery), than Windows 98, now an unsupported OS. PCMCIA modem gives good dial-up performance, usually 48000 bps or higher. Does 800x600x24, display still works good.
Still, considering the cost of the battery, a new laptop might be worth it. Windows XP would be nice to run for music and photo's , but I would not really want to let it out onto the internet. To do that, I'll use my livecd linux, especially when doing online banking and bill paying. I can easily download songs while booted into linux and place them in the XP filesystem, reboot and play them there. I think one can download the Windows Update patches (according to Kyle Rankin) using linux, and then reboot and apply them.

So, new battery technology is long awaited, especially for all kinds of mobile devices, laptops, etc.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[kimvette]

Ni-Cd was a "wow, this is cool and will be on the market in 2 to 3 years" technology once.

You were there for that, in the 1800s? Just how old ARE you? ;)

Re:Average time-to-market?

[GrievousMistake]

Or like car batteries, that tend to get buildups of hydrogen gas inside them.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Anonymous Coward]

4 years.

To whit: http://www.a123systems.com/ was founded by a professor of mine in 2001, and their batteries (while having roughly the same power density as normal lithium-ion batteries) can discharge at a rate of 3000 W/kg while being so safe that you can literally drill a hole through them without them exploding.

That's on the order of 5x the power density of typical lithium ions now.

They already have factories in China, and you can buy the batteries commercially. They won't improve computer life much though (increased power, not energy density). However, for applications like coordless power tools, these little guys can actually provide *more* power than a wall outlet rated at 20 amps (though only for 5-10 minutes of continuous use =) )

Most leaps in technology aren't that huge, small increments that you'd barely notice. Anectdotal evidence -- my cell phone needs to be recharged every three days or so. My old cell phone needed to be charged every night. Not that that's proof, not enough controls, but it's strongly suggestive of improvements occuring that sales people just don't understand well enough to brag about.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Yes, because slowly leaking flamable liquids all over the place sounds much better. If the battery/cap goes off like a bomb, then that event can only happen once, and it's a short duration with more predicatable results. I'm sure they can design it in such away that it doesn't sent shrapnel flying in random directions.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[WindBourne]

What is a nuke plant? a natural gas plant? or even a coal plant?

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Anonymous Coward]

My laptop lasts 6 hours. Maybe you need a new laptop?

Re:Average time-to-market?

[CAIMLAS]

Much of the weight provided by the batteries (or engine, etc.) in a car is not "dead weight". It is completely, absolutely necessary for the speeds at which modern veihcles routinely travel in order to keep the vehicle from flying from the roadway and flipping end over end.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[bergeron76]

His skeptism stems from the fact that every technology that involves "Energy" never gets brought into mainstream production. Historically, this can be blamed on governments, because it:

a) keeps people under control (if you control how they get from point a to point b, you have complete control over them [particularly if point b puts food on their table])
b) keeps people under control (prevent derision, deviation, and other "unacceptable" practices such as: free-thought [because governments purchase garage technology and quell it if it gives power to the people)
c) keeps people under control (promote "Faith" and blind following of a God [ex. "Faithful interpretation of the Constitution"])

Re:Average time-to-market?

[stonecypher]

How long, on average, does it take for a new technology (especially battery related) to reach the market, after an announcement like this?

The variance is huge - so large that the average is immaterial. Fuel cells made it to market in under 18 months. Francium anode batteries are still a promising technology and are still being researched, but were originally conceived of in the late 1960s. Thorium (radioactive decay) batteries were implemented in a matter of months, but it took more than ten years for regulators to make them legal. Lithium Ion batteries were released in six years, but given the current heating, distortion, bloating and occasional fire problems, it can be argued that they were underdeveloped.

Basically, this is Duke Amperage Forever. They'll promise it for a long time, but it could come out god only knows when.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[stonecypher]

1. The energy density is roughly double that of current lithium ion models. When you discuss a battery's power, you're not discussing storage, you're discussing release rate. That 100x regards how fast the battery can drain.
2. We only really need to match the energy density of gasoline in order to make it real-world practical.
3. A tank of gasoline is also a bomb. For that matter, so are batteries, ## todo: insert Dell laptop joke here.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[stonecypher]

Gasoline needs to be in a fine mist to become explosive

Well, a spray is actually good enough, which isn't tremendously rare in bad car accidents. Also, there are ample sparks to get the party started. I saw a special on The History Channel that suggests that there's a gasoline explosion, generally due to massive compounded driver error, once every three days in the United States. To wit, I even saw one once. Sure, they don't send a car sailing through the air, but they're enough to roll it onto its top, and to send glass and metal shards flying everywhere.

The reason the US has such extensive and complex requirements regarding gas tank safety is that this is a very real issue. The reason that you almost never hear about this actually happening in a nation of 300 million compulsive drivers is that safety engineers are very good at their jobs.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[stonecypher]

No one would ever drive a car powered by something that could explode.

In the right situation, your current gas tank and starting battery can each explode. Before the development of the honeycomb isolation gas tank, it wasn't even all that uncommon in bad car accidents. If you replace "could" with "is likely to," you will begin to understand a sad truth about humanity. We gamble with everything, every day, including our lives.

Notice that there are also quite a few things in your house that can explode, including your television (temperature, electricity surge, or implosion, which is just as bad since the glass shards just bounce off the back of the CRT and outwards, also sparks, yay fire,) your furnace, your hot water heater, some kinds of dryer (lint can cause more than fires,) some kinds of microwave, gas stoves, and so on.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[Eideewt]

That was sarcasm, by the way. As long as the batteries in question are only about as likely to kill us as gasoline, I don't see a problem.

Re:Average time-to-market?

[stonecypher]

Sarcasm that nobody can see is of poor quality. Please note that your sarcasm was poor enough that some dumb mod modded you insightful. (Given how many people were saying exactly that right around where you said it, I'll maintain my skepticism, thanks.)

Re:Average time-to-market?

[WuphonsReach]

Note that the tech improvements slowed down after 2000-2001. Look at specs of a 2002 Tecra 9100 - 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, 100GB HD, SXGA+ screen. Which is still a very capable machine (but that is slowly showing its age). Next year when it turns 5 I plan on handing it off to a less demanding user who can probably get another 3 years of life out of it.

The days of double-the-performance every 15 months are probably long gone. (Unless AMD and Intel can manage to double the cores in their chips every 15 months.) Nowadays, things run on a longer ~3 year cycle before performance doubles. A good laptop can easily last 5 years if it's taken care of.

So it's more likely to be worth that 10-15% upgrade cost now then it used to be.

an hybrid?

[Anonymous Coward]

a prototype of an hybrid

A hybrid, A! it's only an if you mispronounce hybrid.

Re:an hybrid?

[donaggie03]

Maybe he's British . . or Australian?

Re:an hybrid?

[CreateWindowEx]

For that matter, "an apple" used to be "a napple", by people mispronouncing it. (From Naples). Like a naprun. It's an example of affix clipping.

How do you like them napples?

Re:an hybrid?

[Fnordulicious]

Sorry to be the bad one in the barrel, but "apple" is not an example of affix clipping. The word is actually reconstructed in Proto-Germanic, and also appears in Proto-Slavic and in modern Lithuanian, Latvian, Irish, and Welsh. It's not known how the various words are related, but it is clear that they are since they all begin with /a/ or palatalized /ja/, although Lithuanian has raised the vowel to /o/. In addition, the medial consonant is bilabial in all of the daughter languages, except in Modern German and various high German dialects where it has shifted to the /pf/ cluster and in Welsh and Irish where it is labiodental. This medial consonant is voiced in the Slavic family, in Latvian and Lithuanian, and in Irish. The /l/ appears in various forms in all of these languages, sometimes in a consonant cluster, sometimes palatalized, and sometimes with a following vowel. The Slavic languages have added a /ko/ on the end whose original function is unknown, cf. Russian /jabloko/.

Now, not to compare apples and oranges, but the word "orange" is indeed an example of affix clipping. In this case the loss of initial /n/ seems to have occurred in Italian and French before the word was borrowed into Anglo-Norman and thence into English. However, the OED notes that this may reflect loss of initial /n/ in some varieties of Arabic at the time.

Re:an hybrid?

[CreateWindowEx]

I was misinformed, then, or had gotten apples and oranges mixed up--the classic error. I should have remembered "yabloko" (wow, that looks really weird in Roman characters) since I at one point took a little Russian a million years ago. Oh well... thanks for setting the record straight!

Re:an hybrid?

[Anonymous Coward]

For English, the root is probably Welsh. Shop (siop) is another example of welsh being used in English, though (again) the English can't spell...

Re:an hybrid?

[cahalsall]

Milton Firebrass built it and someone in parolando named it a batacitator. I think we should stick with that name.

summary is pretty bad, this is not a revolution

[arete]

The summary is pretty bad. If I'm reading the article right:

This is neat, but not a revolution, it's exactly the hybrid of a battery and a capacitor - it has some advantages of both.

This device has similar or less storage capacity than a battery, but can deliver its power much faster.
It has similar or less power delivery abilities than a capacitor, but twice the storage capacity.

In MANY devices, the real problem is that the batteries drain. This doesn't help that in the least bit. This will not make your electric car go farther. This only helps the situation with ultra-high-drain requirements, where a normal battery just wouldn't work.

Re:summary is pretty bad, this is not a revolution

[myrdos2]

You aren't reading the article right. Let me clear things up for you: "It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery." "Palmore said some performance problems - such as decreased storage capacity after repeated recharging - must be overcome before the device is marketable."

Re:summary is pretty bad, this is not a revolution

[arete]

Yes, according to the article: A BATTERY has high storage, low power. A CAPACITOR has high power, low storage.

This has more storage than a low-storage capacitor and more power than a low-power battery.

It does not in any place, at all, say that it has more - or even as much - storage as a battery or power as a capacitor. If it had 100 times the storage of a battery it would change a lot of things.

Re:summary is pretty bad, this is not a revolution

[ottffssent]

In MANY devices, the real problem is that the batteries drain. This doesn't help that in the least bit. This will not make your electric car go farther. This only helps the situation with ultra-high-drain requirements, where a normal battery just wouldn't work.

And in many devices (camera flashes, high-power or small-size flashlights, etc.) normal batteries just don't work well because the power requirements beat the hell out of them and they only deliver a small fraction of their nominal capacity (usually reported at C/20). For these devices, we have NiMH batteries. A NiMH AA cell will cheerfully discharge at 1A and still deliver its nearly-3WHr nominal capacity. Sure, they self-discharge in a few months and aren't suitable for all applications, but they're perfect for a lot of high-power applications.

Re:summary is pretty bad, this is not a revolution

[edwardpickman]

The result is a hybrid. Like a capacitor, the battery can be rapidly charged then discharged to deliver power. Like a battery, it can store and deliver that charge over long periods of time. During performance testing, the new battery performed like a hybrid, too. It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.

Just to clarify. The article never mentions how much storage capacity it has it simply references to the storage capacity compared to a capacitor which is much less than a battery. The 100X seems to refer to discharge rate. This would be a major advantage for electric cars given the need for high voltage for the motors. It still sounds like the storage capacity is pretty bad on the plastic batteries the advantage here being fast recharging. Where it'll best traditional batteries is in weight. They are likely to be able to hold several times the capacity verses weight of traditional batteries. Also they can be molded into shapes making the batteries easier to fit into tight spaces. Batteries might end up in ceiling and door panels increasing capacity and freeing up trunk space. An electric car with a real trunk would be a major advancement on it's own.

Re:summary is pretty bad, this is not a revolution

[cgenman]

There are lots of situations where you would want high power in short bursts.

Coming to mind:

Camera Flashes
Quick Robotic Movements
Stun Guns
Short Burst Radio Transmissions
Most applications that involve hydrolics
Cutting Lasers
Ignition Sparks (stoves, cigarettes, cars, etc)

And in high-drain circumstances, the batteries would behave better overall. Standard alkalines waste a lot of capacity when trying to satisfy high-drain situations.

The form factor seems more interesting, however. As thin as a transparency sheet? That's small enough to be built into the skin of a cellphone, or the shell of a car.

It's not the grand solution we've all been waiting for, but it's a good evolution in an otherwise stagnant area.

Re:summary is pretty bad, this is not a revolution

[arete]

I agree that it never mentions it. I was simply pointing out that the SUMMARY implied something that's basically totally fabricated because it isn't there.

However, I must say that if it was really as good or better than a battery in each regard the press release would've pointed that out - instead they merely say it has some qualities of each.

Electric cars have bigger and less currently soluable problems with range than discharge. A limited hybrid, on the other hand, this might be very helpful with under certain circumstances. But the trend seems to be to make them more-electric which again brings you up against the range problems.

Sorry about the chemicals

[Anonymous Coward]

Professor Palmore,

I've had some of your chemicals on my bench since early July. Yes, I was only using them for three days. No, I don't need them any more. See, it's just that Barrus & Holley is all the way across campus and I don't know anyone in your lab--"Hey guys, take a bunch of metals." I'll make a graduate student bring them back, I promise. I also need to return that nitrogen regulator to one of your colleagues.

-- Someone conducting research at Brown

Ah, not again

[Anonymous Coward]

Still, it's unlikely that such a device can appear on the market before several years."

Good thing. Now that we have hot laptops (Sony/Dell) the last thing we need is a hot iPod burning holes in our pockets. At the battery manufactures trying to tell us something?

Q: Plastic Batteries Coming Soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

A: It's unlikely that such a device can appear on the market before several years.

Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[MtViewGuy]

I think this new battery probably has some relationship to the carbon nanotube supercapacitor electrical storage device that MIT is currently working on.

This is a potentially huge breakthrough, since unlike regular batteries this new power storage unit can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and the recharge time is measured in minutes, not hours. That makes it possible for truly practical all-electric car and also as a truly practical means to store power generated by wind turbines and solar cell arrays for use later.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[mnmn]

Electric cars have been 'practical' for a long time given the technology of 20 years ago. Don't believe GM.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[owlnation]

um, yes.. but aren't you just replacing the non-renewable liquid hydrocarbon fuel with a new non-renewable solid hydrocarbon fuel. Sure, marginally less air pollution (though the other pollutive aspects of car/truck/bus travel remain: noise, heat, visual, congestion etc.), but isn't this still just yet another failing to see the wood for the trees alternative automotive solution?

...or did I miss something?

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[Orange Crush]

um, yes.. but aren't you just replacing the non-renewable liquid hydrocarbon fuel with a new non-renewable solid hydrocarbon fuel.

It's much better than that. Supercapacitors could not only power our cars, but they can solve a lot of the problems with renewable energy sources for generating the electricity in the first place. i.e. what good is a solar power plant at night. When automobiles start running off of grid power exclusively, the incentives for renewable power sources go up dramatically--especially if cheap, efficient high-power capacitors are available. Today's solar panels couldn't even power the convenience store inside a gas station, much less help with recharging customer's cars, but they're getting deployed nonetheless (lots of BPs have 'em).

So even if your car is still ultimately being powered by burning hydrocarbons, it's less net pollution for now, and will be decreasing all the time as non-renewable will utlimately and inevitably become more expensive than renewable power.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[ardor]

Um, no.
Hydrocarbons as a component are not the problems. H. as energy source are. Oil is basically stored solar energy. If we have replacements for the primary energy source (like solar energy, wind, geothermal, maybe even fusion someday) hydrocarbons can be created synthetically if needed (but even when Oil is useless as an energy source, it will be still around).

In fact, this is the future almost all car manufacturers envision: the electric car. Why?

First, because electrical engines have a huge torque compared to combustion engines. Some engines don't need any transmission at all! This is especially useful in cities; you don't have to keep the engine running. (Here, lots of gasoline are wasted.)

Second, electricity can come from lots of sources, thus boosting flexibility and solving supply problems (electricity can be transported much easier than oil, and can be generated locally). With supercapacitors, electric cars would see their last problem solved: energy storage.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[BootNinja]

for example, why couldn't we put a wind turbine on the grill of the car for power generation purposes. whenever the car is moving, it generates its own power. somebody with a little more expertise care to tell me if this is feasible?

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[ceoyoyo]

Are you referring to carbon nanotubes as non-renewable fuel? They're not fuel since the battery is rechargeable. They're also not non-renewable, since we make them. Carbon is quite common. Some people say too common, in our atmosphere.

Presumably we'd charge the things with electricity from something renewable. Even if we didn't, concentrating production of energy at large facilities would likely make it more efficient and easier to scrub the exhaust.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[Lisandro]

Because the perceived wind harnessed by the turbine is generated by the cars' engine running - that's it, you're powering your turbine with the engine. Practically, this would be seen as a reduction in the engine efficiency, and you would gain no energy from the turbine (any more than you're "wasting" with the engine).

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[THotze]

You could probably get a bit of mileage out of this, but remember: the wind turbine is basically generating resistance, making air push against it and turn. So what you're doing, in effect, is making a car move so that you can make the car slow down, making drag - you're just translating the power. And you'd also have to redesign a car in a non-aerodynamic form (by the very definition of aerodynamic) so that wind would go through wherever you put the turbine, meaning you'd get gas mileage.

In real life practical applications, however, you may end up with a bit of a positive power upset off of this because of wind and other 'free' energy (not generated from the car's engine propelling it forward) will also power the turbine.

Speaking REALLY practically, on the other hand, I think that the added cost and complexity of the turbine would just add cost to a car for not much performance benefit. If you had an electric car, the same amount of space that the turbine uses could almost certainly be used more effectively to just increase the space devoted to batteries, or to make the car more aerodynamic, or use the extra space for regenerative breaks, etc.

Tim

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[Firethorn]

Practical, as in workable, technically feasable, yes.

Practical as in 'Economical', no.

Practical as in having no disadvantages over gasoline? Not yet.
Practical as in having enough advantages over their disadvantages, as compared to gasoline power? Not Yet.

Look at the spread of CDs, then DVDs, No longer did you need to worry about rewinding, can instantly chapter forward, no worry about magnets, overall smaller form factor, etc...

Then look at the popularity of LCD monitors. While say the color accuracy is worse, that doesnt' matter to most consumers. Meanwhile they're smaller, lighter, take less power, don't have flicker from refresh rates, etc...

Now, give LiIon technology some time to drop in price even more, gasoline to increase again and the equations might change. But by my last figuring, you'd have to drive as much as a taxi in order to even approach the pay off point, and it'd better be all city driving.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[WhatDoIKnow]

"electricity can be transported much easier than oil, and can be generated locally"

Remember that the next time you run out of gas.

:wq

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[MtViewGuy]

Improvements in supercapacitor technology makes an all-electric car practical for these reasons:

1) You store quite a lot of electrical energy in a supercapacitor pack. This means potentially drastic reductions in the size of the battery pack on an all-electric car, reducing the "deadweight" of the car and providing cargo/passenger space comparable to a regular car now. You could sacrifice a little cargo/pax space for a larger supercapacitor battery pack and get driving ranges as much as 600 km (372 miles), very good by today's automotive standards.

2) Supercapacitor packs charge fully in few minutes, not several hours like you have with NiMH and Li-On battery packs. This means in the future service stations will have both gasoline fuel pumps and fast-charge electrical connectors on the same service "island," since the time to fill up a tank of fuel and the time to recharge a supercapacitor pack is almost the same.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[MtViewGuy]

Electric cars have been 'practical' for a long time given the technology of 20 years ago. Don't believe GM.

If you're talking driving under 30 miles per day and willing to recharge the car for hours every night, that is. That was the downfall of the GM EV-1: it had way too short range and recharging the batteries took several hours for a full charge, not to mention the fact the battery pack took up a huge amount of space inside the car.

With these new battery technologies, we can finally drastically reduce the size of the battery pack; this means pax/cargo space comparable to a normal car and less "deadweight" to lug around, too. Also, because these new battery packs charge to full power in only a few minutes, this means service stations in the future can have both gasoline pumps and electric car recharging connectors on the same service "island."

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[MtViewGuy]

Then look at the popularity of LCD monitors. While say the color accuracy is worse, that doesnt' matter to most consumers. Meanwhile they're smaller, lighter, take less power, don't have flicker from refresh rates, etc...

LCD's have pretty much taken over from CRT's for two reasons: 1) they take up FAR less desktop space than regular monitors and 2) the power consumption of LCD panels is 1/3 that of a CRT monitor with the same display area. Also, LCD monitor picture quality has dramatically improved lately; if you've seen the NEC MultiSync 90GX2 you have to admire that LCD monitor's amazing sharpness and color clarity.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[Firethorn]

Bloody word dropping. The correct sentence would be 'While some say the color accuracy is worse'. This mostly mattered to publishers, who actually care about exact tones for printing. You know, the people who actually bothered to tune their monitors occasionally.

I'd even argue that the power consumption is a minor point. Most people don't care that much about a monitor that's hopefully not on all the time (standby between an LCD and a properly designed CRT won't be that much different).

The space savings, however, are incredible, and LCDs have essentially taken over the midrange market. CRT's can be produced cheap, so they still have some of the bottom end, and some of the top end for the color accuracy issue. Kinda like obscenely expensive stereo equipment featuring vacuum tubes?

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[stonecypher]

This is a potentially huge breakthrough, since unlike regular batteries this new power storage unit can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times and the recharge time is measured in minutes, not hours. That makes it possible for truly practical all-electric car

Recharge frequency is not an issue for current cars; current batteries can be charged several thousand times without more than 20-30% distress. That your laptop batteries don't survive this long reflects the way they're made, not a limit of the technology. By contrast, consider your Nintendo GBA SP, which will hold a good charge for more than five years, even if you leave it on the charger every night. Charge time is a minor issue; most people wouldn't bleed their cars and then need to do it again an hour later.

The actual limiting factor on pure electric cars is energy density. This technology is a compromise between batteries (high storage, low charge transfer rate) and capacitors (low storage, high transfer rate.) This technology is not useful to solve the current limiting problems for electric cars.

and also as a truly practical means to store power generated by wind turbines and solar cell arrays for use later.

Er, we don't have any problems with this today. The primary difficulties of wind turbines are threefold: 1) the source, wind, isn't reliable; 2) they have a significant environmental impact, and 3) they have to be put far from current homes, which makes the resistance of transmission lines an issue, as well as movement on the encroaching of urban sprawl.

Re:Remember MIT's nanotube supercapacitor?

[stonecypher]

I think this new battery probably has some relationship to the carbon nanotube supercapacitor electrical storage device that MIT is currently working on.

You think wrong. This is essentially a capacitor and battery laid edge to edge. The article goes into detail about how it works. At no point are the words "MIT," "carbon" or "nanotube" used. Also, carbon nanotubes cannot create plastic, by virtue of the chemical definition of plastic. Therefore, that they're plastic batteries should have been your first hint.

Try reading the article next time, pontiff.

polypyrrole

[roman_mir]

"You start thinking about this polymer and you start thinking that you can create batteries everywhere out of it," Palmore said. "You could wrap cell phones in it or electronic devices. Conceivably, you could even make fabric out of this composite."

Yes! Because we all need a good jolt once in a while during the day, and the coffee doesn't always do the trick.

On a more serious note, this polypyrrole material is just too much like the PyrE stuff and we all know how that ended up.

Quotith TFA

[CrazyDuke]

"It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery."

Uh, maybe I'm behind on my knowledge of current capacitor technology, but I'm under the impression that twice as much storage as a capacitor is not saying a whole lot. So, basically the thing can juice a large amount of amps, for what? ...a split second for any resonable portable battery size?

If you want to use battery-like capacitors, I'd recomment the multiple farad aerogel capacitors. I wonder how this compaires.

So what the difference between...

[__aaclcg7560]

A plastic battery and plastic explosive that looks like a plastic battery in an airport x-ray machine?

Re:So what the difference between...

[Mr. Hankey]

If the news surrounding Lithium technology batteries is any indication, Lithium-Polymer batteries might very well be considered explosives.

Re:So what the difference between...

[owlstead]

Don't know about the difference, but a similarity is that they can blow up, so it makes little difference.

Re:So what the difference between...

[stonecypher]

Well for one, plastic explosive means the adjective "plastic," meaning bendable and deformable, not the material plastic. C4 isn't made out of plastic. It's called "plastic explosive" because it acts like sully putty (at least before you blow it up.) That's very useful for things like shaped charges and drilled shock patterns, where you can just sort of cram it in and that's good enough.

For two, you don't detect plastic with x-ray machines, you detect it with chemical traces (or dogs,) whose results will be very different for the two machines.

For three, most plastic explosives don't come in a sealed case made by Sony, and cannot run an MP3 player.

Yeah, but...

[slobber]

Good news - scientists develeop a cool new battery.

Bad news - it uses a gold strip as one of its components.

Time to market - take a wild guess...

Re:Yeah, but...

[Firethorn]

Plenty of gold plated connectors out there. Gold($583), while a valuable metal, is not so expensive when you start talking about platinum($1164), quantities of copper($3.31), nickel($13.22), etc...

A strip of gold, while it might be expensive, has to be looked at in the context of expense. If it's worth it, it'll be used in a moment.

Re:Yeah, but...

[stonecypher]

Bad news - it uses a gold strip as one of its components.

So does your $120 TV. Gold can be machined until it's ridiculously thin. Chances are there's more gold in your $10 gold plated headphone plug than in the battery. We use gold for its high electrical transfer rate, which is dependant on surface area, not volume.

CAPACITY, not power, is important...

[dpbsmith]

...for most of the things I care about. And this device only had double thecapacity of an an alkaline battery. Capacity is mAh. Power is watts.

An alkaline battery might have a capacity of (say) 2000 mAh, meaning that it could power a three-watt bulb for about an hour. This device, if it lives up to the claims, could do so for about two hours.

An alkaline battery couldn't power a 100-watt bulb at all, because it can't deliver more than a few amps. This device apparently _could_ power a 100-watt bulb... but only for about four minutes.

The ability to deliver power, that is to deliver energy in a short, intense burst, might be very useful for some applications. But it wouldn't let you recharge your laptop once a week or anything like that.

(There's another question I have. A battery hold an almost steady voltage for a long time, then declines fairly rapidly. Almost a square wave. This is one reason why it's hard to measure discharge state. Presumably these ultracapacitors have a smooth, exponential voltage decline, like radioactive decay. That probably means that you need tricky circuitry to exploit them... and there is probably always a significant amount of power in the device that you can't use, because the voltage has dropped too low).

Re:CAPACITY, not power, is important...

[flooey]

And this device only had double the capacity of an an alkaline battery.

It wasn't even that. The device had double the capacity of a traditional capacitor, which traditionally suck for capacity (hence why we use batteries). It's really what it claims, a hybrid. It's between a battery and a capacitor in terms of both storage capacity and power delivery.

Re:CAPACITY, not power, is important...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a problem. A DC to DC converter module can take a varying input voltage and return a steady output voltage allowing you to use the power source well into voltage levels which would not be sufficient to power the device. They are 85-95% efficient depending on size and power handling.

The real question about this is the peak current output. This would probably (based on the article) have a high peak current. This is really good for charging - as you could charge it fully in just a few minutes. At discharge, though, it becomes an issue, as releasing that much energy at once could be quite dangerous. (Think Dell battery on steroids)

Re:CAPACITY, not power, is important...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

The hell it's not important. Power in batteries often works both ways; fast discharge compared to another battery often implies a faster charge rate. And this looks to also be the case here.

Also, it doesn't have double the capacity of an an alkaline battery, but double the capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. So, it may infact even have less then the capacity of an alkaline battery. But there isn't much info on the density of the material, so I'm not sure why you think it would be a good idea to compare them, anyway.

And if I could charge up my laptop in 10 mins, then I wouldn't really care if it only lasted a day, as I'd always have the opportunity to charge it up sometime during the day.

Voltage fluctuations may be a problem, but it might be possible to use a voltage regulator/switching PSU and still end up with more engery per mass.

Re:CAPACITY, not power, is important...

[stonecypher]

And this device only had double thecapacity of an an alkaline battery.

Alkaline batteries actually have a pretty good power capacity; we just don't use them in things like cars and laptops because they're not reasonably rechargable. I for one would love to see my laptop's running life go up a ways, especially if I could just plug it in for ten seconds while I stopped for a coffee before going back out for another several hours' work.

If this kind of thing works out, you might see places like McDonalds deploying fifty cent "charge stations" in their drive-through, where you make electrical contact for a few seconds while you wait on the jerk in front of you to quit staring at his fucking hamburger and drive.

never in consumer devices, maybe in military

[r00t]

We won't be seeing our battery problems solved ever.

High energy density is dangerous. As it is, we're seeing laptop computers vent with flame.

This thing? Gee, it's basically a bomb. Even better? What, you want to rip apart the whole airport?

Re:never in consumer devices, maybe in military

[ceoyoyo]

You mean like in a gas tank?

Actually, if you figure out the energy density of the notebook itself, it's pretty high. E=mc2 you know. It's just that the energy is in a really stable form. It's not density, but stability that matters.

Re:never in consumer devices, maybe in military

[lachlan76]

Li-Ion batteries don't explode because of the stored energy, they explode because lithium is a very volatile metal. Didn't you ever see a piece of lithium thrown in water in high school?

Re:never in consumer devices, maybe in military

[r00t]

I mean like a gas tank which also contains the oxidizer in very close proximity to the fuel. In other words, like a solid rocket engine or a bomb.

High-density capaciters are damn bad. Damage one little film, and you get an arc. This then damages yet more, and so on, until all of the stored charge has been used to rapidly heat the capaciter.

Re:never in consumer devices, maybe in military

[ceoyoyo]

So sort of like a gas tank? Lots of fuel with a little bit of aluminum or steel between it and a HUGE amount of oxidizer?

You're right though, the design of a true capacitor depends on it's physical integrity. That doesn't mean you can't make a high energy density storage device that is safe though. Many kinds of regular batteries don't suddenly discharge if they're punctured (the opposite, in fact). Fuel cells behave much like gas tanks when they're broken.

Our battery problems may never be solved by capacitors, but there are lots of other avenues without any unusual inherent explodability.

Re:never in consumer devices, maybe in military

[r00t]

Most fuel in a gas tank is NOT in close proximity to a huge amount of oxidizer.

The stuff in the middle is about a foot away. The stuff near the surface is a few milimeters away. The nearby air is not a huge amount; the tank is not surrounded with liquid air or even compressed air.

With capaciters, 100% of the stored energy is, roughly, micrometers or nanometers away from badness. Additionally, mere contact will cause a problem. Gasoline does not spontaneously ignite in air.

Re:never in consumer devices, maybe in military

[ceoyoyo]

In an accident gasoline will leak, putting a great quantity in contact with oxidizer.

As you said, gasoline does not spontaneously ignite in air. It is a reasonably stable energy storage medium. That's the important point, not it's energy density.

As I said, capacitors that we envision today are likely not overly practical because they tend to be unstable, particularly when damaged. That doesn't mean we can't have high density energy storage devices in the future. On the contrary, we have several of them now.

Roland the Plogger again

[Animats]

Ah, Roland the Plogger again.

First, this isn't about a battery with a 100x higher energy density. That would be a major breakthrough. It's about one with a high peak power, for surge applications. That's a specialty item.

It's also been done. Flat batteries with high peak-power outputs were invented over 25 years ago at Polaroid, for the PolaPulse battery. One of those was in every Polaroid film pack for years. It could put out 15 amps for a brief period, providing plenty of power to run the camera mechanism. (Since, in that camera, the battery had to power the mechanism that squeezed the film between the development rollers, substantial power was required for about one second.) The battery chemistry wasn't rechargeable, although there's no reason a rechargeable chemistry couldn't have been put in that packaging.

PolaPulse batteries are still available, and turn up now and then when a flat battery with a high peak current is needed. One amusing use of PolaPulse batteries is StartMeUp, which is a pocket-sized unit with six PolaPulse batteries used to restart a car.

Several other manufacturers claim to make flat batteries, some of which are rechargeable. However, none of the manufacturers mentioned in that article actually seem to be shipping product.

Re:Roland the Plogger again

[ozbird]

I think you mean thin batteries: a flat battery is what you get by discharging its power.

Re:Roland the Plogger again

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Ah, Roland the Plogger again."

Yes, but at least he's linking directly to the article this time and the only mention of his website is in his submitter name, where it should be.

conducting polymer supercapacitors

[Anonymous Coward]

Conducting polymer (such as polypyrrole) supercapacitors have been around for years. For example, see some of Belanger's work here:
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/dep_chim/prof/belanger .htm

Other examples include:
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServ let?prog=normal&id=JESOAN0001510000070A1052000001& idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

Nothing new to see here, folks! Sorry!

(Yes, I am an electrochemist)

Never enough energy

[HatchedEggs]

It always seems like we never have enough energy to accomplish as much as we want to. I mean, really... its the limiting factor in so many of the things we do:

1. On a car trip you have to pull over and get more gas.
2. You can only listen to your mp3 player so many times before you have to recharg it.
3. Etc

Beyond those every day things, it has even more drastic affects on our goals. For instance, how many of us are going to make it into space? Not many... why? We have the technology to do everything we want to in regards to space flight, except for being able to supply energy cheaply. Will we ever figure out a way to do that? I certainly hope so. Perhaps we wont though, and the most effective way we will get around that is to utilize energy more efficiently.

In regards to this technology, it is interesting... and perhaps it will actually bear some fruit in the next few years. That said, 100x the battery life we have now is a great advance, but it is no where near what we will need in the future.

Re:Never enough energy

[thegnu]

For instance, how many of us are going to make it into space? Not many... why? We have the technology to do everything we want to in regards to space flight, except for being able to supply energy cheaply. Will we ever figure out a way to do that? I certainly hope so.

The truth is if we don't figure out zero point energy, we're not going anywhere without destroying the planet. The problem with supplying energy cheaply is that it's got to come from somewhere. If you take any energy system, any accounting system, any distributed economic system with limited resources, you have to look at the true cost of things.

In other words, the reason why very few ever make it to space is because it takes energy equivalent to providing the basic alimentary and medical needs for millions of people to get a few people into space. I know that there are valuable side benefits to the space program, such as Tang, but ask yourself if it's really worth burning up the resources of a million starving children to get there.

Of course, we could divert our martial efforts out into space, so in the words of that guy from Team America, we wouldn't end up with shit all over ourselves, rather, shit in space. But hey, that's not happening any time soon, because we're harvesting energy over there. Whose energy? I would venture a guess that it's the starving and exploited who serve the earth who should decide what to do with its guts.

Re:Never enough energy

[donaggie03]

What the hell does "rant" mean? - Peter Griffin

Re:Never enough energy

[enharmonix]

ask yourself if it's really worth burning up the resources of a million starving children to get there.

The space shuttle doesn't run on beans and rice. It runs on hydrogen and oxygen, which you can't eat, so why not use it to send astronauts in space to research things that might help those kids some day?

Ralph Nader's calling. He wants his rhetoric back.

Re:Never enough energy

[thegnu]

The space shuttle doesn't run on beans and rice. It runs on hydrogen and oxygen, which you can't eat, so why not use it to send astronauts in space to research things that might help those kids some day?

Ralph Nader's calling. He wants his rhetoric back.

The Earth is a closed energy system in that we have no control over the incoming energy from the sun. I'm not just talking about the hydrogen and oxygen, but the manpower used in accumulating the wealth of materials necessary to send a person to space.

Tell me how many man-hours it takes to amass the resources necessary for a spaceship, and we'll talk about how full of rhetoric I am. You have a very limited view of how much energy expenditure goes into things. And if you in fact have a degree of some sort, maybe you should call the school and ask for your money back, because all they did was teach you to think linearly very quickly. Which I think gnats can do, and they don't receive much of an education usually.

Re:Never enough energy

[enharmonix]

Tell me how many man-hours it takes to amass the resources necessary for a spaceship, and we'll talk about how full of rhetoric I am. You have a very limited view of how much energy expenditure goes into things. And if you in fact have a degree of some sort, maybe you should call the school and ask for your money back, because all they did was teach you to think linearly very quickly. Which I think gnats can do, and they don't receive much of an education usually.

Well, despite the fact that you basically compared my level of thinking to a gnat (though considering the Ralph Nader comment, I might have had it coming), I can now acknowledge that you did put some thought into your views after all, but I still think you're missing the forest for the trees. You're right about closed energy systems, so obviously you realize the energy is stuck here (net, anyway). There's only so much to go around, but it's not like it's really being used up. You can't really expend energy, you can only move it around. And that was more my point: yes, energy feeds starving kids, but we lack the ability to directly convert this particular energy into food (I'll come back to this in a moment). However, we do have the ability to spend it in areas of research that might a) open up the system (space exploration), or b) move energy around in new ways (scientific research that results in advances in medicine, biology, etc.).

Now I promised I'd get back to food. Unfortunately, at this point in history, hunger is a political problem -- we have the ability to produce enough food, and it logistically possible to distribute it (still inconvenient but by all means possible). It is getting it past corrupt government officials, warlords, and other bad guys that presents a problem. As the war in Iraq testifies, we could make short work of them, though there is a big question as to whether politics would allow us to remain in those countries long enough to set up a stable decomacracy/republic. Regretably, conservatives lack the will to force change in those governments over something like hunger, and liberals lack the will to follow through on war efforts to ensure that any changes that occur actually last. So like I said, it's not energy that's the problem, it's politics that prevents us from channeling it into something in that direction. Like electrical current, the energy expended to feed the world's hungry will follow the path of least resistance, and that's the space program. If you can put it into the heads of the nations governments that we need to do something about it, then maybe we can, but until that happens, let's send people into space.

Re:Never enough energy

[thegnu]

If you can put it into the heads of the nations governments that we need to do something about it, then maybe we can, but until that happens, let's send people into space.
Concur. And while we're at it, why not compromise and send Ralph Nader into space? ;-)

Re:Never enough energy

[enharmonix]

Heh! Agreed!

two questions, one serious

[artifex2004]

1) Can plastic batteries be recycled, and if they aren't, how long is it projected to take for them to degrade in a landfill?
2) How long until all plastics are banned from commercial flights, because they might be illicit power sources for bombs or weapons?

(I'm not telling which is the serious question)

New Standards

[Doc Ruby]

Interestingly, alkaline solutions offer greater power density than hydrogen. So maybe the "new standard" alkaline batteries will be fuelcells.

What I really want to see is "plastic" catalyst membranes in these fuelcells. That will make the cells cheap and easily replaceable, lowering the TCO consistent with the cheap fuel. It might need to be "new standard" plastic, carbon fullerenes with nanoscale features catalyzing the process. But if we can avoid the rare earth and precious metal elements fuelcells often require, we can more easily switch our power systems over to the cleaner, smaller, cheaper systems. Someday, a phone that can talk longer than I can.

Badn journalism....

[gweihir]

• "Comming soon" is not equal to "comming in several years". Stop lying in headlines!
  
• 100 times the power will make a lot of people believe you are talking about battery life. This is wrong. The short-term peak-performance is 100 time that of the alkaline cell. This says absolutely nothing about the power capacity and is a worthless feature for, e.g., mobile electonics. Typical disinformation in order to hype this thing. Also the 500A or so peak current this thing seems to have is needed nowhere, i.e. a basically worthless feature.
  

Re:Badn journalism....

[kfg]

This says absolutely nothing about the power capacity and is a worthless feature for, e.g., mobile electonics. Typical disinformation in order to hype this thing. Also the 500A or so peak current this thing seems to have is needed nowhere, i.e. a basically worthless feature.

Oh I don't know. My own experience is that most mobiles would be improved immeasurably by a second or so of 500A. In fact, haveing them do so spontaneously if on when entering a theater would be a dandy feature.

KFG

Re:Badn journalism....

[gweihir]

Oh I don't know. My own experience is that most mobiles would be improved immeasurably by a second or so of 500A. In fact, haveing them do so spontaneously if on when entering a theater would be a dandy feature.

Well, I certainly agree to that!

Finally !!

[Chemkook]

If we could somehow we cold combine these with zero point energy we would be laughing! Watch this cool video to see the Hutchison effect ... http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-7027255937 915952897&q=hutchison

Short term only? Not so.

[Bananatree3]

First, this isn't about a battery with a 100x higher energy density. That would be a major breakthrough. It's about one with a high peak power, for surge applications. That's a specialty item

This new battery/capacitor hybrid can be used for long term usage. It is not only for short surges. I quote TFA:

The result is a hybrid. Like a capacitor, the battery can be rapidly charged then discharged to deliver power. Like a battery, it can store and deliver that charge over long periods of time. During performance testing, the new battery performed like a hybrid, too. It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.

Re:Short term only? Not so.

[Animats]

The PolaPulse can do that, too. You can draw 15 amps for a few seconds, or a few microamps for years to keep a clock alive.

Re:Short term only? Not so.

[honkycat]

Maybe it can store the charge for a while, but unless you have more energy storage than an alkaline, you're going to run out of energy pretty quickly at 100x the power delivered. I'm not sure offhand what the energy capacity of a standard double-layer capacitor is, but it's substantially lower than an alkaline battery.

Regardless of how long you're storing the energy, you'd only use this technology (as described) in surge applications. If you don't need 100x the power, then use an alkaline because it'll last longer for low-drain use.

Allow me

[Anonymous Coward]

...to be first to plea: Go away Roland!

(curiously, my captcha word is spanking, which is exactly what this lamer needs)

She's kinda cute

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd hit it!

Re:She's kinda cute

[east coast]

Sick, depraved bastard.

You are correct:

[zippthorne]

The technology for long-lasting batteries does indeed exist. However, the applications using them has taken advantage of the increased capacity by making smaller devices with..*smaller batteries.*

For example, the first cell phones were the size of a laptop, weighed a ton, and worked for about twenty minutes (did they even have a standby mode?)

fast forward to today, where cell phones are the size and weight of a multivitamin, last for hours of talking, weeks of standby, and taste like candy. (unlike the vitimin...)

Certainly reducing power requirements contributed, and that compounded the benefits from the various improvements in battery-cell technology.

Charge time

[Ixlr8]

If a battery can be recharged quickly (as in much much quicker than your Li-ion laptop battery) it could find good applications in mobile devices you use often. Not the torch you have laying around for a power outage, but say a mobile phone or mp3 player. Short charge times means high charge currents, so a laptop probably doesn't fit the category.

Research Fraud

[fluffy99]

What you see here is a prime example of deceptive research results. 100x power in this case, just means 100x the peak amperage available - not 100x the energy density. The misleading quote was probably intentional, so as to lure potential investors or grant writers into thinking this project is on the verge of a major breakthrough. The reality is that they are simply rehashing existing work looking for a different angle. They have not created anything better or even really different than what is already commercially produced, such as SuperCaps.

Electrically Conducting Polymers

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked on this kind of crap (electrically conducting polymers) as a chemistry grad student back in the early 90's. Call me cinical, but technologists have been promising breakthroughs in plastic batteries for over 20 years. I don't ever see them replacing inorganic batteries, or even fuel cells. Too many technical hurdles to solve. Just because you can make a battery out of plastics, doesn't mean it's a good technology.

Oops

[Nom du Keyboard]

'it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.'

Hate to short this puppy out by accident.

Digital Cameras

[Nom du Keyboard]

Sounds great for digital cameras, whose power requirements (long duration with high peak flows) don't work well with some battery types.

Re:Average time-to-market? Actually

[Nom du Keyboard]

and during the night.

Actually, during the night is when power consumption is the lowest also. You've turned your lights on, but you've shutdown your factories. That's why hydro systems pump water back uphill suring those hours to store it for peak daytime usage.

oxyrides

[zogger]

You can get the panasonic oxyride batteries now, hasn't been that long since they were invented.

As to battery tech in general, I can remember when all you could get were carbon zinc batteries (drycells) and that was it., now you can get NiMH, NiCad, LiIon,and the oxyrides. Tech advances...maybe not as fast as you'd like, but it advances. Heck, I own some solar PV stuff, that is pure sci fi action from when I was a kid, along with just personal computers in general.

BOOM

[abigsmurf]

Capacitors are great.... until they explode. The higher the power the capacitor naturally, the bigger the bang. you're not just talking about the build up of gas here.

With these polymer batteries you've got the high voltage and high current. if these get shorted not only will there be a violent bang but surely the huge current would result in melting/igniting the immediate surroundings or creating an EMP.

Many Years

[smchris]

Still, it's unlikely that such a device can appear on the market before several years."

And many, many years before they are common.

As someone who has moved almost all standalone devices to rechargeables, I'm sensitive to what little incentive the battery manufacturers have to scale down their business. Outside of specialty battery stores, a computer store and Target the only place I've seen "standard size" rechargeables sold is SuperAmerica and I give them credit for that.

Good replacement for NiCd applications?

[billstewart]

Currently there are three kinds of rechargeable batteries used for electonics and toys:

• NiCd - low energy, high power, nasty heavy metals - good for driving small motors that need high current for a short time.
• NiMH - about 4-5 times the energy of NiCd, lower power, medium life - they'll discharge in under a month even if you're not using them, so they're not good for some applications.
• Rechargeable alkaline - medium energy, lower power, long life, full 1.5 volts.

For toys like remote-control model cars or model airplanes, Nickel Cadmium is the main choice, because it can dump a lot of power for a given battery weight. If this new technology lives up to its promise, it sounds like a good replacement, and we can avoid the heavy metal toxicity problems of cadmium. The article doesn't talk about what voltage it generates (some things really like 1.5v better than 1.2v), or how long the charge lasts if you're not using it.

Re:Good replacement for NiCd applications?

[Raistlin77]

For toys like remote-control model cars or model airplanes, Nickel Cadmium is the main choice...

Actually, if you look at the r/c hobby scene, LiPo batteries are the big thing these days. The voltage-per-cell is higher (3.7V per cell) than both NiMH and NiCd (1.2V per cell). But they are considerably more expensive and require special speed controllers as well as special chargers. An improperly charged/discharged LiPo battery can literally result in a fireball.

Re:Good replacement for NiCd applications?

[jamesh]

An improperly charged/discharged LiPo battery can literally result in a fireball.

Lithium Polymer batteries appear much safter than Li-Ion batteries, which can (and do) literally result in fireballs when _properly_ charged/discharged :)

Presumably i'm mis-informed, but I always thought that even though the Li-Ion/Po batteries have a higher energy density, they still didn't beat a Ni-Cad in terms of the ability to deliver higher current under a wider range of conditions.

The current delivery only matters if you are running an electric motor though... I guess if you're using an ICE and the battery was running the logic and maybe a small servo or two, current delivery wouldn't be such an issue, in which case the Lithium batteries might be a much better choice, especially on something that needs to get airborne.

Re:Good replacement for NiCd applications?

[tamboril]

That is old information. Lithium ion polymer (LiPo) is now the preferred choice for electric RC. These are, by the way, "plastic" batteries themselves.

It's real

[zogger]

Smokey Yunick (now somewhat recently deceased) was a real guy with *outstanding* automotive engineering cred, perhaps before your time. And as with all other advances with automotive design and performance and mileage increases, the grade A engineers are almost all in racing, because racing pays engineers what they are really worth, unlike the big car companies that pay salespeople and VPs and other sorts of management. His carb is real, as were the cars, and I have provided the references and places to go look yourself. He had several good working prototypes, all verified beyond any doubt by other outside engineers.

Re:It's real

[tomhudson]

People were able to duplicate the vapor carb trick by running their fuel feed around the rad a few times - it worked because carbs back in those days were notoriously inefficient (8 to 10 mpg for a car!) and anything that let more fuel be vaporized before it entered the combustion chamber meant more fuel burnt, hence more efficiency.

Of course, on a hot summer day - vapor lock.

Because of the way carburetors work (lowering air pressure by speeding up air flow through a restriction) they can actually have ice form on their insides on hot humid days - pre=warming the fuel helped ensure that you could get b on a leaner mixer. This was the idea behind the heat riser valve.

Re:It's real

[zogger]

His engines used a homogenizer and a low boost turbo after the carb as well as the vaporization from heat chamber. According to what I just relooked up, he got 150 horse and 60 mpg from a two cylinder engine at 78 cubes. He said the biggest problem back then was finding good quality oil that would stand up to the engine, and all he could find was some jet engine oil at 98 dollars a quart, plus having to use some exotic materials to construct it, fine ceramics mostly. It was pretty neat for the time.

here's the patent

http://www.delphion.com/details?pn=US04862859__

I wish the article itself was online to see the car and some better details. I remember reading it the month it came out in the dead trees version. (april 83, was the cover story)

Re:It's real

[tomhudson]

If you can increase the operating temperature, you'll have a more efficient engine. I remember there was talk about making an engine with no lubricants, just ceramics, thus allowing a lot higher temperatures, and greater efficiency. The problem is, what do you use as a bearing?

Re:It's real

[zogger]

I guess you'd have to use magnetic levitation type bearings.

That ceramic engine I think was Ford's baby way back and it disappeared. From what I recall, it didn't need piston rings! There was no or little changing of specs as the engine "warmed up", your bore stayed the same, etc. They just made close enough tolerances and it worked.

Frankly speaking,IMHO, electric motors are the way to go for the vast bulk of low weight load/short distance commuter styled transportation and for reducing costs per mile. With the addition of the rigidly attached add-on fuel generator idea like from AC Propulsion, you eliminate the one big complaint of electric vehicles, namely distance travelling. I think the new generation of small efficient diesels is pretty good for that part, especially now that we can get biodiesel and blends.

Re:It's real

[shrubya]

So I found Smokey Yunick in Popular Science, and I have to say ... bullshit. He was lying. If he really had an engine that gave American-level horsepower at 60mpg in a standard size car, SOMEONE would have publicized it, SOMEONE would have funded him. There were (and still are) WAY too many nationally-recognized investigative reporters (60 Minutes, Consumer Reports, etc) who would have loved to do independently-verified road tests and tell us about the guy who could save us from the oil crisis, except that "the Man" is keeping him down. There were (and still are) WAY too many wealthy investors in America alone who would have loved to throw megabucks at this guy, even if they didn't expect to make a return, solely for the fame of being the CEO of the company who saved us from the oil crisis.

If it were true, it would have happened. Proof by contrapositive.

Re:It's real

[zogger]

He built the engines, had them running in cars, that's just data. The industry in general was way committed to going to fuel injection at the time, plus he still had serious problems with emissions, something I don't think ever got worked out adequately, that and the lubrication problem, etc. That's why it never took off.

Re:It's real

[shrubya]

So... Yunick's wondrous new engine is dirty and difficult to maintain, but the only POSSIBLE reason why it isn't being used today is that every CEO in Detroit, from Lee Iacoca back then through Bill Ford Jr today, would rather teeter on the brink of bankruptcy with billions of dollars in losses, than risk offending their secret masters in OPEC. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Re:It's real

[zogger]

What? All I was doing was pointing out originally that there was at least one verified advanced carburetor system that got much better than normal mileage. And was very open about the possibly why's why it wasn't used much. there was another one way way back as well, the Pogue carburetor. Carbs in general have poblems that have been overcome with fuel injection, smokey's came just hen the industry was going to fuel injection, which gives somewhat better mileage and allows a lot better timed delivery. They do the fuel part for vehicles with emissions in mind as well. Smokey was clear his needed expensive lubrication and more advanced engineering and materials, that is primarily the reason they didn't go to anything like that, but that doesn't negate the fact that he did build it, and it did work and at the time was an amazing difference with what was currently out there. As to any high level conspiracies or whatnot, you get what you see, especially with the detroit car bosses, behind the curve a lot compared to the japanese and european car companies because gasoline remained so cheap in the US most likely. That's a guess on my part. US drivers wanted huge engines, bg sound, out of the hole performance and didn't care to mych untilrecently about mileage except for a brief period after the OPEC embargo. We had european and japanese cars hit with much better mileage and designs way before it was common in detroit, fuel injection, overhead cams, turbocharging, etc. In the more modern era we have seen it with stratified charge and hybrids, etc. Now that basically all the car companies are global and own each other, I don't think you can even classify them as being all that regional or national. I do think though you might be seeing a resurgence of the smaller companies as more advanced features are developed. It seems to go in cycles like most others-way way back we had a lot more companies, then consolidation, now we are seeing the very small companies really coming out with some interesting stuff, like AC propulsion with the two stage hybrid concept (the detachable ICE part) or the tesla car. That there will be a much bigger variety of types of cars though is indisputable now, we will be getting a lot more options, flex fuel, more turbo diesels, etc. Honda just announced they will be pushing a much cleaner diesel starting next year IIRC, and a bt more battery design tweaking and we will be seeing comercial plug in hybrids, which really opens up some good mileage areas tat still maintain "performance" and range.

To summarize, there were good mileage carbs that didn't make it into mainstream use, why they weren't adopted is something of a red herring, *aspects* to improved designs get adopted and modified and morphed around. We are seeing a resurgence of variable valve timing now, because altough the concept was sound way back, they couldn't pull it off with reliability, now they can. and etc.

why is he slurring?

[Anonymous Coward]

slurred the engineer with the scortched tounge.

Is he slurring because he has a scotched tongue or a scorched tongue? Or both?

Plastic Batteries That Last 100x Longer?

[electrogeek_dot_com]

Yeah I can see it now. Duracell will roll out a new plastic battery that lasts 100x longer then their standard batteries so in turn consumers will need to buy Duracell batteries less often. This in turn will drive their profits down due to slower sales. Yep. I'm sure they'll get right on that. Then they can start work on their line of nuclear batteries which never need replacement or recharging. Sounds like a plan.

Yeah

[WindBourne]

it is called teslamotors.

Huh? New?

[RAMMS EIN]

I thought plastic batteries had existed as a prototype for several years (I think I recall something about Philips working on them). When I read the headline, I thought "Ah, they're finally coming to market!" Now it seems work on developing them has just started, and time to market will be years at least. I'm confused...

Uhm, no

[joto]

Currently there are three kinds of rechargeable batteries used for electonics and toys: [NiCd, NiMH, Rechargeable alkaline]

Uhm, no!

You forgot some very common types:

• Alkaline - Most common. (or are all alkalines rechargeable?)
• Li-Ion - Expensive, rechargeable, with high energy and power. Non-standard sizes only. Used in cellphones, digital cameras and other expensive high-tech gadgetry that ared used often, requires a lot of power, and must remain portable.
• Litium - Expensive, non-rechargeable, with high energy and power, and long shelf-life (> 10 years). Not rechargeable. Cells are 3 volt, so standard, AA, AAA, C, D cells cannot be replaced, although 2 of them in series can. Comes as 9 volt batteries and as their own weird sizes (CR123A being the most common).
• Heavy duty - The cheapest kind of battery. Has long shelf-life. Not rechargeable.
• Lead - Well perhaps not commonly for electronics and toys, but... does the "portable" speakers for my mp3-player count?

Bomb

[Mark_MF-WN]

Alright! You win the prize for most inane comment of the entire day! For while other comments may demonstrate greater trollishness, stupidity, or meaninglessness, this post surpassess them all in the extent to which it is unlike anything even resembling a cogent thought of any kind. Congratulations!

On a related note, coal -- having one of the highest energy-densities of any chemicals known -- has been banned, since it must also therefore be a bomb. Likewise with wood. Anyone found transporting wood on their person into a government building or office will be shot on sight as a terrorist. Upon realizing that hydrogen, by virtue of its capacity to fuse releasing energy, has a high energy density too, our handsomest politicians have seem to it that water and all other hydrogen-containing compounds are banned. It was then helpfully pointed out that all matter is also energy, and therefore has enormous energy density. All matter is therefore bombs. Anyone found purchasing matter will be requird to have the appropriate paperwork for dealing with explosives. Unregistered transport of matter-bombs is a terrorist act of the worst kind, and will be tortured to death in a CIA information-collection centre until saftety happens.

Plastic Battery

[Mark_MF-WN]

So you're a coward ... how's that working out for you?

How did Americans become gutless wimps so fast? Seriously -- lets ban EVERY technology that bears a superficial resemblance to a type of weapon that terrorists don't use anyway. Then lets start living in small cages that the government unlocks when its time to go to work in an approved citizen transport craft. Then we'll be safe (although I'm sure you'll still keep yourself worked up about something -- I hear that panicking about the evils of pornography or the dangers of universal heat death are both nice).

battery followup

[billstewart]

I was talking about rechargeables, so Lithium, heavy-duty, and regular alkaline don't count.

Not sure how I spaced on the Lithium-Ion batteries - I was probably thinking about things that can replace AA/AAA, but obviously cellphones and laptops are using the things, and they work a lot better than NiMH in terms of memory effect.

I left out lead-acid on purpose - how big are the ones for your MP3 player speakers? I do have a friend who uses them in his portable stereo system, but it's mainly "portable" with a hand-truck, uses a couple of motorcycle batteries, and puts out enough sound to cover a whole dance floor for a couple of hours.

I didn't know about Lithium Polymer batteries - interesting to hear about them. I've had a number of applications which needed 3V or more, so LiOn or LiPo would work. Unfortunately, NiMH works well enough for most AA/AAA applications that it's pretty much crowded out the rechargeable alkaline market, and I've had trouble finding more AAA for things that need low power for months, though AA are still usually around.

Burning cars

[phorm]

This summer I've driven past burning cars twice. I'm assuming this was caused by a ruptured hose or whatever ,and it looks like they went up pretty fast. They might not explode, but bursting into flames isn't exactly a fun thing either... especially if you're stuck in the vehicle or can't get out before it goes up (personally I'd rather be exploded than burn+asphixiate to death).