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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."
Something to use in my sega nomad!!!
'it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.', slurred the engineer with the scortched tounge.
God spoke to me.
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?
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
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]
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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.
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.
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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.
"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."
...a split second for any resonable portable battery size?
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?
If you want to use battery-like capacitors, I'd recomment the multiple farad aerogel capacitors. I wonder how this compaires.
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A plastic battery and plastic explosive that looks like a plastic battery in an airport x-ray machine?
...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).
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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.
http://www.er.uqam.ca/nobel/dep_chim/prof/belange
Other examples include:
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsSer
Nothing new to see here, folks! Sorry!
(Yes, I am an electrochemist)
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)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
- 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.Bill Stewart
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