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Nanowires Boost Laptop Battery Life to 20 Hours
brianmed writes to tell us that Stanford researchers have created a new use for silicon nanowires that promise to reinvent lithium-ion batteries. "The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. [...] The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture."
Now with 10 times the explosive power.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
The article makes this sound very promising.
It may very well be the leap that keeps battery technology ahead of ultra-capacitors for the foreseeable future.
There should be a moderation category "Dumbest Comment EVER"
Rather than tripling the life of a current battery, I can see this being used to power a laptop off a battery the size of a current cell phone battery and shrinking cell phone batteries to the size of a nickel. This will drastically reduce the size of several of our common devices such as Bluetooth headsets, cell phones, iPods (and other MP3 players), digital cameras, etc. In many such devices, the battery is still the single largest and heaviest component and being able to shrink this by a factor of 3-5 will drastically affect the size and weight of them.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
why does the assistant professor get the patent?
I would say he was employed by Stanford. So Stanford should receive the patent. If his research-money was provided by a public institution (some sort of grant), then either the research should be public (patent-free), or the patent should be somehow associated to the country.
I don't see why he gets to profit from the discovery. (After all he was payed to do that. It would have been bad, if he hadn't found anything.)
I'd say that increasing battery performance by 10x is EXACTLY the kind of thing that the patent system is built for. This development can only be good for society, even if we have to wait a few years before it becomes generic.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A short but more technical story found here.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
It's a shame that enough power to cause a massive explosion can only power a device that, for the most part, just displays text for 3 hours. We really need to rethink what a computer does when someone reads e-mail or browses the web. With an e-paper display, processor, disk and a WiFi radio should just briefly power themselves on when the user goes to a new URL and then completely shut down, yielding weeks of typical use on a single charge. Audio and video playback can be achieved by a dedicated chip and achieve playback times of the latest iPods. If users also want to use the same laptop as a desktop replacement, it can an internal PDA-like subsystem with it's own low power CPU, RAM and flash storage that synchronizes some directories with the main disk. Users can then choose weather they need high performance or long battery life at the moment and control either subsystem from the same display, keyboard and trackpad.
With clever engineering it should be possible to make a laptop exclusively used in low power mode solar powered if it's normally left out when not in use.
1) How much will they cost
2) How long does it take to charge
3) How many charges can you get in its lifetime.
If any one of those is a major deficiency, the technology will be worthless. Since they didn't immediately bring up use in electric cars, I'm guessing there's currently a fatal flaw that applies to one of those questions.
My money is still on ultra-capacitors.
Stack up 4,648,421,052 of these bad boys and you'll have a nano wire Empire State building. Conversely, the length of these are approximately 2.15x10^-7 Empire State Building's long*.
*including tower
That's highly incorrect. Lithium ion batteries have a self-discharge rate of about 5% per month. However, while the battery is connected to a power supply, some energy is always consumed, just like the way desktop PSUs consume power when the computer is off, but when the PSU cutoff switch is not switched off. That's why laptops will not stay charged for months when unused. Take the battery OUT of the laptop, and you will be able to power it on a year after you turn it off.
Low-self-discharge (LSD) NiMH cells (such as Sanyo Eneloop) have discharge rates that are even lower... up to as little as 20% per year.
As a guess based on my experience, the actual implementation of a design, with prototyping, testing for failure modes, integral monitoring, sensors and such, I will bet that another 1-2 dozen patents will be filed and $10s of millions will be spent getting or trying to get the "pre-production" version over a 3-5 year time frame. If they leverage by working with an existing battery manufacturer, maybe they get it to 2-3 years.
Given that the initial results suggest an energy density increase of an order of magnitude, I suspect VCs are already crawling into Palo Alto & up to Standford.
What happens between the "experiment" where a 10/1 advantage is produced, to the final produceable & safe product, it is not uncommon to see 10/1 advantages slip to 5/1.
Other notes in this thread have joked at 10 times the explosive power, which battery manufacturers have worked out in existing batteries, but this one will offer BIGGER challenges. I wouldn't know how to calculate the "explosive power" of the end design if safeties failed, but this will be critical.
Any serious damage which might cause a catastrophic short would cause some companies to NOT accept these batteries, like airlines for instance. My pure guess is that physical damage, in say an automobile accident, or similar "mashing", will make the design of safety features be what takes the most time and effort.
Because of the Bayh-Dole Act, which commercialized federally-funded research.
Are you joking? Batteries have come a LONG way since WW 2! Granted, electronics have become more powerful and energy-efficient as well, but you can't deny the progress made. Look at the life of a current generation set of Lithium AAs.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
From an article listed below this post, it talks about only having done 10 cycles so far. Borrowed Link So there is still work to do, but the science is promising.
The current limitation is that you cannot releaste the energy in a short burst.
Yes, precisely!
where ARE my *rechargable* lithium AA, AAA, C, D, & 9 volt batteries? NiMH is an improvement over NiCD but given all the rechargable Li-ION & Li-Polymer batteries in cell phones, laptops, etc... what is the deal?
**reaches for tin foil hat**