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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
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)
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.
It's not exactly a memory effect, but LiIon batteries do degrade over time. Unlike NiCd cells, their life is best preserved by keeping them about around 50% charge. You get a lot of people complaining that their batteries wear out quickly because they still think the things they learned about NiCd cells apply, so they fully discharge and recharge their LiIon cells, which is the absolute worst case for them.
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Universities have patent licensing programs for this, and often support their facultry or students in founding companies based on their research.
I'm sure Stanford has made a killing by licensing to or investing in companies. Here's a list of their startup investments - not necessarily patent related, but I'm sure many were founded by Stanford professors or alumni with patents licensed back from the university...
http://otl.stanford.edu/about/resources/equity.html
They probably made over a billion on Google alone...
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.
The current limitation is that you cannot releaste the energy in a short burst.
Yes, precisely!