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Batteries Smaller Than a Grain of Salt
An anonymous reader writes "Lithium-ion batteries have become ubiquitous in today's consumer electronics — powering our laptops, phones, and iPods. Research funded by DARPA is pushing the limits of this technology and trying to create some of the tiniest batteries on Earth, the largest of which would be no bigger than a grain of sand. These tiny energy storage devices could one day be used to power the electronics and mechanical components of tiny micro- to nano-scale devices."
As exciting as this is, I would take this news... ... with a grain of salt.
The title says smaller than a grain of salt but the article says smaller than a grain of sand.
And what kind of salt are you talking about? Table salt, sea salt, pickling salt? Same goes for sand. Waikiki sand, Provincetown sand, Bali sand?
What would be nice is if there were some system of measurement that could be easily understood by the masses when talking about such sizes. For example, how many fractions of a Library of Congress would that be? Or maybe elephants. Elephants are always good. I once listened to a story on NPR about how much water is in the average cloud. The scientist (hydrologist?) involved used elephants to let the listener know how many elephants worth of water was being suspended above our heads when clouds are about.
Personally I prefer metric buttloads. Use that term and everyone knows what you're talking about.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Because the most efficient batteries are the ones that aren't a bunch of teeny batteries all wired together into a larger one. You have all that wasted space, weight, and resistance loss due to all of the connectors. If this scaled, it would be best used in larger batteries.
And, from TFA, they are trying to match current densities, not improve on them. Take your 1Ah battery and replace it with 1,000 1mAh batteries that take up the same space, and now you have to connect 1,000 batteries together to come up with the same 1Ah battery. It's larger, heavier, more complex to build, and doesn't last any longer. It's about as logical as trying to get enough rechargeable button batteries to start your car. Sure, you could do it, but it's gonna be a lot bigger, heavier, expensive, and more prone to failure than your current battery.
The sole purpose of something like this is to power very tiny devices where there's no room for a full-sized battery. It's not improving energy density or efficiency.
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I don't know about everyone else, but I've had no less than 4 devices in the last year have faulty Li-Ion batteries (they didn't hold a charge, or ran out much faster than they should have). Each time I had to exchange the device for a new one, at which point it worked as expected.
Is this really how batteries are now? It's pathetic.
They've got this already... they're called capacitors. Ok, they're not smaller than a grain of salt, but an 0201 package is really fricken small.
Do you really need the greater power density you get from a chemical reaction rather than a capacitor at those sizes? A capacitor is so much easier to fabricate and charge that I can't imagine why you would go for a battery. I mean, in order to charge a battery, you'd need a chip that is MUCH larger than a grain of salt... although even for a cap you'd want a voltage regulator of some sort.
Maybe I'm missing something here. What is this for? Nano-machines? Nano listening devices? Nano-trackers? Now that seems like the really interesting question....
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all language nazi's will burne in heil!
It is already a pain to change AAA batteries, imagine what it is going to be like trying to change one of these things. Good forbid you drop the thing, or put it in the wrong way. Think, how many sides does a grain of salt have! That is going to the number of ways that someone is going to install it wrong!
Also, lets say you want to test it to see if it still has a charge. You put it on your tongue and it dissolves! Now your are stuck shelling out another 5 bucks to Energizer!
So we current have current laptop batteries that store X power in Y space and when then go wrong they over heat or even burst into flames so the new batteries that store the X power in "grain of rice" space then the power density stored must be a minimum of a 1000 times higher what happens when one of those goes wrong?