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Researchers Report Super-Powered Battery Breakthrough
another random user writes with news that researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are reporting a breakthrough in battery technology. They say:
"With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly. ... The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale (abstract). The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun’s group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance. With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available."
...Magic was discovered today and practical and affordable applications for it are now only 30 years away!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
That was the most worthless infomercial ever.
From the supplemental material: "The energy densities of the microbatteries are initially superior to the supercapcitors, but lose an average 5% total energy density after each cycle."
Which if we stop sacrificing everything at the alter of thin is fine.
A GS3 or Iphone5 could be twice the thickness and easily just as portable and easy to use. This would more than double the battery life since the extra volume could essentially be just battery and not radio or mobo.
So you would have a smartphone that lasted 2-5 days and could be charged in minutes.
On the car side, 100 miles is plenty of range if I can charge in 10 minutes. That would give you a nice short break every 2 hours.
If it can charge in seconds it does not need huge power density. If you could charge your phone in 1 minute than it only lasting 24 hours would be fine. If you could charge your car in 10 minutes than only having 100 mile range would be fine.
As someone who carries his phone in his pocket instead of his purse I disagree.
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If it can charge in seconds, then by very definition it has a huge power density. Perhaps you meant energy density?
imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second
I'd like to, but my fuses just blew, the connector in the phone melted down, there's a smell of burning plastic insulation in my room, and a small fire seems to have started burning here, so I have other things on my mind!
Ezekiel 23:20
Yes, I'm an idiot. I read super as sugar.
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
...do we ignore the first law of thermodynamics? If these batteries charge 1,000 times faster then they must put off 1,000 times the heat or so one would think under the law. Further, the largest collection of Lithium is sea water, but it is very inefficient to harvest existing at the ppm level.
The phone is credit-card thin, but the power connectors equal those on a car battery.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
I've considered several times trying to modify my phone to take a battery twice as large.
If used heavily, my phone usually dies halfway through the evening which means doubling
the capacity would be more than enough. I don't have a problem plugging my phone in every
evening so I really only need 12-16 hours instead of the 8-10 I currently get but ideally I would
want 40 hours (or a second battery) for the rare occasion I forget to plug it in. Either way, my
phone is plenty thin and I would barely notice the extra thickness of a slightly larger battery
which is easily obtainable with existing technologies. Too bad cellphones don't have battery
options like laptops do.
I carry my phone in my pocket. I have to use a long life battery with my Galaxy Nexus to make it last more than eight hours off charge, which means the stupid thing has a big ugly hunchback cover on the back of it, so the enlarged battery will fit. But while that might be ugly, it's hardly suddenly too thick to fit in my pocket.
Remember we're only talking about thickening a phone by a millimeter or two to get something approaching a reasonable battery life. The current situation is absolutely ridiculous and has nothing to do with practicality or the ability to fit a phone in a pocket. It's purely looks. And it's a prime example of form being put ahead of function to an extreme degree.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
... Elon Musk has one hell of a rager over this. This could make electric cars that could go from Florida to New York on one charge, and recharge in similar time to a gas refill, a possibility.
Say you got 500 miles to a charge, which is a reasonable amount if these numbers are to be believed. That's the amount of miles driven by the average US driver in 2 weeks. So if the battery needs to be replaced after 8-10 charges, you're talking once a quarter. If the battery costs $250 and is easily user-replaceable, this isn't a big deal:
My quick, rough math says that if it lost 5% of the original maximum after every charge and the maximum charge of a brand new battery were 500 miles, 10 charges would come out to 3875 miles. If the battery can be produced for $250, that comes out to 15.5 miles to every $1 spent on the battery. Now, consider experiments are in progress to allow free/nearly free recharges, so the cost would really be reduced to just the battery. The current gas price I see out my window is $3.33/gal and my Scion xB gets about 30 MPG.
So, my Scion costs $3.33 to go 30 miles. The Tesla with a $250 battery would cost $2, and not explode the environment.
I'm sold. // of course these costs are pure conjecture until we know more.
Apple's Lightning II connector coming soon...
You could try this:
http://boondeeworkshop.com/cellphone/index.html
Not exactly portable. It might make sense if you use your phone mostly in your car.
If they offered that with stock android or at least an unlocked boot loader I would have considered it.
All I want on the side of my battery not is a logo that says, "King/Pikul" Start a jam band, name it King Pickle, profit.
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I would carry my phone in my pocket but my dongle usually gets in the way.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Namely "safety issues" ,
seems like forever since we've had to worry about batteries exploding
Tell that to Boeing
I keep hoping for the battery that will finally allow the electric motor to kill the combustion engine. What little the article says sounds great, but it doesn't speak to a lot of questions, and too soon concludes with trite superlative and celebratory statements. "... breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources." Sure it does-- if such batteries aren't prohibitively expensive to manufacture, can be scaled up to power cars, don't have memory problems, will last for thousands of discharge cycles, aren't prone to catching on fire or blowing up, and also can withstand significant damage without burning or detonating, can handle a wide range of temperatures and altitudes, and are not difficult to recycle or scrap. At least the article covers one essential feature: they recharge quickly.
This kind of reporting is dreadfully common and tiresome. Seems every month brings us another announcement of a fantastic battery or fuel cell breakthrough. Evidently, it's asking too much of journalists to be a little more sober and thoughtful.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Sigh. If only I could fit my cell phone into my pocket.
You just need the right size pockets.
The anode is the side current flows into, not necessarily the negative one. From wiki:
In a discharging battery or galvanic cell (diagram at right), the anode is the negative terminal because it is where the current flows into "the device" (i.e. the battery cell). This inward current is carried externally by electrons moving outwards, negative charge moving one way constituting positive current flowing the other way.
In a recharging battery, or an electrolytic cell, the anode is the positive terminal, which receives current from an external generator. The current through a recharging battery is opposite to the direction of current during discharge; in other words, the electrode which was the cathode during battery discharge becomes the anode while the battery is recharging.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
"Here we report lithium ion microbatteries having power densities up to 7.4mWcm2m1,which equals or exceeds that of the best supercapacitors, and which is 2,000 times higher than that of other microbatteries."
WTF more do you want? you can calculate almost everything from there.
Sheesh.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Combustion engines, while fun, spew poison into the air.
So do electric power plants. What matters is how much, and modern combustion engines are very well optimized in that regard - something like 1/10000th of what a car from the 60s would.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
.do we ignore the first law of thermodynamics? If these batteries charge 1,000 times faster then they must put off 1,000 times the heat or so one would think under the law.
The first law of thermodynamics says that energy isn't created or destroyed. It has nothing to do with charging rates. With respect to charging it just tells you that the stored energy added plus the losses (mostly heat) add up to the energy you supplied. (Second law says you have to lose SOMETHING to make the charging happen - though it doesn't say how much.)
The key here is battery resistance. The heat produced is proportional to the SQUARE of the current. If you charged a battery with the same resistance a thousand times as fast, you'd generate a MILLION times the heat.
Charge is determined by current times time. Maximum charging rate is determined by the highest charging current you can drive while creating heat no faster than it can be dissipated with the battery almost at the maximum temperature it can stand. Resistance tells you how much heat you generate at a given current. Cut the resistance by a factor of a million and you can multiply your charging rate by a factor of a thousand and get the same heat generation.
The micro-geometry of the plates in this case (along with most of the recent ultra-fast-charge battery designs) results in drastically lowered resistance.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And yet still twice as much as a coal fired power plant, 100 times as mich as a gas fired powerplant, and a million times more than a wind turbine.
I'm afraid your cut and paste came out complete garbage. The number you want to express is 7.4 mW cm^-2 micrometer^-1, which is more conventionally expressed as 74 MW/liter. Slashdot's markup support for compositions is incredibly crude.