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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.
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
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 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.
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
"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
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.