Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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."
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
Agreed. The whole article is full of vague comparison like 30 times farther, 30 times smaller, 1000 times faster etc. The abstract does not even talk about energy density. It only talks about power density. Even that is blatantly exaggerated. Based on the abstract, it translated to max 74 W/cm^3. The article claims, cell phone using batteries few millimeter in size can jump start a car. How is this possible unless the definition of "few" is overstretched and use a cell phone of the size of olden days public phone.
Recharging in the same time as a gas refill is unlikely to ever happen.
To go NY to Florida in an electric car will take on the order of 1MWh. To recharge this in 5 minutes (gas refill time) would require a cable transferring a power of 12MW. If we used 25,000 volts to do this (the voltage of overhead electrical lines for high speed electric trains) the current would be 480 amps. It's simply not practical to do while obeying the laws of physics.
Now think of how many people are fuelling up at a gas station at any given moment, and think about it if they are all drawing a power of 12 megawatts. There is no practical technology for the forseeable future that you can use to build a power grid capable of doing this. This is before we even get to safety issues of a power interconnect which is both high voltage and high current.
Also think of that 12MW figure for a moment, and you may get an inkling why personal motorised transport is absolutely unsustainable.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows