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Sony Creating Sulfur-Based Batteries With 40% More Capacity Than Li-Ion (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Since the original iPhone was released in 2007, we have seen some incredible advances in smartphone processing power along with a wealth of feature improvements like faster Wi-Fi and cellular speeds and larger, higher resolution displays. However, battery technology, for the most part, hasn't kept up. There are a few major battery suppliers but Sony is currently an underdog, commanding just 8 percent of the market for compact lithium-ion batteries. Its three largest competitors — Samsung (SDI), Panasonic and LG Chem — each command around 20 percent of the market. In an effort to change that, Sony is developing a new type of battery chemistry that can boost runtimes by 40 percent compared to lithium-ion batteries of the same volume. Sony's batteries use a sulfur compound instead of lithium compounds for the positive electrodes, reportedly allowing for much great energy density. Sulfur batteries can also supposedly be made 30 percent smaller than traditional lithium-ion cells while maintaining the same run times. The company is now working to ensure that the new battery chemistry is safe enough for commercial use.
I think phones are small enough. How about we work on making them last at least 1 day on a full charge?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Energy density is not all that matters, and even energy density is *complicated.* One can have high energy density if one looks at maximum energy per mass, or per volume, and depending on the application and how different they are one or the other can matter, which is why tables generally include both https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_of_common_energy_storage_materials . But even aside from energy density one has other issues, like recharge time and lifespan. It doesn't matter if you can make a battery with very high energy density but with a very short lifespan. In general, I'm skeptical of claims of massive improvement in batteries. As with new solar systems, if every single in-lab claimed battery improvement all were genuine and implementable we'd have solves all the world's energy problems years ago.
Battery research is far more important than building smaller phones and tablets. Increased energy storage density has important implications for household and grid storage, and electric-powered transport.
The problem is that there have been at least a dozen or so stories about new battery tech in the past 12 months. Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away. Enough crying wolf; wake me when I can buy one.
Li-Ion batteries already go up in nice flames. Consider what you would get with 40% more energy and sulphur getting burned off into the air.
No it's not. Weight energy and volumic energy are two different things. The article does not say which is which.
It's a good thing that the summary (didn't even have to click through to the article) indicates that it's using volumetric energy density for both:
"Sony is developing a new type of battery chemistry that can boost runtimes by 40 percent compared to lithium-ion batteries of the same volume. Sony's batteries use a sulfur compound instead of lithium compounds for the positive electrodes, reportedly allowing for much great energy density. Sulfur batteries can also supposedly be made 30 percent smaller than traditional lithium-ion cells while maintaining the same run times."
Weight - and therefore energy density per unit mass - isn't mentioned or implied.
The grandparent's observation is spot on--the summary is indeed saying exactly the same thing in two different ways. If you can have the same runtime in 30% less volume, you can always get 40% more runtime with the original-sized package. To within a trivial rounding error, 140% and 70% are reciprocals; they're just saying "40% improvement in volumetric energy density".
~Idarubicin
I worked at a company where a hallway smelled like an open sewer for several weeks. What made it mysterious was that no sewer line went through that part of the building, leaving the building architect and plumber puzzled. The smell came from leaking batteries inside a UPS in a network closet. Since no one bothered to plugin in the monitoring cable, the one guy who did I.T. for the company didn't know that the UPS stopped working a long time ago. Now that was one hell of a stinker.
Some of them remind you of the old joke about nuclear fusion; it's always 20 years away.
Actually it's 40 years - and it's been 40 years away for the past 60 years or so. However batteries are a bit different in that there are regular claims of working prototypes with capacities 2-10 times the current limit and/or recharge rates similarly improved yet none ever seem to make it into a commercial product and yet the capabilities of Li-ion are slowly improving. What I would love to know is where all these ideas fail (as so many clearly have). Is that they cost too much to make, aren't safe in everyday environments or that the improvements claimed are woefully optimistic? or is if that by the time they would come to market Li-ion has improved itself to the point where there is not much difference in capability?
Let me know when there are factories building these batteries, until then, *yawn*
This is a site with "news for nerds". If you are not interested in reading about interesting scientific research then go elsewhere. I am just happy that it is Friday, and so far there are no SJW articles.
Btw, the summary is muddle-headed. It compares "lithium compounds" to "sulfer compounds" when the Sony battery is actually Lithium-Sulfur, with both lithium and sulfer. Lithium-Sulfur batteries are not new, but they are not widely used because they tend to degrade and have short lifetimes. Maybe Sony figured out a solution to that.
How about making them smaller in the x and y directions? Or why not have a keypad at least.
I predict, that most — if not all — of the added capacity will be eaten by new hardware and features, as happened with the rest of the computer-industry.
By Moore's law, today's computers ought to be over 256 more powerful, than in the previous millennium (16 years ago) — and the hardware is. But the operating systems and applications ate most of it. And not only because of the new features which the users want (as well as those we do not), but also because the programmers choose wasteful technologies like programming languages, that are more convenient for them, and otherwise sacrificing speed to software portability and maintainability.
It is quite common for people to complain, that their computer has "become slow" — they don't realize, that the machine is just as fast as when they bought it, but the software (including open-source) has become more demanding.
For similar reasons, the phones using these new batteries will not run for 40% longer...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The reason why consumers "prefer" bigger phones is not because people want a change of clothing with bigger pockets... but the faster CPUs and such require more area to deal with heat.
Of course, I've been told by someone in the industry that nobody would give up CPU and RAM for a smaller phone, but it would be nice to have a phone about the size of an iPhone 4.
In general, it seems phone form factor choices have went from candybars, flip-phones, sliders, keyboards, clamshells... to the typical all-glass touch screen smartphone that fundamentally looks the same. across all models. Is this better? Not really.
Then, there are capabilities built in. Phones are powerful enough that one can build in an entire desktop OS. The Motorola Atrix and Atrix2 are examples of this. It would be nice, with the USB 3.1/USB 3 standard to be able to plug a keyboard, mouse, and monitor into a cellphone, and use it as a desktop. If one creates a dedicated network GPU server that allows devices to send graphics commands, and gets back streaming video (think OnLive for the LAN), then the device wouldn't need to have much in the way of video, and a phone could drive a standard monitor. This essentially allows one device to perform multiple roles, similar to how Microsoft's Surface Pro can work as a tablet, as well as function as a full desktop computer.
Right now, smartphones seem to be stagnating. We have faster CPUs and payment methods, maybe even touchscreens that register pressure on them... but those are evolution, "0.1" or "0.0.1" style improvements. Having the ability to use the phone as a desktop via USB-C, or even as a document repository, similar to Intel's personal server concept, would be a real "1.0" advance. Especially if BlueTooth could be used with a hard drive to get respectable transfer rates, at least USB 2.0, if not greater for short distances. Barring that, there are companies saying they could get 1GB/sec from infrared, so maybe update the IrDA protocol and have that as an alternative to wireless.
Lots of ways phones can be improved on, but there are no players interested in doing anything to affect the status quo right now.
And my laptop charge lasts weeks, thanks to my never turning it on.
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The reason why consumers "prefer" bigger phones is not because people want a change of clothing with bigger pockets... but the faster CPUs and such require more area to deal with heat.
Of course, I've been told by someone in the industry that nobody would give up CPU and RAM for a smaller phone, but it would be nice to have a phone about the size of an iPhone 4.
I work in the industry. I can tell you that the size is due to the display. It's not primarily due to heat dissipation. The manufacturers are convinced (based on trends and sales) that people want big phones with 5" or larger screens.
Actually it`s hard to type on a small phone with my large penis.. I mean fingers!