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Researchers Create A Lithium-Ion Battery With Built-In Flame Retardant (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget:
One big problem with lithium-ion batteries is that they have the tendency to catch fire and blow up all kinds of gadgets like toys and phones. To solve that issue, a group of researchers from Stanford University created lithium-ion batteries with built-in fire extinguishers. They added a component called "triphenyl phosphate" to the plastic fibers of the part that keeps negative and positive electrodes separate. Triphenyl phosphate is a compound commonly used as a flame retardant for various electronics. If the battery's temperature reaches 150 degrees Celsius, the plastic fibers melt and release the chemical. Based on the researchers' tests, the method can stop batteries from burning up within 0.4 seconds.
What we need is a DiLithium battery to propel us to the 24th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
> batteries can be recycled pretty easily
Are they? Is there enough pressure in place for that?
> Personally, I prefer a bit of leaked flame retardant over a plane crash
Point is: less flights overall is even better. Of course my mumbling above about a "hipster blazing off his balls" was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the serious part is: at the moment we are not willing (are we even able) to renounce to a bit of "instant gratification" (also called "progress") in the name of a longer term vision. Of course you could dial down energy density by a couple of percent, maybe a smallish ten percent, and that wouldn't only make the flame retardant unnecessary, but let the battery last *much* longer and be more resistant to abuse (LiFePO, y'know). But octocore and play HD video seems more important.
For me, this is utterly disgusting.
Remember the times where we said free market economies give you a choice -- contrary to the grey Soviet communism? We are reaching a point where shaving off the last .03 percent costs in economy of scale is taking this choice from us.
A battery capable of running a laptop for 10 hours is - if the energy is applied as heat, or even just sheer unrestricted electrical discharge - the same as powering 600 laptops for a minute. Or 3600 laptops for a second. Imagine the energy you need to do that - to just turn on 3600 laptops simultaneously, even for a second.
The amount of energy stored is enormous. In oil-based products it's orders of magnitude more again. Which is why a tiny little candle thing in a survival pack can cook your food, or a paraffin heater can heat a house.
The more energy you store, the greater the risk, but it does depend on how it's released. There's a reason you can't stop a house fire without hours of dampening it down - wood has a ton of energy but doesn't tend to release it that quickly, but can still be alight the next morning once it gets going.
In terms of battery, the worst problem is a short-circuit, either in the battery or the circuit itself. I can remember short-circuiting AA NiCd batteries as a kid, with my electronics kits. You could literally melt the plastic casing off the battery and make them too hot to touch in just a few seconds, with sparks and all sorts of case deformation as you did so. And that's an AA battery, with maybe 450mAh. Nowadays, rechargeable AA's can ten times that.
And then you consider the energy in a Li-Po that's as big as a laptop battery? When that goes wrong, you're in big trouble.
The short-circuit resistance does change things. Shorting a cheap alkaline likely won't do much at all, but even they come with warnings not to do that. But you're assuming that things are already going wrong for a battery in normal usage to short. At that point, you just assume zero-resistance and watch as your laptop catches fire and explodes.
No matter the technology, if it's capable of delivering that much electrical power, and you short it or break it, it's going to do pretty much the same thing.
My dad tells a story of when he and his work colleagues shorted a forklift battery bank. It was in an abandoned warehouse and the forklift was scrap, basically. They dropped a thick steel spanner over the batteries (a handful of normal lead-acid car batteries, basically) from a distance. The spanner glowed red, then bent, then glowed white, at which point the entire forklift exploded into smithereens and they were scraping battery acid off a warehouse ceiling (50ft up!) for weeks.
The energy is there, if you need to do those jobs for that length of time. If you release it all at once, even for a car battery, you have a literal explosive device on your hands. That isn't going to change just because you change lead-acid for hydrogen fuel cells or petrol for LPG or NiCd for LiPo.