Why Batteries Haven't Kept Up 446
TimWeigel writes "Ever wonder why we can cram ever more computer power into smaller and smaller devices, but we're still (mostly) slaves to the almighty AA? This article on CNN touches on this very important facet of our lives - why the power sources for our Palm Pilots and Gameboys haven't matched the advances in computing power. In a word: physics." I had an interesting conversation with a person who's been doing a lot of research into batteries. Batteries have grown at standard normal industrial rates - which are much slower then Moore's Law, and hence, the source of our problem.
Calculus Has Kept Up (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Can you differentiate complex numbers? (Score:2, Informative)
The beauty is, if your complex function is analytic (smooth) everywhere (or almost everywhere), then differentiation is just the same as in the case of single varable functions of the reals ({f:R->R}), only the variable is a complex number.
For example,
d/dx(exp(a*z))=a*exp(a*z)
for a complex variable z and a complex constant a.
Re:Can you differentiate complex numbers? (Score:3, Informative)
They click on your user info page, and mark down all your last few comments when they have moderator points, thus wrecking your karma, and destroying the visibility of your posts.
There was someone who did that to me, because he didn't like my perfectly valid (if opinionated) post.
Thus, abuse of the moderation system.
Of course, this post will be marked offtopic, even though deep-nested comments should NEVER be marked offtopic due to the fact that normal discussion almost always goes off in other directions than the topic, but, I digress...
I would have marked you back up had I not already spent my moderator points.
Actually (Score:3, Insightful)
Rechargable (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rechargable (Score:2)
Re:Rechargable (Score:2)
Re:Rechargable (Score:2)
Re:Actually (Score:2, Interesting)
However, if you're traveling it is a bother to carry all the chargers around.
Also, finding a power plug might be an issue.
It would be so much easier if the devices could use a standardized charger.
Re:Actually (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that far they haven't. The reason more devices run on rechargables is because the devices have reduced their power usage. It's not because the batteries are massively better.
more power than a tactical nuke (Score:5, Insightful)
engineering around power limitations means smart, efficent designs, not wasteful products that just suck up energy. i think these limitations helped designers innovate.
Re:more power than a tactical nuke (Score:2)
Re:more power than a tactical nuke (Score:4, Insightful)
Chip makers (intel/amd/etc) and hardware vendors expect software producers to write expensive code, that only the newest processors have a chance of running. Thats how they push the newer boxes out the door.
Re:more power than a tactical nuke (Score:2, Interesting)
Nuclear paranoia (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:2)
americium decay (Score:3, Informative)
Re:americium decay (Score:2, Informative)
Re:americium decay (Score:3, Informative)
It's even simpler than that, actually --- the alpha particles emitted by the americium ionise the air inside the detector cell, making it slightly conductive. When smoke enters the cell, the conductivity changes and the alarm goes off.
That's why you can stop smoke alarms by blowing at them --- you're blowing the smoke out of the detector cell.
Reasonable fear, wouldn't you say (Score:2)
As for your smoke detector example, IIRC the americium is used as the smoke sensor itself, not as a power source.
I'm all for the use of nuclear technology where appropriate, but having substantial quantities of radioactive material in everybody's Game Boy doesn't strike me as appropriate.
Re:Reasonable fear, wouldn't you say (Score:2, Insightful)
Damned near anything can be turned in to a weapon, and most household products, when mixed the right (or wrong, depending on your perspective) way can level a large office building. Are we going to ban everything that can cause harm when used in the wrong way? Name me a product that CAN'T be used to cause harm.
So no, I don't think your fear is reasonable. If it were, we'd all stay locked in our homes, never venturing out, and the Attorney General of the United States would make damned near everything illegal just out of paranoia. Wait a minute...that's already happening...
Re:Reasonable fear, wouldn't you say (Score:2)
I'm as big an advocate for nuclear power as you'll find, but if such things are to be commercially available then they need to be protected in a way that makes them impractical for such terrorist activities, and that precludes them being small enough to be portable.
Re:Reasonable fear, wouldn't you say (Score:2)
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:2, Informative)
not quite.. the americium is merely a source of ionizing radiation that makes it easier to detect small amounts of smoke. batteries are still required
http://www.howstuffworks.com/smoke2.htm
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:2)
I think there's much more danger of someone cracking a NiCad battery open than there is of someone taking a plutonium RTG apart and breaking open the irridium shells which encase the plutonium.
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:2)
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:5, Interesting)
The first nuclear power plant was fired up in metro Chicago! if they thought it was dangerous
Actually it was dangerous. Starting up a nuclear reactor in a squash court in downtown Chicago was dangerous then, and it's dangerous today. Just because nothing went wrong doesn't make it safe. The risk of blowing up Chicago was probably about zero. The risk of making a big chuck of Chicago uninhabitable and making a lot of people sick had their reactor caught on fire was very real.
The public's fear of nuclear power is not entirely unfounded. Fissonable materials are extremely dangerous to humans. You don't really want to be shipping it around all over the place like gasoline. Accidents do happen. And it's very hard to clean up.
On the other hand, some countries are still actively developing nuclear power. South Africa, I belive, is in the process of building a "pebble bed" reactor which should be quite safe compared to the reactor designs used currently. It is claimed to be meltdown-proof, and the fuel should always stay contained inside of the "pebbles" reducing the risk of contamination. Of course, you still need a plant to manufacture the pebbles themselves, and that plant could turn into a mess if not properly run.
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Nuclear paranoia (Score:2)
dont really know, cince they just now have some antimatter to play with, i am guessing that a few years some scientist will figure out how to make it reqall fricking hot to generate steam or cause a huge number of thermocouples to generate electricity. it's not my job. but any corperation that would do it probably wont because of the hostility in this country towards nuclear energy. Like you said S. Africa are continuing research while here in the USA we happily coddle the gree-freaks instead of researching safer and better uses.
You've got Nuclear Paranoia! (Score:4, Insightful)
Pebble manufacture is probably the smallest problem. If your graphite moderator is sufficiently pure, you can use natural uranium and you have no enrichment or other steps and no byproducts. Yellowcake (uranium dioxide) is probably one of the least-difficult materials to work with; it's been used as a colorant in pottery glazes.
Standardisation (Score:5, Insightful)
There's the argument that the laptop makers (and so forth) would lose their revenue streams from replacement batteries, but they also wouldn't have to pay a premium on putting the things into the laptops in the first place, if we had newer battery standards which specified the characteristics of a set of 'standard' laptop batteries.
Perhaps I'm over-optimistic, but I'm certainly hoping that commoditisation eventually leads to not having to buy the 'special' AA rechargeables for my camera, or being able to walk into any computer store and get a new XX for my laptop...
Re:Standardisation (Score:5, Funny)
Why not standarise on one size of paper too? I say we go with B2. That should suit everyone, right?
Re:Standardisation (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Standardisation (Score:2)
Re:Standardisation (Score:3, Insightful)
Standard Cells (Score:4, Insightful)
How is this helpful? I had a 486 laptop that I could not find a replacement battery for but Batteries Plus was able to replace the cells in the old battery. When I used to be an instrumentation tech, we recelled batteries all of the time. It was often far cheaper to rebuild a battery than to buy one new. This works for laptops too. If you want to do it yourself, Dremel tools, epoxy and superglue are your friends. Even after paying a Batteries Plus tech it can still be cheaper if you recoil at the thought of wielding the Dremel yourself.
I'll also point out that the cells in the battery are often held together by metal straps that are sort of punched into the terminals of the cell. If you want to try your hand at battery rebuilding , then you will want to run down a supply of the strips and the punch tool.
Re:Standardisation (Score:2)
Re:Standardisation (Score:2)
> so forth?
BTW: When you break up such batteries you'll see that they are usually a bunch of standard cells soldered together with some kind of temperature triggered fuse...
Re:Standardisation (Score:3, Informative)
I think you sum it up nicely. It's the revenue from spares and replacements. I bought a used laptop with a dead NiMh from eBay for about $270. The battery manufacturer (Solomon) isn't even selling these batteries any more, but there's a generic Duracell equivelant, ranging from $105 for the dumb battery to $150 for the smart version.
Consider that this pack is pretty much equivelant to 10 x 1.5 (actually 1.2)V MiMh AA's, costing $50 or less for ten good cells. The dumb pack is charging a 100% markup for the form factor and contacts, and (no doubt) a very cheap recharger. The NiMh in my other laptop gets very hot while charging, which is about the last thing you want to happen.
An interesting how-to on making up an external power pack for a digital camera using 5 x 7Ah F cell NiCd's (totalling about ten times a typical laptop battery's capacity) can be found here [dansdata.com].
To power a 12V laptop, you need 10 x 1.5v cells (which actually deliver about 1.2V each). Using various types of (e.g.) Sanyo NiCd's (although I'd prefer NiMh's, as cadmium is nasty-nasty), you could use:
Compare and contrast with my 3.5Ah pack at about 250g. Even with stock AA's, I'd get over three times the capacity and life. If I wanted to lug a lump of battery around, I could run the thing for days off of battery power. Actually, my laptop expects 19v DC in through the power jack (to recharge the 12v internal battery), so you could multiply all these figures by up to 1.5, if you felt like (realistically) powering a laptop for a working week off of a 7 lbs F cell pack.
NiMH (Score:3, Interesting)
I have quite a few Accu-Recharge NiMH batteries that cost me about $10 for four.
It used to (about 2 years ago) cost 4 times that.
I'd say that's progress...
Re:NiMH (Score:2)
the $10.00 pricetag is too high for joe-schmoe to pay, while people like me snag everything off of the display when they clearance them.
Take a look at your local homey-center.
Another reason... (Score:2, Insightful)
Another reason not touched by the article: compatibility. How many people here would replace all their AA-weilding devices if new batteries wouldn't work in them? Actually, knowing the slashdot crowd, all of them would. But hey, that's the whole point! There's a market for a newer, better battery.
I always hated my TI-85, fresh batteries at the start of a school year would run out just days before the final exam. My last calculus exam was a whole lot of squinting at the screen with the contrast turned up to 9
Re:Another reason... (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, Tetris really sucked up the batteries in High School Calculus.
Companies have solid market. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would the battery companies want to improve themselves out of so many repeat sales?
Make your product a bit better than the next guy, but make it so good that your customer only needs half as much of your product as they did in the past, and you have lost sales.
Fuel cells realistic battery replacement? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fuel cells realistic battery replacement? (Score:2, Informative)
I think the problem of power cells (the ones that already exist and existed for a long time (non-commercial)) is that they hold a big charge (mAh) but it's difficult to reach a given voltage.
Hence, to duplicate an AA battery you will need a LOT of full cells chained together, and thus the device will be really big (impractical).
Also, if the fuel cells are not really a BIG improvemt over batteries, they are niche. Because refilling a Metal hidride cell is free. If you Palm can live a month and recharge for free, why would you need a fuel cell?
So fuel cells will be a niche before becoming widly adopted. Yet, another technologies (atomic batteries, etc) may obsolete them before they see the light.
Re:Fuel cells realistic battery replacement? (Score:2)
Water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide, while far less effective, is also a greenhouse gas.
lame article, ignores fuel cells, atomic batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
Example : In 1987 Apple asked potential portable computer consumers to rate, in numerical order 10 different attributes of a system they cared about most.
Battery longevity came in LAT place... even so apple demanded a pure CMOS system, including CMOS cpu for its portable mac and a non backlit screen resulting in a staggering 10 hour battery life.
10 hours of use.
Humorously with no more low power general purpose cpus in existence in 1998 comsumers rated battery duration MOST IMPORTANT, first place above performance.
Hilarious.
Apple tried to do the impossible and the "Wallstreet" 300 Mhz G3 Powermac laptop used a low power dvd decoder and dvd drive so that the entire system could do someting no ibm pc could do, or still can do nowadays as far as i know.... play an entire two hour (120 minute) dvd movie at full brightness without swapping batteries once. Just one Lithium ion battery.
non stop dvd playback.
now its 2002 and no apple laptop can do that, and i think no comperable highend PeeCee (Wintell) laptop sporting dvd, firewire, fast cpu, etc can play a movie on one battery.
We are going backwards.
Example : a Palm Pilot, even the 8 megabyte (yes 8 MB) Palm 3x, lasts almost 30 days of usage on a pair of AA "1100 milliamp-hour" standard alkaline batteries.
But the color palm eats up batteries because it uses a backlit design, unlike the ingenious Gameboy Advance low poer color screen which requires sunlight but last a long time on its batteries.
But that article is not very techie. It ignores radioactive batteries, fuel cell designs and other energy sources.
Re:lame article, ignores fuel cells, atomic batter (Score:3, Informative)
You were doing pretty good until you called the GBA screen "ingenious". Even in bright light, that thing is horrible. Literally, no hyperbole, that screen is the worst screen ever created. Bar none.
Having your batteries last a long time doesn't do you any good if your EYES wear out after five minutes.
Re:lame article, ignores fuel cells, atomic batter (Score:2)
what about capacitors? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:what about capacitors? (Score:3, Informative)
Even the highest energy density capacitors are easily out stripped by the lowest energy density batteries. Granted thay have made huge strides in the past years with the Ultra capacitors and at some point break even with batteries. You can now get multiple Farad capacitors but that is still peanuts in comparison to an AA battery. On the other hand research may at some point allow them to catch up or surpass batteries.
Re:what about capacitors? (Score:2)
Re:what about capacitors? (Score:3, Informative)
Batteries and capacitors are quite different. Batteries use electrochemical reactions that produce a near-constant potential (voltage) across the terminals, until the reactants are used up.
Capacitors work by polarizing a dielectric material [a physical change, not a chemical one] between two closely-spaced plates. The terminal voltage is proportional to the amount of charge (time integral of current) the capacitor is holding.
Modern capacitors are approaching the energy capacity of batteries. A 50F 2.3V capacitor holds 132 J of energy, which is equivalent to 120 Amp-seconds (or 33 mA-hours) at 1.1 Volts. This capacitor costs CDN$17.88, compared to $2.17 for a 250 mAh AAA NiCd cell. (prices are from Digikey in quantities of 1000)
So the capacitor's about 8x the cost for 1/8 the capacity of the NiCd.
We make memory chips using microscopic capacitors. What limitations keep us from packing a bunch of those together to make a more powerful battery?
One big limitation is that we only make our memory chips one layer thick (vs. multi-layer capacitors), and that these capacitors are optimized for storing information, not energy. The more energy stored per cell, the more heat is wasted every time that cell switches state.
Re:what about capacitors? (Score:2, Informative)
Unfortunately, even with current technology in the field of exotic materials, flywheels are too dangerous/unwieldy for automotive use. It's very difficult to control a disk spinning at tens of thousands of RPMS; IIRC, someone was killed when one of the flywheels disintegrated in road testing.
There are two ways to connect batteries. If you connect them in series, you get increased voltage; in parallel, you get increased amperage. Most complex, high-amperage systems use a combination of the two. Your car's battery, for example, is such a hybrid; it has 6 cells, each providing 2 volts, in series so that it can provide the 12 volts your car runs on. In each cell, though, it contains several cells, sometimes up to a dozen, connected in parallel, to provide the needed amperage. If the same cells were connected in series, you'd never have enough current to start your car.
"i don't know, i don't like it...." (Score:2, Insightful)
sombody slap this guy silly(ooh, someone already did). bateries have evolved big time. the battery in the old 386 laptop in my closet couldn't power a modern lalptop thru' the bios(okay, it probably would, but not much longer).
The real problem with recarable bateries is people. of you leave the battery fully charged, lat say over the summer, it's broken. the cemical compunds have reacted and formed stable elements(wich won't produce power). I hate to see poeple who leave their cell phones plugged in the wall so it's full when they take it with them once a week.
---
Re:"i don't know, i don't like it...." (Score:3, Insightful)
A good and bad example (Score:4, Informative)
On the other hand, I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop which has a lame battery. It is also lithium-ion. When I first got my laptop the battery would last about 3 hours before having to recharge. About a year later, it would last barely 1 hour. Dell knows their batteries don't last very long and only warrant them one year (despite the 3 years I have on the rest of the machine!). I found this out when I contacted them 1 year + 1 week after I bought the laptop. I ended up writing a small windows app called BatteryLog [boonedocks.net] to help track your battery performance. You may want to give it a try on your laptop before your year-warranty runs out.
So basically, it's more than just the technology of the battery, it's also the design and manufacturer. There are some good ones out there!
Apples to Oranges (Score:3, Informative)
They're two different tools, used for different tasks and designed differently as a result. It's like you're trying to compare how many miles per gallon you get in a motorcycle vs. a chainsaw. One of those measurements won't make much sense.
Your G1 draws far less current at a far lower rate than your laptop. Your laptop has a hard drive that's probably constantly spinning while you're using it, while your camera's only motor is in the zoom lens. (OK, you might have a microdrive, but that doesn't stay spinning nearly as long as the drive in your PC.) Your camera's backlit screen has about 5 in^2 of illuminated area, but your laptop's screen is closer to 180 in^2, a 36 times larger screen that draws close to 36 times as much power. Flashes are also not a constant power draw. Finally, its off to your CPU to check current draw. Camera CPUs are more closely related to dedicated microcontrollers than they are to the general purpose CPUs found in your laptop. Microcontrollers are designed for minimal current draw, they power themselves down nicely (and frequently. While your Pentium was designed with low power laptops in mind, it still draws a frightfully large amount of current in comparison to the little processor inside your camera.
If you were able to wire up your camera's battery to power your laptop, you'd find you'd get maybe ten minutes of battery life. There's not magic inside that battery, and that's basically the point of the whole article.
John
Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:2)
Charge cycles (Score:2)
They aren't really rated in months or years, though that's how the warranties are written.
Rechargable batteries are rated in charge cycles. Charge cycle == discharge and recharge the battery, doesn't matter if it is a partial or a complete discharge.
NiCd batteries are rated for about 400-500 charge cycles.
NiMH batteries are rated for about 400 charge cycles.
Lithium and Lithium Ion batteries are rated for about 300 charge cycles.
Battery charge capacity falls off as a function of charge cycle lifetime. The closer to the end of your 400 charge cycles, the less capacity you'll see in your batteries.
How many times have you recharged the battery in your laptop? How many times in your digital camera?
Yes, the batteries in your digital camera will start sucking after about 250 or 300 charge cycles. Expect to have to buy new ones about that time. Or buy a new camera, which will come with new batteries, whichever.
Re:Charge cycles (Score:2)
How many times have you recharged the battery in your laptop? How many times in your digital camera?
That's sort of hard to answer, since the battery is in the laptop constantly, and the laptop is socket-powered 99.9% of the time I use it. But I estimate that I fully used and charged it no more than 50 times. More like about 30. The camera has had probably 30 or more charges too. I know they're not the same and I don't expect my G1 battery to run my Dell. Maybe I just got a bad laptop battery, but it's too late for me to have it fixed free now. :(
The Way of the Fuel Cell (Score:3, Funny)
clean electric cars = oxymoron (Score:2, Informative)
The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car.
Would somebody please stick a note to that author's forehead - you recharge your exhaust-free car by plugging it into a radioactive and/or hot'n'smoky power station...
I'm still hanging out for that orbiting solar collector/microwave beam thingie [spacefuture.com]!!
Re:clean electric cars = oxymoron (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear plants are another story. It may very well be possible to design a reactor that produces no waste - that is an engineering matter. Building the thing is a political matter, and thus not subject to the dictates of reason.
Solar (terrestrial or space-based), wind, and hydroelectric power aren't being built fast enough to keep up with demand, mainly due to their low output and high cost.
One thing the article ignores is the development of small fuel cells that can use methanol as fuel directly. Methanol (or ethanol) can easily be made from corn, soybeans, or industrial hemp. Such fuel cells could power small devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and laptops for days instead of hours on a few deciliters of alcohol, without noxious ozone and nitrous oxide emmissions.
Re:clean electric cars = oxymoron (Score:2)
Please, Please also note that Nuke power plants produce a miniscule amount of waste compared to the early 80's and Coal and natural gas power plants also produce very little "evil-toxic-gasses"(tm) than they did in the early 80's (which by the way is when they got the numbers for all the tree-hugger propaganda you read today.)
yes they put out some bad stuff, but not a whole lot anymore.. and the clean-freaks are making the big corperations afraid of even trying to make new types of power supplies.
Oh and please dont mention the horrible toxic by-products from solar cell manufacture, rechargeable batteries, etc...
Re:clean electric cars = oxymoron (Score:3, Informative)
The results...even when energy production for recharging is taken in to account, electric cars were found to be MASSIVELY less of an impact on the environment than their internal combustion brothers.
Re:clean electric cars = oxymoron (Score:2)
The coal power plant has much better energy efficiency and makes much less pollution per kWh of energy produced then the small automotive internal combustion engine. By ?plugging? your electric car to the said hot'n'smoky power station you ARE actually making significantly less pollution.
I am not advocating fossil fuel energy production and would actually like to see it phased out. Electric vehicles are the step in right direction.
Flywheels (Score:5, Interesting)
batteries. One company reports a 50:1 energy to
weight advantage over lead acid batteries. (How
does that compare to Lithium?). You add energy
electrically - a motor spins up the flywheel.
You get it out electrically - a generator takes
energy from the flywheel. To reduce friction, the
flywheel sits in a vacuum, and uses a magnetic
bearing. 17,000 RPM. They claim a 5% loss per day. It would
be nice to be able to add energy at a high rate -
like at a kilowatt. No memory. When the device
no longer functions, there are no toxic chemicals.
I'd like a laptop that runs for 100 hours between
charges, and charges in a minute. I'd like to
be able to add energy by hand crank, solar cell,
car plug or house plug without funky adapters
to lug around.
There is talk of putting flywheel batteries on
the space station. Twin counter rotating flywheels
reduce torque on the station.
Re:Flywheels (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't that a little high? I'm no expert on batteries but it would seem to me that this idea would be useful only for something along the lines of continually adding energy to these things (until just before the material would reach its breaking point) and then do a large deceleration to capacitors to store up a shizerload of charge for burst transmission, like say to a lazer.... hmmm...
Re:Flywheels (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flywheels (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Flywheels (Score:3, Insightful)
Why rechargeable batteries can't keep up (Score:5, Informative)
Dump those $15 battery chargers, get a good one, and you'll only need one Set of batteries for every appliance for the rest of your life.
Good battery charger (Score:2)
Any suggestions?
Re:Good battery charger (Score:5, Informative)
i have this charger, and use it with ni-cds and ni-mhs, and it works great. really saves money. i use nimhs in my discman and my palm, and soon in my minidisc player. i highly recommend both the charger and thomas dist.
complex
Re:Good battery charger (Score:2)
I can always wind it up (Score:2)
If physics can't compete, let's see how many people will want to generate their own energy anywhere by winding up their electronics! [freeplay.net]
Re:I can always wind it up (Score:2, Interesting)
Bloat hurts Batteries, not process shrinks (Score:3, Insightful)
It is the users/marketers insistance on cramming more "functionality" [aka bloatware] in that gobbles battery life. Quit whining -- we do this to ourselves. The technology is an innocent bystander.
Re:Bloat hurts Batteries, not process shrinks (Score:2)
Hmm... lame ass example. I would like to have my cake and eat it too, and as technology has proved we can. Look at low output chips such as the transmeta, PPC and ARM processors..
next thing you will say, use TWM instead of KDE or Gnome because they run better on your 486. Doesn't matter how efficient you try to make KDE, it's not going to ever be as efficient as TWM, because KDE can simply do more for you.
Imagine if we kept that mindset, geezus, none of us would of ever left dos.
Maybe it's not so bad... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a lot of examples on how batteries have improved. Just look at mobile phones. I had 6 or so batteries for my Ericsson 337 mobile. For the Nokia 8310 that I have now, I have one battery. I think that this one battery easily beats the time I used to get out of the 6 batteries I had for the 337.
I am aware of the fact that the electronics in these devices have improved such that it uses less power. However, the batteries HAVE improved aswell (they are all Li-ion now, so they can be recharged without beeing decharged completly).
I think it would be very hard for batteries to follow moore's law. The reason is that batteries have been around for a lot longer, and there is no real driving-force for getting better batteries than the ones we have.
I mean, it would be nice to get 200hours workingtime on the laptop, but really, what difference does it make? I mean, just buy more batteries. Is anyone willing to pay a lot of extra money for a battery with 200hours instead of 10?
OK, but do your own research (Score:5, Informative)
Consider the "need to know" shortcuts in this article. For example "1859, when the first lead acid battery was made in France". This was the first cell using Planté type plates which are still in use today, but the history of lead acid and other [hepi.com] cells goes back a bit further than that. [accuoerlikon.com] It's a reasonable shortcut, but it does illustrate that this kind of article only skims the very surface. If you want insights, you have to go and do your own research.
On the other hand, they do make an important point: "Of the billions [of cells and batteries] sold each year, most wind up in landfills and incinerators". Well, that's pretty much true of AA type alkalines and carbon-zincs, but actually clunky old automotive lead acids are now recycled 95% of the time. NiCad's though are death in a tube: nobody wants to touch the bloody things. NiMh's and Lithium Ions are a little nicer, if you can find a local recycler who will handle them. Power Express [powerexpress.com] used to accept small amounts of NiMh's and LiIons by mail, but they've changed their site and I can't find any mention of it now, which perhaps indicates the volatility (ha ha) of the recycling market. If you want some sleepless nights, have a look here [obviously.com] for a decent overview of what you can and should be recycling.
Oops, but then we slip into the land of delusions again: "Batteries, which have long been derided for polluting the environment, will soon do their part to clean it up, MIT's Sadoway said. The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car."
Uh huh. Like the T Zero [acpropulsion.com]? Again, the site has changed, and I now can't find mention of the technologies, but from memory, it's either 300kg of lead acids (shorter range or quicker death from deep discharges) or nickel metal hydrides (landfill ahoy) with quoted replacement costs and times of $3000 and 3 years for the lead-acids. Yes, that's 100kg of lead, acid and plastic to be recycled every year for every vehicle, or about half a pound (and $2.75) a day. OK, it can be recycled, and the problem is concentrated rather than distributed. But it's a lot of nastiness to deal with, and remember that rules only apply to nice middle income people. Scurrilous low income types are just going to abandon their twenty year old wrecks (complete with 200kg of lead) in the nearest ditch, street corner, or even front yard. We'd better be prepared to treat these things as environmental time bombs and have policies in place to collect and recycle them, with or without the owner's consent. Designing in a large recycling burden just makes less sense than investing in a clean and long lived internal power source.
I think that the intro sums it up: the problem is chemistry. There's only so much energy you can store in a sealed unit. If we want significant energy density from a renewable source and no ongoing recycling nightmare, then we have to go to hydrogen cells or even good old fashioned alcohol burners. Sealed cell technology is not the long term answer to our energy needs, and we can't just blame the manufacturers for that, seeing as how it's us that keeps buying their products by the billion then (mostly) throwing them in the trash.
Re:OK, but do your own research (Score:5, Interesting)
Gone offtopic, but i think the air-powered car is a better solution than a battery powered car. The air-powered cars in production in Spain are a nice example: you charge the car with a home-compressor, and it gives you 200 miles autonomy (present model).
The exhaust is obviously pure AIR. I'd enjoy the day people put their faces near an exhaust tube to refresh themselves
Re:OK, but do your own research (Score:3, Interesting)
Gasoline in a tank generally has very little oxygen present, and the liquid gasoline WON'T BURN. Otherwise, a puddle of gas would instantly vanish like flash powder, instead of burning on the surface.
In fact, if you had a plastic collapsible container with zero vapor volume, the gas would be inert. Do whatever you want to it, it won't burn, until you let oxygen at it.
Because of profit (Score:2)
NEC Polymer Proton Battery (Score:2)
Re:NEC Polymer Proton Battery (Score:3, Informative)
Efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
Wireless energy nets for mobile phones/gadgets (Score:3, Insightful)
I was only thinking that since batteries are a problem (because of size and durability) why not take them out of the gadget. Actually, even without being a PhD in Physics I could probably think of many reasons why not, but could anyone tell me how and if this could be feasible?
Naturally if such a energy transport system were to be possible, it would only be feasible in mostly urban areas with infrastructure resembling that of cell phone networks.
- Is it possible to transport _enough_ energy (and not lose too much in the conversion?
- Would a direct line-of-sight be necessary, and would crossing it be hazardous?
- Would it be possible to "encrypt" this energy to make it possible to subscribe and protect from freeloaders?
- What types of waves (and/or photon beams?) are best suited for this application?
- How long would it be before we all die with brain cancer because of the free energy being transmitted around?
Sony Clie T415 (Score:2)
This is something that has bothered me for a while (Score:4, Interesting)
This is one of the things that really excited me about Transmeta. Here was a company that seemed to be saying "no, it's not top of the line performance, it won't run Quake, but it can do all your work and keep your laptop running a long, long time." Unfortunately, all the OEMs seem to be stuck in a bigger/better/faster mindset, and don't realize that some of us actually miss the early days of laptops.
Now you've got the same damn thing with palmtops. I'm hearing about iPaqs now that only last 8 hours before they need to be recharged? Fuck that, give me a black and white Palm any day.
Re:This is something that has bothered me for a wh (Score:3, Insightful)
You're also forgetting that the display is far more inefficient than the electronics spitting data out to it. A reflective LCD display doesn't use as much power as a backlit display but that comes as a cost of usability. Reflective laptop displays would not work out very well. A small reflective screen works fine because enough incident radiation is hitting the focus of your eye. With a larger screen anything outside of your focus is going to be hard to see which means reduces periphrial vision on the screen. Backlit LCD screens are huge power wasters, only half the light emitted by the backlight even gets to your eye. This is why the iPaq has such shitty battery life, it is a backlit screen that is acutally pretty damn bright. The next big thing in portable electronics is going to be OLEDs. Since the light isn't passing through a filter the display is more efficient and thus consumes less power. As it is your LCD display sucks about a third of the power your laptop uses. Another third is being sucked up by your 5v periphrials like your hard drive and CD-ROM.
You miss the early days of laptops where they weighed ten pounds and worked for about an hour? I certainly don't. You get ten times the work out of a modern 1GHz P3 laptop than you did out of that old 100MHz Pentium in a much lighter package and uses the same if not less power.
Re:Shake? (Score:4, Funny)
Put it in a paint mixer for a few days and have it run for years...
Re:Shake? (Score:2)
Re:Shake? (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but that's ok for a Windows laptop - finally an excuse to vent your frustrations on it. The "Come on you bas***d! WORK!" annoyed-shake suddenly becomes effective when you provide the CPU with more juice ^_^
Maran
Re:Shake? (Score:2)
Sounds similar to those Seiko Kinetic watches. I'm not sure if they are mechanical doodads or actually generate an electrical charge.
This technology would definitly be nice for a PDA if it can scale to provide enough power. Hopefully Seiko didn't grab some generalized patent on this idea =/.
Re:Panasonic NiCad (Score:3, Informative)
Sigh. One more time, for everyone who missed it. NiCad cells have a FUNDAMENTAL problem. They grow whiskers of Cadmium internally when recharged by simple reverse-DC , which causes internal short circuits. This is why they lose capacity. This is why a large capacitor discharge can sometimes recover them. This is why they suck. If someone makes a good charger (i.e. one that reverses the charging current periodically like the rest of the electro-plating industry has done since the year dot) then NiCads are fine. They are just VERY VERY picky about how they are recharged. What you are seeing is a stream of new chargers on the market (e.g. the one I bought from RadioShack in New Orleans last week). Now, why has it taken so long? Because you can also recharge dry cells (safely!) with such a charger. Now, boys and girls, can you think why Duracell, Ever Ready et. al. might not want such a product on the market>
The second point being that NiCad manufacuters should look at perhaps two 0.75volt batters (each half-AA height) stacked, so as to get the full standard 1.5v.
Please go and learn some electro-chemistry. NiCad cells (i.e. the SMALLEST POSSIBLE UNIT of storage) produce 1.2 V, against 1.5 V for zinc-carbon and alkaline, and 2 V for lead acid. You CAN'T MAKE a 1.5 V NiCad battery. That's why NiCad 9V batteries are so poor - the cheap ones used to be only 7.2 V, with the expensive ones being more like 8.4 V. Neither were much good when you needed a real 9 V battery.
Re:nuke batteries (Score:3, Informative)