More battery life, fewer explosions
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Silicon, Toys & gadgets, Hardware, Laptop, Mobile on
No battery ever lasts long enough. The extended battery on the HP 2710 tablets we carry give us a full day of work, nine to ten hours or less if we turn on Wi-Fi. I’ve been typing since 8am this morning and online a few times and it’s now 1pm and I have four hours left. That’s just about acceptable, but it’s never enough - I’m wondering where the nearest power socket is. Two technologies we saw at the Future in Review conference this week could produce much longer battery life - if they ever make it to market.
Lithium ion batteries work by packing as much lithium as possible into the positive and negative electrodes inside the battery and them moving ions from them, through the electrolyte fluid and out to your device. The more lithium you can get into the electrode, the more ions you can get out of it. That’s how Yi Cui of Stanford is hoping to get a battery that lasts ten times longer. He’s replacing the usual copper electrodes with silicon, which can store ten times as many lithium ions .
That’s not news; we’ve known for 30 years that silicon stores more lithium, but it also swells up more than copper because of that - and when it swells up, the electrode breaks. Yi Cui’s breakthrough was using silicon nanowires that are much more supple; each wire is only 100 nanometres wide, but they’re very long. Silicon is also more stable than copper, so increasing the energy density doesn’t make it more likely for batteries to explode the way it does with current batteries. It doesn’t make it hotter either, because it’s the internal resistance of the battery that causes the heat, not the capacity.
Ten times as many lithium ions doesn’t mean ten times the battery life; by the time you add in the rest of the battery system, including the electrolytes and the packaging around it all, and some further developments that are still under wraps, you could get double the battery life of lithium ion today.
Startup Seeo is starting with the other half of the battery, replacing the electrolyte fluid with a plastic film that’s very like the polymers used to make motorcycle helmets. For one thing that means it’s much safer - no matter how hot the battery gets it won’t catch fire. But it also works with other battery chemistries than lithium; according to Seeo, some of the lithium replacements they’re looking at could give you 50 to 70 times the energy density of lithium, so you get a choice between smaller devices or longer battery life in the same size we lug around today.
We’ve seen a lot of new battery technologies over the years and few of them have made it to market. One promising zinc battery might finally show up in notebooks PCs this year, maybe, possibly - four years after I first saw it running a laptop. It’s not just that the chemistry might turn out not to work as well as it did in the lab. At the moment you can only charge a silicon lithium battery 100 times before it won’t charge enough to be worth using; that has to go up to 500 times before you’d think about putting it in a mobile phone you’d keep for two years and more like 1,000 for a notebook. Both Seeo and Yi Cui are aiming to charge as quickly as lithium ion, but they’re not there yet - silicon lithium batteries could take an hour to charge.
And hardware manufacturers have to see enough of a demand to change the power supply and charging system in a laptop or phone. Seeo’s lithium battery might fit into an existing device but that’s more about safety than longer battery life; a different chemistry will need a different charger. Silicon lithium batteries run at a slightly different wattage and the value that tells the system the battery is fully charged and doesn’t need more power is also different.
So are these new technologies going to languish the way others have? Maybe not. For one thing, people will pay more for longer battery life, so manufacturers have an incentive to switch. And for another, with the price of oil and petrol still rising, electric cars are looking more likely and both these technologies promise to scale up enough to power cars. When you can do that, a smaller battery for a phone or a PC almost comes for free.
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Loading ...Comment by Bob - May 28, 2008 on 11:23 am
Why not pilot market the battery for something
like the razor or Black Berry with the
sale of a charger built to spec.
Is that possible? Business people need longer
battery life and dont want bigger batteries.
Seems like a natural. And have you experimented
with combining your battery with ultracapacitors to feed someone like CalCars Prius replacement? Seems like they would be a natural business partner for large footprint batteries.
Comment by Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe - June 3, 2008 on 3:17 am
Bob - third party chargers are certainly a possibility, although it does mean more expense for the end user and the battery company has to develop expertise in manufacturing the whole charger unit as well as the battery; usually those are manufactured by different suppliers. The third-party charger might impact the warranty, though I’m not sure many people would worry if it gave them a lot more battery. And of course you get lower volume of sales than if, say, Dell puts the battery in all its high-end notebooks. That makes being a supplier to the notebook manufacturer a more attractive proposition all round and it’s the route all the other battery folk have taken - which may show a route like yours could be a better answer.
On the ultracapacitor side, I’ve not seen anything but every aspirant battery technology company we’ve spoken to has talked about hybrid cars, either as an after-market replacement or pitching to the suppliers.
-Mary
Comment by laptop battery - June 23, 2008 on 3:14 am
There are several steps you can take to help you get maximum performance from your laptop battery: Prevent Memory Effect - Keep the laptop battery healthy by fully charging and then fully discharging it at least once every two to three weeks.
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