Battery technology

[Askarus]

I know it's one year old but did anyone read this?

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153614-new-lithium-ion-battery-design-thats-2000-times-more-powerful-recharges-1000-times-faster

Would be nice to have such a thing in thy Pyra, right?

Do you know of any other battery technology that's in development right now and might be usable within the next decade for a mobile device?

I'm just interested in that whole battery development .

 

[Nintendo]

Wasn't Apple developing a super battery?

 

[Askarus]

Don't think it will be something we can use easily.

 

[_jr_]

Energy density isn't improved. No use in a mobile handheld computer.

 

[levi]

I'm hoping that the next gen for batteries will be Lithium Sulphur (aka. LiS). As it discharges, you can pack two lithium atoms onto each sulphur, versus less than one per metal ion in a LiIon cell, and with sulphur being lighter than most metals, it gives it a much better energy density than LiIon, and could be cheaper to make. No idea what the charge rate is like compared to the super-battery in the OP, but so long as it can be charged overnight I'm not so fussed.


Sadly, while prototype cells have been made for a few years now, nothing commercial has turned up yet. No idea what the problem is other than LiIon being good enough for most of us.

 

[Fzero]

I like what I heard on some documentary about 5 years ago.

Was a company in America somewhere, I thought called Witricity [remember it being a merge of WiFi and Electricity], so might be these guys http://www.witricity.com

They have that technology already, where you have a charging base station, hidden in the property somewhere like behind a mirror or picture frame, so wasn't intrusive, and your devices are constantly charging when in the range.

But they also talked about their next level plan, which was to make use of existing 'signals' which are bouncing around cities all the time, as a means of charging.

So even if you were out and about in town, your devices would remain charged.

I think they were converting 3G signal or WiFi signals somehow into a charging .... Voodoo I guess

 

[Xaeo]

I've heard of people trying to collect energy from noisy areas before (such as all the signals bouncing around downtown), and my best understanding of how that works is through a very efficient antenna which collects all of the signals and is then boosted up to a useable level. While this is a good idea, I can only wonder how much this will dampen all of the signals bouncing around in cities and other hot spots.

Considering they have a technical paper entitled 'Highly Resonant Wireless Power Transfer..." I think it is safe to say that this is similar technology to what Tesla was working on so many decades ago now.

 

[WizardStan]

I can't imagine 3G or WiFi are especially powerful for charging. It's definitely possible, there's a (analogue) radio design which is powered entirely by the radio frequency you're listening to so getting power out of ER is totally doable. Quiet, it's an in-ear radio, but doable.

But the amount of power in a wifi signal is measured in picowatts, millionths of a watt. A good charger is between 5 and 10 watts. You would need to be surrounded by a million wifi hotspots before you could get to the kind of charging we're used to. I guess if it can be integrated for free it'd be useful for prolonging a couple minutes on the battery, but I doubt it's free (in either money or space) and that extra minute is actually almost certainly very expensive. It's just not worth it.

 

[_wb_]

The energy efficiency of charging that way is very poor, since the energy in any undirected wave is proportional to the inverse square of the distance from the origin (it does not matter what kind of wave, this just follows from the surface area of a sphere being proportional to the square of its radius).

The energy required (say by a wifi AP) to transmit information with a decent signal-to-noise ratio is not that high. The energy required to make sure that devices in a radius of, say, 100 meter can get a useful amount of charge out of it, would be huge. Most of that energy would be completely wasted (unless you can somehow make sure that the non-absorbed energy gets mostly recuperated), and I would be surprised if such an environment would be safe for humans. You would essentially turn a city into a huge microwave oven.

 

[Xaeo]

The energy efficiency of charging that way is very poor, since the energy in any undirected wave is proportional to the inverse square of the distance from the origin (it does not matter what kind of wave, this just follows from the surface area of a sphere being proportional to the square of its radius).

The energy required (say by a wifi AP) to transmit information with a decent signal-to-noise ratio is not that high. The energy required to make sure that devices in a radius of, say, 100 meter can get a useful amount of charge out of it, would be huge. Most of that energy would be completely wasted (unless you can somehow make sure that the non-absorbed energy gets mostly recuperated), and I would be surprised if such an environment would be safe for humans. You would essentially turn a city into a huge microwave oven.

This is the issue all wireless energy runs into, especially in buildings where you have walls and the like ruining your transmission even further. Then take into account large high rise buildings made of cement and steel ,like most large office buildings are, and there is such a drop off in power it would be better to run an extension cord then to try any type of wireless power.

 

[Askarus]

Wireless seems like a waste to me.

I do prefer the super battery.

Imagine the Pandora with 5 times the battery capacity it has now.

Awesome.

 

[fusion_power]

Imagine the Pandora with 5 times the battery capacity it has now.

And imagine, this battery then blows up.

 

[WizardStan]

I do prefer the super battery.

The super battery you linked to wouldn't have a major benefit to the Pandora. The new technology isn't more energy dense, it wouldn't give a longer life, it apparently has about the same capacity as existing lithium ion batteries.What it has is a much higher power density, that is it can charge and discharge much faster. Lithium-ion has a power density of about 300W/Kg. The Pandora's battery at about 300g means it can safely supply about 90W of power. That's a lot more than the Pandora could use, but nowhere near what your desktop needs. You'd need a battery at least twice the size, possibly 3 to 5 times as heavy, before it would be able to supply enough power to start it up. This new power dense battery would have no problem providing the power a desktop needs out of a battery the size of the Pandora's.

Granted, you'd only be able to use it for about 5 minutes before the battery was flat, but if you're in a situation where you need short bursts of huge energy then this is the battery you need.

edit: Also, this massive power rate probably means it's several times more volatile than existing lithium-ion, so yeah, I wouldn't want it near my head.

 

[Null]

And imagine, this battery then blows up.

 

[relliker]

I've been reading articles about "super" batteries for at least since the early 2000s. Not a single one of them has made it to market I think. There were promises of batteries that would charge in seconds and last for days, weeks, months (take your pick) and technologies that ranged from liquid refillable, to special anodes, to nano tech, to to to......I'm still waiting for ANY one of them to materialize anywhere online where anyone outside the lab can buy it but they don't.

 

[DaMummy]

thats likely because batteries are damn near explosions and poison, and they have to be EXTREMELY idiot proof to introduce them to market