Boffins build ant-sized battery, claim it's tough enough to start a car Electronics continue to shrink to ever smaller sizes, but researchers are having a tough time miniaturising the batteries powering today’s mobile gadgets. Step forward, bicontinuous nanoporous electrodes. Smartphones use smaller power packs than they did five years ago, it’s true, but that’s because their chips and radios are …
Every single battery technology I have ever heard of has come to nothing. Literally a dozen or more articles a year on places like Slashdot, The Reg, etc. all backed by "Bliss Professor" (whatever that is, sounds like a good job) or similarly qualified people, all telling me how the technology will scale, all telling me that it's more powerful than anything before, all telling me that it all works in the lab.
Every single battery technology that was a provably commercial advance - I'd not heard of it until it was on the market and selling and then the commercial market actually improved it. I can remember when laptops used Ni-MH and the first Lithium battery (apart from coin-cells etc.) I saw was in a laptop a friend had bought. I didn't even know it was possible until I was holding it in my hand.
I'm not saying that a LiPo didn't start off in a lab somewhere, but if you pay attention to every battery-in-a-lab that appears to work wonders, you get incredibly disappointed when NONE of them appear on the market even 25 years later. And then you'll start ignoring them all and only paying attention to ones that do appear on the market. It's nice to know "this exists in a lab somewhere" but for any practical use "this can be bought by me for a decent price from somewhere" holds infinitely more weight.
As with everything from Wii to iPhone to supercapacitors to Kickstarter campaigns and everything else: It's easier to wait until you can buy - because what does it matter before then anyway? - before you get excited about anything. That way, you don't spend years waiting for no-shows to arrive, possibly ignoring other commercially-viable products in the meantime.
Old devices had really small batteries, so they paid attention to where every microwatt went.
Nowadays, they don't seem to care. For example, if I'm working at home all day using wi-fi, and I manually switch off mobile data on my Nexus 4, the battery will last at least 2, maybe 3 days.
If I don't switch it off, I see instances where I turn it on after a while and it's using BOTH wi-fi and mobile data, and the battery life is evaporating like chocolate in a laser beam.
And this is Google's supposedly most advanced top-of-the-line Android. Idiots.
"...the battery will last at least 2, maybe 3 days. ..."
One (1) full day of battery life should be enough for almost anyone, assuming that they live in a house with a live electric power outlet available somewhere near their bed.
Trying for a 2nd day is an admirable goal, much the same as holding your breath for two full minutes. Utterly pointless.
"...road trips..."
Most cars have 12v power sockets. My Mercedes E-Class luxury saloon car has several, including one in the trunk for the political prisoner. A "road trip" is not really a good example of a situation where electrical energy is not readily available at least once a day.
"...camping..."
On the rare occasion where we might camp, as opposed staying in a 4 or 5 star hotel with indoor plumbing and room service, I tend to bring along multiple satellite and shortwave radios to receive BBC, other two-way radios and satellite TV, battery packs, solar panels and so on. It's the tech challenge, not just mere survival eating beef jerky and pooing in the bushes. Also, 90% of "camping" is right beside the aforementioned car anyway. If you're back packing into the wilds (no service) and/or you object to dragging such technology along (like *your* mobe), then why is this an example to support your point?
"...weekends in the country..."
Sleeping where? On the ground, or in a luxury resort (with power)?
Worrying about the 2nd day of power in a mobile battery is 99% foolishness. Seriously. Think about it. Everyone grumbles about it even when they're sleeping in their own bed at home. Rubbish!
PS: No, not Mom's basement. Multiacre waterfront property of our own. Just one of several properties we own in various longitudes. Not kidding. Boring? LOL. Thanks for asking. :-)
A 1980s-vintage NiCad Tamiya racing pack had more than enough oomph to start a car (The starter batteries on light aircraft are generally nicads too). It's all about being able to supply enough amps, as another poster pointed out.
It'd be nice if the capacities being talked about are there though, as long as they don't turn into pocket grenades when overheated.
You may need momentary max of 400A at 12V to overcome friction in a stopped cold motor initially dropping to 250A or a little less.(according to the Aussies)
http://www.uniquecarsandparts.com.au/how_it_works_starter_motor.htm
Seems you might need up to 800A though, for a somewhat larger motor like say the "small" 3.5 - 4.4L Buick V8 derivatives in RR/LR and TVR etc ...
http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070225112149AAIivZV
A "normal" modern high-compression 1.6L 4-cyl 16V uses a 1.2kW nominal starter motor and a 60Ah battery .... no fuses in the main starter circuit and wires as thick as possible!
I'd definitely like to see this productionised. Unlike some people who shall remain nameless, I think it will be in far less than 10 years.
Just think of it - electric cars with 1,000-mile ranges with small underfloor batteries.
And then the Vulture Central Oil Industry Defence Brigade will arrive - 'USELESS! The ONLY conceivable use for any vehicle requires 2,000 miles between recharges! This will NEVER be any good, scrap the whole idea NOW.'
So it's better than the best supercapacitors.
Supercapacitors are good at high rate dumping and absorbing power. The actual capacity (compared to regular batteries, but not capacitors) is pretty bad.
Perhaps it's 2000x better than other micro batteries, but I suspect most batteries scale down badly.
At micro and nano scales materials can be used that fail at larger scales because their bulk properties (IE their conductivity) are not good at meso scale. They only work at this scale, but the conditions at this scale means they turn an unworkable architecture into a practical power source.
Cautious thumbs up but it's yet another battery chemistry which will need an infrastructure to support it.
Here's the thing. It's novel. That does not equate to better and by "better" I mean against the existing battery form factors and chemistries that are already commercially available.
I truly believe that a lot of laboratory technologies die in their cribs because the researchers get overexposed to a generally ignorant and cynical public (the Internet has made this far worse) and it simply crushes their spirits. Add to that the fact that when you are working with any new technology there is only bad news & more questions than answers and you end up permanently closing off doors in what started out as an innocently curious mind.
Personally I'm all for scientists and researchers working in an underground bunker away from the bullshit and letting sociopath business people deal with the money side of things but the entire 'ecosystem' of science has gotten so screwed up that researchers have to go begging for money and selling their souls to get to do anything.
If people are ignorant and cynical it's because they're sick of snake oil salesmen promising the moon wrapped in cellophane and then never delivering. People aren't born cynical, they get that way because talk is cheap and bullshit is common.
My cynicism switch is triggered by people talking about inventions that improve on current technologies by orders of magnitude, like this article - that's when I start rubbing my beard and saying things like "oh yeah, sure..." because my life experience has taught me, repeatedly, that big talk goes with hot air.
For me the two biggest causes of this syndrome are data storage devices, and portable energy sources. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen articles about researchers inventing umpteen-petabyte-in-a-matchbox holographic crystal storage devices but, years later, the largest hard drive I can buy is STILL only 4 TB. I'm not expecting to see anything much bigger than a dozen TB at most come to market in the next 5 years - if it does I'll eat my own socks and post the video on YouTube.
I have the same attitude to battery promises as well. I don't know how many times I've read articles about the next big thing that will revolutionise battery technology only for it to vanish in a puff of vapourware and never mentioned again.
That's the crux of the problem and the cause of the cynicism: a single article like this appears in the likes of El Reg and Ars Technica and then is never mentioned again. No follow-up articles, no progress reports, no "this time last year we reported on...", nothing. That's why people get cynical.
And the reason that these things only ever appear once is that a lot of these "inventions" are the products of graduate students doing something for their thesis or paper in order to obtain that degree or other certificate that they hope will get them a nice cushy job in a corner office somewhere. Once they have the piece of paper and the cushy job, the invention joins the millions of other inventions buried in the archives of some university library and is never looked at again. Once the students graduate, their university projects usually come to an abrupt end - and the fabulous invention we've been promised evaporates in a puff of library dust.
So if this cynicism is crushing researchers' spirits, maybe those researchers should consider the benefits of keeping the public updated on the course of their research. If I saw even one article mentioning progress on a technology that was reported a year or so ago - even just once a year would suffice, because I understand that it can take a few years to bring a prototype to market - just keeping people updated on the development progress would go a long way toward assuring us that this wasn't just another student's graduation ticket to be buried in an archive box once they've got their bit of paper.
Until then, I'll just keep rubbing my beard and saying, "yeah, sure mate..."
Err. T-flash has a storage of 200 megabytes / mm^3. A 3.5" hardrive full of them has a nominal capacity of 73 TB. That assumes the same amount of actual storage cells per unit volume.
I'm not sure how much of a t-flash card is the cells, the controller, connectors and packages, nor how well this would scale to a 3.5" enclosure.
If I'm charging at home I want it to charge slowly while I'm asleep, no grid overload from that.
For highway recharging stations the answer will have to be fatter transmission lines to the highway recharging stations. Admittedly this will add something to the capital cost but I hope this will be offset by the lack of any refuelling tankers like we currently have going to all petrol stations twice a week.
The complimentary research that needs to be done along side making the battery is how to disassemble it efficiently. With all of the regulations being enacted today, making recycle-ability a priority is important. I imagine that there will be somebody ready to work on the problem with gold and lithium on board.
The technology sounds interesting and I hope that is turns out to be feasible as a commercial product. There are many pseudo inventions that might work if they had a good enough power supply (such as the aforementioned ray guns).
Also, I would be much happier if my cell phone had at least 2 days of battery life with reasonable usage. I usually plug in at night, but every once in a while I forget or can't. My only option (if it's a work day) is to plug it in with the car charger and not be able to use it until I've put some amps in the can. I work for myself and not having my phone handy is an issue. I have spare batteries now and a separate charger for them as a backup. I pity those with non-replaceable batteries. What do you do if your iPhone goes flat?
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