Google research bods hope to lick battery life limits – report Google has reportedly been attempting to develop batteries that last longer. The world's largest ad broker apparently has a small team of four people beavering away at lithium-ion technology and solid-state batteries in its Google X research lab. According to the Wall Street Journal, erstwhile Apple battery bod Dr Ramesh …
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battery story...
Its gonna be at least 3 years (IMHO) until ANY of the improved battery tech that's been touted for the last 5 years will be ready for the market.
I have some NiMh AA cells that are almost 3000mAh. That's a phenomenal power density for something as big as a little finger. Especially as its re-usable.
That needs doubling, anything less is a waste of research £$€......
Not gonna hold my breath for this. Umpteen battery improvement stories later and not a bit of useful kit has entered the consumer market...
Actually, your almost 3000mAh AA is made by some "computer wizard" with label editing "skills", changing 2000 to 3000 because "everyone else is doing it".
In the Li-on space, typical capacities for the classic 18650 size cell have gone from less than 1800mAh to today's 3100-3400 mAh for the premium cells from premium manufacturers, a doubling in capacity.
One thing that annoys me is how media frequently reports on "breakthroughs" in making a battery that charges in 5 minutes. Such Li-Ion batteries already exist, the capacity penalty you take for quick charge isn't even that big (Compared to supercapacitor capacities). Dumping that much power in 5 minutes requires some nice fat cables and chunky charge electronics, though. Your average usb cable would turn into a glowing white noodle in seconds.
If media reported on car tyres like they report on battery tech, every week there'd be a sensational post reporting on a new innovation, a new tyre that is rounder and not square. Every month there'd be reports of amazingly low friction tyres promising to save 75% energy, the boffins are calling it "railway". A couple of times a year there'd be reports on "out of the box" thinking derived "innovations", pht wings on the car, "inventing" the "aeroplane", and tyres are only used a short portion of the travel. Stick legs on the vehicle so it walks, no tyres needed at all, and no road infrastructure either, all problems solved forever!
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Indeed. People love to complain about there being too many stories about battery research that never amounts to anything, but what that actually means is that there are thousands, of people in numerous universities and businesses working on improving batter technology. Sure, most of the articles that hit the media are nonsense based on very preliminary research or untested new ideas, but it at least shows that there are lots of people working on lots of different approaches to things. Google having a couple of people also thinking about it in their spare time just isn't relevant at all. Before this article, we knew there were thousands of people working on batteries. Now we know there are thousands of people working on batteries, and a couple of them happen to be funded by Google. So fucking what.
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I don't want to see a closeup of someone's gob when I'm eating - only when I'm snogging them.
Anyway, how exactly does it contribute to the story? I though irrelevant pictures were being dropped. And don't use the tenuous 'lick battery life' title as a relevance. It was obviously only phrased that way to fit the picture!
To get two orders of magnitude improvement six or seven multiplicatively applied factors combine. To get any one factor maybe four or five process improvements must be applied in the right order by domain experts.
Countless dead ends and wasted engineering hours are prevented by tasking the best minds to focus on what they know best.
It doesn't sound like Google are that interested in making huge strides and considering how much they outsource the consumer tech rather than build it themselves...
With their pockets and resources if they were seriously interested I expect they'd throw a higher level of resources at it. A team of 4 is just a token 'me to' surely?
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