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Tag battery technology

The Pocket Pen Protector Patrol Blotter

By Brian Filed in Links, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , April 11th, 2011 @ 11:45 am

Assorted bulletins from the world of geekery:

MIT Technology Review has a post this morning about research into nanostructured metal “foams” that could be engineered into new battery technologies that would completely recharge a device like a cell phone or laptop in just a couple of minutes. Even the lead researcher on this idea admits that there’s a long way to go before this tech might pay off with real-world products, and some naysayers argue that it might not ever work out, so don’t throw away your power bricks just yet. Next Big Future.com’s related story includes plenty of supplemental links to explain the technologies involved, for those of you who want the SCIENCE!

Anyone who has done their time in tech support will appreciate these “Achievement Unlocked” badges from the tech blog Evilrouters.net. Some of them, like “Stars Are Aligned” (successfully restore files from a tape backup) are, of course, simply impossible in this universe. Others happen so regularly that even the noobiest IT guy can rack them up the first week on the job (“get asked an IT question from a guy in the next urinal over”, “get a ticke to fix a problem after 4:30 p.m. on a Friday). And some are purely the province of wizened veterans (“resist killing your fellow employees”). I larfed.

Proof that sometimes technology really is for the betterment of mankind: the New York Times recently featured this article about how computer software is replacing lawyers.

This post at MetaFilter would like you to know that today is the 20th anniversary of Linus Torvalds’ debut of a little operating system he was putting together in his spare time that became known as Linux.

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In The Future, EVERYTHING Will Be A Battery

By Brian Filed in Science, Tech Tagged with , , December 10th, 2009 @ 1:09 pm

nanopaper

Imagine being able to dip a piece of paper into a solution made up of nanotubes and microscopic wires and coming away with a super battery that can last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles. That’s the promise of Stanford University’s Yi Cui, who has developed the basic process and is ready to take it to commercial development. Being able to use ordinary paper as the substrate material for long-use batteries addresses many of the engineering limitations of current battery technologies for the automotive industry, among others. The batteries even work if the paper is crumpled or even soaked in acid. Paper has an advantage over other materials because of its ability to bond with the nanoparticles, but it’s also likely that other materials could be treated with the nano-ink and turned into batteries or supercapacitors.

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Linkapalooza – Tech

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , , , , , , December 4th, 2008 @ 3:41 pm

How Do You Like THEM Apples? — MacRumors.com is spreading the story that Wal-Mart is about to start selling Apple iPhones for $99. They will carry a 4GB version of the second-generation 3G iPhone, and the phone will still come with the mandatory 2-year contract with AT&T Wireless. When the iPhone first came out in 2007, there was a 4GB version, but it was discontinued with the feature bump in the 3G models. The model Wal-Mart will have is NOT the original 4GB version, but rather the current version with less storage. Speaking as someone who owns and loves a 4GB iPod Touch, I would be plenty happy with 4 gigs on an iPhone, and the $99 price tag is going to make this a serious consideration for me, even if I do have to sign up with AT&T Wireless. MacRumors says that they are expected to show up on the shelves immediately AFTER Christmas — so if you get some crappy Wal-Mart gift for Christmas, you can return it to the store in exchange for a shiny new iPhone.

Measure For Measure — Back in October, I mentioned to any readers who live in Eastern Massachusetts that Comcast was pushing the DOCSIS 3.0 firmware to our cable modems to increase bandwidth. There was no big public announcement from Comcast when this happened, so knowledge of it came through blogs and news reports and such. It appears that they’ve finished with the rollout, though, because late last week I got an e-mail from Comcast trumpeting the “free” increase. They’re also bringing out several tiers of service levels for people who want even more throughput. Though the DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade has been in the works for a while anyway, much of the marketing around their new services comes from the brouhaha about their other announcement earlier in the fall to impose usage caps. The basic tier has a 250GB/mo. cap, which is a very generous amount to most of their customers and only seriously impacts people engaged in very heavy BitTorrent or other P2P uses. The new tiers offer the options of paying for bigger caps. There was also some criticism that most customers have absolutely no clue how much bandwidth they use and thus would not know if they were pushing that 250GB barrier or not; Comcast did not immediately have a response, but now they are about to roll out a “bandwidth meter” that will let customers keep track of their usage. I predict that non-tech-savvy users will discover that they are using hardly anywhere near 250GB and there will be some calls for Comcast to offer even cheaper tiers with reduced bandwidth and throughput caps…or, it will be the side door through which the much-dreaded per-use billing will arrive.

Blu-Ray For Hollywood! — Despite the intense marketing and all those side-by-side comparison demos you see at electronics stores showing just how much better the video quality of a Blu-Ray disc is than a conventional DVD, AND the surrender of the HD-DVD format a few months ago, it seems like retailers are still having to twist arms to get people to buy standalone Blu-Ray players. One thing that might help player sales is the coming bump in storage capacity without sacrificing compatibility with existing players. Pioneer has publicly demoed a 16-layer, 400GB Blu-Ray disc that they expect to start shipping in 2010. The current 2-layer media “only” holds 50GB, so this is an 8x increase in storage (and a 100x increase over the original single-layer 4GB DVD). Imagine having an entire season of your favorite TV series or an entire movie series on a single disc instead of a box set. Then, in 2013, we have 1-terabyte Blu-Ray discs to look forward to. The only problem I can foresee is that by 2013 people may abandon disc players entirely for streaming downloads and set-top boxes selling on-demand services.

That’s Life — A team of Korean researchers have published their results on developing a new material for use in LiON batteries that could increase the length of time a charge lasts by 1000%. A typical Lithium-Ion battery in a laptop, for example, is good for a max of about four hours under ideal conditions. With this new technology, you might not have to recharge that battery for almost six months of continual use. The work they are doing involves using a variation of graphite using porous silicon. The pores increase the surface area in the graphite, which massively increases the number of lithium ions that can cling to the material, and also help the graphite hold up structurally for a longer time under repeated use. This technology might also become a critical innovation for electric cars, significantly extending the range of an electric vehicle on a single charge, which in turn would make it much less expensive to build networks of recharging stations.

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Another Nano-Battery Breakthrough

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , December 20th, 2007 @ 1:10 pm

A few weeks ago I was all pumped about nano-ultracapacitors for improving battery performance, but this development might come to fruition faster because it’s an improvement on existing technologies: using a matrix of nano-sized silicon wires in Lithium-Ion batteries to extend the life of the battery by a factor of 10.

As the press release says, silicon batteries were thought impractical because they could hold enough charge in a larger form. Now, by reducing the silicon to nano-wires, the amount of lithium that can be stored in a battery can be exponentially increased, and the nano-wires do not degrade over time. So a laptop battery could last for 20 hours instead of the usual 2-4.

Because the technologies are better understood, the researchers think the time-to-market will not be as long as other nanopower technologies.

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A 20-Year Battery?

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , October 2nd, 2007 @ 11:49 am

Betavoltaic Battery

Via The Presurfer comes a link to this press release about a company that is hoping to develop a battery cell which could last for 20 years using the process of betavoltaic power.

Betavoltaic power uses the natural release of weak radioactive beta particles from the slow decay of a substrate trapped in a hi-tech matrix of amorphous metals. The principle of betavoltaic power has been known since the 1950s, but only recent developments in materials sciences have made it possible to construct all the various elements that would be necessary to develop a viable battery. This particular effort was first brought to the attention of the media a couple of years ago, and there is not a commercial product on the horizon yet, but it appears that the efforts are getting closer.

The extreme longevity of power production and the claim that the spent batteries would be chemically and radioactively inert are both very appealing for commercial use. The process is also non-thermal, so there is no excess heat generated by the battery, unlike some contemporary batteries. Imagine a laptop that never needed to be charged, or a device installed in a remote location that would only require battery replacement once every 20 years.

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Burning Water

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , September 13th, 2007 @ 11:57 am

water candle

This week everybody has been all over the story about the guy who claims that he can burn salt water, but, as this hoax website points out, most of the stories have ignored some salient facts (pun intended): in the first place, the radio wave generator he is using to create the flame actually uses more energy than the energy produced by the flame itself. Secondly, though the inventor claims otherwise, apparently all he has done is stumbled onto some previously unused process that creates electrolysis — separating the hydrogen and oxygen molecules of the water so that the hydrogen (and also the sodium present in the salt water) will burn. In other words, don’t start looking for beach-front property so you can refill your SUV.

Meanwhile, CNET reports on a new battery technology from Japan that uses water to generate power. The batteries have the somewhat unlikely name “NoPoPo”, which stands for “Non-Pollution Power”, and can even use other water-based liquids such as soda pop, fruit juice, and even urine. The batteries are still merely chemical-reaction cells, but unlike dry cells they can retain a full charge for an extremely long time — up to ten years, according to the manufacturer. They can be recharged, but have a smaller number of recharge cycles than conventional dry cell batteries. So while they are an excellent choice for emergency kits and other such things stored unused for long durations, they’re not completely practical as a replacement for rechargable batteries. CNET says to expect to see real-world product in the U.S. and EU next year.

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A Series Of Tubes

By Brian Filed in Tech Tagged with , , , , August 28th, 2007 @ 11:42 am

Last week I had a post about a promising battery technology using carbon nanotubes as the substrate, and in the comments, Sarah said something to the effect of “wait til they discover nanotubes cause cancer”.

That’s actually already a concern with nanotechnology, but more from the manufacturing side than the finished product side. The chemicals used to produce carbon nanotubes are fairly toxic and pose long-term health risks to workers, as well as environmental concerns. But, because the properties of chemical substances can be radically altered when reduced to such small forms, there is much unknown about potential risk associated with ANYTHING involving nanoparticles.

For example, see this article from New Scientist about a process being developed that would use carbon nanotubes to create a permanent anti-bacterial shield on surfaces. Unlike present anti-bacterial products, which use chemicals toxic to bacteria, the nanotubes actually create micrscopically small “sharp” edges which rupture the bacteria. But, like with other anti-bacterial products, they create a disruption to an entire ecosystem that could result in unintended consequences with potentially negative repercussions.

Ditto this article in Scientific American which details the development of sunscreen lotion contaning nanoparticles. In this technology, it is not carbon but zinc and/or titanium dioxide that are reduced to nanoparticulate, increasing their effectiveness at blocking ultraviolet radiation. However, particles that small can cross the blood-brain barrier and also lodge in the liver, and studies on humans are incomplete. Nevertheless, the FDA has approved such products.

This op-ed in the environmental magazine Orion argues that there needs to be a significantly increased public awareness of the development nanotechnology, not just as a “gee-whiz” futuristic concept, but as a real manufacturing tool that will find its way into dozens of products over the next number of years. The author, David Rejeski, is the director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He says that polls show that 70-80% of Americans have heard nothing about nanotechnology, even as some economic projections suggest that nanotech will account for $1.4 trillion in production by 2014 (in other words, roughly the cost of the Iraq War to-date). This is the time, he says, for making sure that the appropriate mechanisms are in place to regulate safety, quality, oversight, and to insure public input. Given the viciously deregulatory nature of the body politic in Washington, the fight will be difficult, so starting early is key.

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Wafer-Thin

By Brian Filed in Links, Tech Tagged with , , , August 23rd, 2007 @ 11:12 am

Ars Technica reports that researchers at MIT and Rensselaer PolyTech have developed batteries made out of carbon nanotubes that are paper-thin and biodegradable. They’re also flexible, like a sheet of paper, and can be made in any shape since they are formed by applying a nanotube-saturated liquid to a substrate.

They see the first uses for such batteries in implantable medical devices, but if this technology is scalable, there would be any number of consumer electronics applications where a small, flexible, custom-shaped battery would be an enormously desirable change from present battery technology.

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Bright Idea

By Brian Filed in Links, Tech Tagged with , , , , June 5th, 2007 @ 12:17 pm

solarpanels.jpg

A company called Solar Electrical Vehicles makes solar panels you can install on the roof of your hybrid car to help charge the car’s batteries. According to their white paper that details their prototype for the Toyota Prius, using the solar panels to recharge the batteries reduces the gasoline consumption of the vehicle by 17-29%. They also say that with a DC converter to plug in to your home electrical supply and a bigger battery, it would be possible to forego using gasoline as a fuel altogether.

While SEV presently sells the solar roof as an aftermarket item, it would be great to see Toyota incorporate a similar technology right into the vehicle’s design.

(via MAKE:blog)

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