Gadgetory

let's talk about batteries for a moment doesn't it seem as if we're still charging things as often and for as long as we did a few years ago those researchers come up with a new technology that looks promising that's not going to make an impact until it can be manufactured very inexpensively with great quantity researchers continue to advance not necessarily at the rate that you see with processors we've all become very used to just about every core component of the technology we use getting much better much faster every year this has led to all kinds of bastardization zuv Moore's law which stated that the amount of transistors on a piece of silicon would double roughly every two years we've turned that into a meme that everything gets even better than the year before even faster and then there are batteries they clearly have not followed a Moore's law exponential curve battery startup envyus systems surveyed the markets history and found the amount of charge in a given battery back in 1995 took 13 years to double so much for Moore's law and it won't double again they predict until 2020 and because batteries are so widespread from small devices to very large ones the benchmarks at which we measure them are pretty broad as well first of all you've got charge time how long does it take to get it back to a charge from when it's depleted this is a big one in everyday use related to that is energy density how much energy can you put into a battery of a given size and weight then there is specifically the size and weight leaving density out can you make the battery smaller more malleable weigh less so that it can make the phone lighter make it package better into the electric car then there's cycle life this is generally seen as how many times you can recharge a battery from mostly empty to mostly full before it drops below 80% of its ability to hold a charge that's kind of a ballpark at where most people say a battery is getting depleted and of course there's cost if any of the above have breakthroughs but they make the battery unaffordable in its application doesn't matter there are also some ancillary benchmarks around how easily a battery can be kept within its temperature range especially electric cars keep battery from being too hot or too cold adds a lot of complexity and cost to the vehicle you've also got concerns about toxicity in chemical formula and recyclability now we can't begin in a few minutes to catalog all the breakthroughs that are being pursued in labs around the world but here are a couple of buckets of where they tend to group first there's chemistry the exact chemicals and materials that are being used are always being fiddled with beyond the current very common lithium ion the dual carbon battery being developed in Japan is said to have no heat generation when being charged or discharged IBM's lithium air battery is said to have much greater energy density than current lithium ion lithium silicon is said to be expandable at the molecular level to allow for faster charging and the recent buzz from Stanford is around a pure lithium battery that researchers hope will triple the energy density while quartering the cost of today's lithium-ion battery applications MIT and University of Texas are taking one more pass through the periodic table trying new brews of silicon sulfur and sodium but even if they strike gold these are many years to market then that brings us to nanotechnology you could go on for days about the number of projects that are exploring using graphene in future batteries it's a new nano material that could address both charge cycle and energy density it's believed and you may have heard about the so-called 30 second charge phone battery a prediction based on some research released lately by store dot a company that is working with nano crystalline structures and related to all this watch the non batteries trying to make incursions on batteries territory one of the biggest categories and an older one is capacitors these charge and discharge much more quickly than most batteries but they also hold less energy have a lower energy density but they're already being used by Mazda and Lamborghini an automotive for example to power a brake energy regeneration system and a start/stop system respectively and then of course there are hydrogen fuel cells that basically take hydrogen and create current and water vapor from it it's a very elegant solution but of course facing a lot of hurdles right now one of the most interesting and telling developments is how Tesla and Toyota have sort of quietly gotten divorced on what was a very big effort between them make battery electric vehicles but now Toyota is pushing hard on fuel cell electric vehicles perhaps the most exciting part to watch about battery technology is that these core breakthroughs when and if they happen will affect devices from the smallest to the largest very likely anything from your phone to your laptop to your electric car even to storing excess power coming off the solar panels on the roof of your home when there's a breakthrough in the battery area a real breakthrough it's going to touch a lot of people