DailyDirt: Better Batteries

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Storing lots of energy conveniently is one of the world's greatest challenges. Batteries have improved a lot over the years, but not quite at the same rate as the electronics they power. There are a number of battery research projects, and here are just a few. As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: batteries, energy, lithium, mfcs


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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 7 Jun 2011 @ 5:24pm

    Better batteries are by far the most needed improvement in smartphones. Everything else could come to a standstill as far as I'm concerned.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 7 Jun 2011 @ 5:44pm

    Supercapacitors?

    There seem to be fundamental limits to storing energy in chemical form. What about something based on lower-level physics?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    Michael Ho (profile), 7 Jun 2011 @ 6:35pm

    Re: Supercapacitors?

    There are also fundamental limits to capacitors, though... so I think chemistry might be the better bet, even though we're not really satisfied with chemical battery performance.

    Maybe superflywheels will trump everything....? :)

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    The Insider, 7 Jun 2011 @ 6:57pm

    Ah, if only Nikolai Tesla hadn't been intellectually raped by Thomas Edison and JP Morgan....
    By now our batteries would last 10 years, be interchangeable between devices and recharge with the Ions in the atmosphere.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Ken, 7 Jun 2011 @ 10:01pm

    We are not far away from the day you can no longer repeat a joke you heard on TV.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Andrew D. Todd, 8 Jun 2011 @ 5:29am

    Water Scoops and Thinking Outside the Box.

    The battery problem is basically a problem for electric cars. People talking about electric cars seem to have gotten fixated on batteries in a very narrow way.

    I don't know if anyone here will have heard of railroad troughs. Back in the days of steam engines, an engine not only needed a supply of coal, but also a still larger supply of water to make steam. For example, the Union Pacific "Big Boy" locomotive (4-8-8-4), of 560 tons and 6000 horsepower, had tender capacity of 28 tons of coal, and 25,000 gallons of water (106 tons), which gave it a couple of hours running time.

    In some places, railroad tracks were fitted with water troughs between the rails. Water was let into these troughs, and flowed downhill for a mile or two, like an artificial brook. When an engine passed over one of these troughs, at a speed of forty or sixty miles an hour, the engineer would move a lever to lower a scoop into the trough, and water would be pumped up into the engine's tanks, thousands of gallons of it. Of course, the engineer had to be sure to retract the scoop before reaching the end of the trough, or else there would be a bit of a bang, and an expensive repair job (there are some funny stories... ). The intelligent use of troughs could reduce the need for fueling by a factor of four or five.

    The analogy to take away from this is the necessity of finding ways to make an electric car automatically hook up to a supply of electricity, whenever one is available. The point is not to find a perfect battery, but to create a system which is very good at gobbling up bits and pieces of electricity where it finds them. _That_ is within the scope of Moore's Law-- it works out to things like robot arms which reach out to plug in, or perhaps to put a trolley pole on an overhead wire, or something like that.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. icon
    Michael Ho (profile), 8 Jun 2011 @ 9:49pm

    Re: Water Scoops and Thinking Outside the Box.

    I don't think battery life is *just* a problem for electric cars... and it's not even clear that pure electric cars are actually that much more desirable than hybrid vehicles.

    And there are various ways to wirelessly transmit power -- but it'd be tricky to do for a target that's moving at >55mph....

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    Andrew D. Todd, 9 Jun 2011 @ 7:42am

    Re: Re: Water Scoops and Thinking Outside the Box.

    Well, perhaps not just for electric cars, but they do tend to present the most difficult problems.

    Here is an example I heard about. In Bordeaux, France, they have installed a new kind of streetcar. Instead of having an overhead wire, its track has a "third rail," set flush into the pavement between the other two rails, and running at 700 V. Sections of this rail are switched on by individual electronic controls, only when the rail-car is on top of them, and the rail-car has metal skirts designed to keep anyone or anything from getting too close to a "hot" segment. So far (knock wood), it seems to work. I assume that the streetcar has a battery, allowing the "third-rail" to be made discontinuous for reasonable distances. There is no need to push one's luck by running the third-rail across crosswalks, for example. The same would apply to street intersections.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    All Battery Coupon, 25 Oct 2011 @ 2:20pm

    I agree with "The Insider"

    By now the efficiency of batteries at this point should far surpasse what they are currently capable of. I do however, think that fully battery operated vehicles are just around the corner and will be mainstream soon.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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