What’s New in the Mobile Device Battery Industry?
Since the very dawn of the Industrial Age, people have worked to harness the natural forces of power to do our work for us. Producing, storing, using, and recycling energy is the key cornerstone of our industrial technology. We keep making improvements as we study deeper into the science of energy management, and perhaps someday we will even finally solve the ultimate problem - producing infinite, inexhaustible energy.
Of course, the ultimate power source - perpetual motion - is proved to be impossible. But we can get close to the next best thing by combining inanimate objects to generate a current. You can actually build a primitive battery at home; all you'd need is a small jar of sulfuric acid with two rods dipped in it, one zinc and one carbon, with a wire connecting the two. A current will generate through the wire, as electrons jump from the zinc to the carbon, until the acid eats up the zinc rod. OK, maybe playing with sulfuric acid and pure element rods isn't safe to do at home, but it illustrates the principle!
All batteries work on the same principle, generating current from electrochemical reactions. We can switch and swap different metals, acids, elements, and oxides to produce different reactions at different rates. The rechargeable kind of battery in fact exploits the fact that certain electrochemical reactions are reversible. Here, we will show some recent advances in battery science.
barium-titanate powders
A few research companies are looking into cells made with barium-titanate, in the hopes that they will outperform lithium-ion batteries in energy density, price, charge time, and even safety. They also look like they could pack ten times as much power of a lead-acid battery at a cheaper cost, and will also replace batteries with a battery-ultracapacitor hybrid. These so-called "ultracaps" have already been known to withstand decades of use, but so far the problem has been in packing enough power, since traditional ultracaps have less power than lithium-ion. But barium-titanate could at last overcome this limit. These new units have applications in everything from mobile phones to hybrid vehicles.
improved rechargeable batteries
The latest nickel-metal hybrid batteries to hit the market have been improved to the point where they can be sold fully-charged without having the self-discharge problem, have four times the lifetime of a regular dry cell battery, and can be recharged up to 1000 times before experiencing degraded performance. But best of all, they can be recycled, relieving some of the pressure of electronic waste on the environment.
universal battery chargers
Gone are the days when you had to find the specific charger for your device's unique batteries, leading to several chargers scattered around the house for each device. Deluxe chargers these days can handle AAA, AA, C, D, and 9V batteries all in one handy unit, and can also recharge both NiCad and NiMH batteries. Not only that, but some of them are even taking into account the world-wide house current situation, being able to run from either 120 or 240 volt current.
nano-batteries
What, you might ask, is a nano-battery? A battery constructed at a microscopic scale, using nano-technology! Researchers at the legendary Massachusetts Institute of Technology have already succeeded in building batteries at the microscopic scale. Now for the scary-sounding part: they do this with genetically-engineered viruses. The viruses are designed to attract individual molecules of cobalt oxide from a solution, forming thin wires and electrodes as they do so. Really, these are not so much living organisms as they are small factories for producing raw materials, which just happen to be made of protein.
These are just some of the developments of the past year in portable energy technology. Any or all of these could be powering your GPS or laptop before you know it, and many more new advances beyond these are sure to follow.
Filed Under: Batteries
