A Field Guide to Batteries
A Field Guide to Batteries
The first battery was the Baghdad Battery, a simple clay pot with a copper sheet inside which is wrapped around an iron rod. They were discovered in 1936 in the village of Khuyut Rabbou'a, near Baghdad, Iraq, and have been dated to between 250 BC and AD 224. Ancients would have used them by pouring an acidic liquid inside, such as lemon juice, grape juice, or vinegar. this would have served as an acidic agent to trigger the electrochemical reaction with the two metals. And now you understand a battery at its simplest terms!
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.
Filed Under: Batteries
