Scientists can now make lithium-ion batteries last a lifetime
Ron Czapala
Posts: 2,418
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3060005/mobile-wireless/scientists-can-now-make-lithium-ion-batteries-last-a-lifetime.html
Who says playing around is a waste of time?
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) said that's exactly what they were doing when they discovered how to increase the tensile strength of nanowires that could be used to make lithium-ion batteries last virtually forever.
"All nanowire capacitors can be extended from 2000 to 8000 cycles to more than 100,000 cycles, simply by replacing a liquid electrolyte with a... gel electrolyte," the researchers wrote in their paper.
The result: commercial batteries that could last a lifetime in computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft.
"The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option," Thai said in a statement. "This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality."
Who says playing around is a waste of time?
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) said that's exactly what they were doing when they discovered how to increase the tensile strength of nanowires that could be used to make lithium-ion batteries last virtually forever.
"All nanowire capacitors can be extended from 2000 to 8000 cycles to more than 100,000 cycles, simply by replacing a liquid electrolyte with a... gel electrolyte," the researchers wrote in their paper.
The result: commercial batteries that could last a lifetime in computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft.
"The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option," Thai said in a statement. "This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality."
Comments
So unless some regulations are in place that *force* vendors to provide lasting batteries, it won't happen, at least not for ordinary commercial products.
I don't think that's the case anymore. My observation is that the majority of people upgrade their phones well before the battery life gets bad. Even if the battery is good for 10,000 cycles (27 years @ one cylce per day), we just don't hold onto our equipment that long. There will certainly be some excellent use cases for this tech, but you can be sure that you will pay for it.
I do get your point about planned obsolescence, but from a slightly different perspective. When you buy the newer, faster, better phone, the battery in the old phone is no longer useful (assuming you just throw the old phone in a drawer). What would be nice is if we could re-use the existing batteries in new products, or in other products that we still have! That way, you save a bit of money buying that new phone and you reduce e-waste!
To that end, I expect that consumer rechargeable batteries (AA, C, D, etc.) will readily adopt this technology. Assuming that the manufacturing costs are about the same, they could easily bump up the price to more than double their profit margins. Even if they sold half as many batteries, they would be more profitable than they are now!
And some vendors use built-in batteries that can't be replaced (easily) by the user, so then they're covered both ways: If the user prefers to stay with that old Android version, or circumvents that by installing Cyanogenmod or something (and the majority of users aren't capable of doing that), the phone will have be be replaced anyway when the battery gets old.
Absolutely! That would be perfect in every way. It *will* happen, easily, if, but only if, regulations are in place to force vendors to introduce batteries that can be charged more than a few hundred times (lasting maybe two years, or sometimes worse), and introduce standard form factors when they're at it. Form factors won't be ideal, in the same way that the (now enforced by EU regulations, or it wouldn't have happened!) standard charging port for mobile phones: MicroUSB. Now, microUSB has a lot of problems, starting with how easily the socket breaks when unplugging a cable (I always file off those small notches on the plugs now, to avoid that), but that change has done wonders for the mess of cables and chargers I used to carry around. Because when it was enforced for phones, suddenly other equipment started to follow, and it spreads. I'm in Japan at the moment and small tech gadgets I buy (for some reason I feel this urge to buy tech gadgets.. part of why I'm on these kind of forums I guess) use microUSB charging as well.
To conclude on batteries: I hope that at a future time, not too far ahead, we'll look back and shake our heads at the notion of rechargeable batteries that didn't last forever. They should be as rechargeable as a capacitor, and with practically zero leakage. At that point batteries will be used for everything. I stopped using rechargeable NiCd and NiMH batteries a long time ago because I used them so infrequently that they would always be dead when I needed them. And if I kept only a few, to avoid the non-used ones to die on me, I wouldn't have enough when I *did* need them. So I'm back to stacks and stacks of ordinary use-once batteries - they keep charge. But it's not ideal. I want rechargeable batteries of the type described at the start of this paragraph, it would change everything, and I believe it can happen if requirements are put in place by regulators.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/availability_of_lithium
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34831187
Lithium is more abundant than lead so I don't think there's any immediate problem there - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust
In any case, except for things like daily-use phones, tablets, notebooks, and my Li-ion rechargeable bicycle light (which I need to use regularly while in Japan (in Norway it would be months without use, in the bright season)), I won't go back to rechargeables anytime soon. I'll wait for batteries that can be recharged nearly forever, not the degrading-from-day-one types that we have now.