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Is Zinc-air Going to be the Next Big Rechargeable Battery Tech?

Ryan Whitwam — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:42:11 -0500

More than anything else, battery technology holds back mobile innovation. Sure, we’d all like super fast mobile CPUs, but the 10 minutes of battery life we’d get isn’t a good trade off. Battery technology has, thus far, advanced at a depressingly slow rate. However, rechargeable zinc-air batteries could actually deliver changes next year.

A company called ReVolt claims to have developed a way to make zinc-air batteries rechargeable. The batteries use oxygen from the air to generate current. Also, they don’t contain any of the toxic materials that are found in lithium-ion batteries, which are estimated to only hold one-third as much power.

In sciency terms, these batteries rely on reduction/oxidation reactions between a zinc and air (oxygen) electrodes. By using new gelling and binding agents, the previously single use batteries can be recharged. They have been tested for up to 100 cycles, but could be capable of 300-500. Smaller batteries for cell phones and hearing aids are supposed to show up in 2010. If that goes well, larger versions for electric cars could be produced. Will this revolutionize the tech world, or is it just so much hot air?

Sanyo: Breakthrough in Battery Technology Allows 1,500 Recharges

Paul Lilly — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:15:39 -0500

From wireless controllers to tail-less mice, it's a good bet you own a set of rechargeable batteries, but even these are good for only so many uses before they no longer hold a charge. Sanyo's "eneloop" brand, which was first announced in late 2005, has won a following thanks to the batteries coming pre-charged from the get-go and offering up to 1,000 recharges before giving up the ghost, and the newest batch performs even better.

According to Sanyo, a breakthrough in battery technology now allows its eneloop brand to be recharged up to 1,500 times, a 50 percent improvement over the original design.

"Incorporating new technologies for 'material,' 'manufacturing methods,' and 'structure' developed through the knowledge gained since the first release of eneloop in November 2005, the number of times a battery can be recharged has been increased by 1.5 times to approximately 1,500 times compared to conventional models, which makes the total number of times it is able to be recharged the industry No. 1," Sanyo stated in a press release.

The technologies involved include the development of a "highly-durable super-lattice alloy," an advanced manufacturing method consisting of a new additive being added to the negative electrode material, and the continued use of a thick, outer case.

Duracell’s Familiar-Looking myGrid Charges Devices Wirelessly

Paul Lilly — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:42:01 -0500

Still getting up off the couch to plug your iPod and other mobile gadgets into an outlet so they can recharge? Pfft - real couch potatoes juice up their devices wirelessly, with the newest way to do so being Duracell's new myGrid charging pad.

If Duracell's myGrid looks oddly familiar, it's because WildCharge has a similar device on the market called the Wire-Free. Like the Wire-Free, the myGrid is stupid-easy to use. Just plug the pad into your wall and drop your power-hungry devices onto the pad, up to four at a time.

Duracell boasts compatibility with a number of mobile devices, including the iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, both the Blackberry Pearl and Curve, and several Motorola and Nokia devices.

The myGrid will be available in October for $80.

Image Credit: Duracell

Lenovo Offers to Replace Low-Functioning Batteries

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:44:28 -0500

If you’ve got a Lenovo laptop with a battery that’s providing sub-par performance, you just might be eligible for a free replacement.

The batteries in question don’t present any fire or safety hazard, so there’s no reason to worry about your health – the folks at Lenovo are simply looking to make nice. “Irreparable damage” and “battery cannot be charged” error messages from the Power Manager or Message Center are the main indicators that you have a bad battery.

If you’re not sure, but you have a ThinkPad R60, R61, T60 or T61 with battery FRU part numbers 42T4546, 42T4566 or 92P1141, and/or a model X60 or X61, with battery part numbers 42T4550, 42T4567, 42T4568, 92P1169, 92P1173, 93P5028 or 93P5030, it’s suggested that you should run the Battery Diagnostic Tool (available here), to find out if you need to swap it out

Image Credit: Lenovo

Sony Launches a New Kind of Lithium

Paul Lilly — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:15:02 -0500

Sony on Tuesday announced it has launched a new type of lithium ion secondary battery using olivine-type lithium iron phosphate as the cathode material.

What exactly does that mean? According to Sony, both high-power and long-life performance in a single package. The company claims olivine's robust crystal structure and stable performance make the material an ideal fit for use as a cathode material. In addition, Sony says its new battery technology is able to charge rapidly.

Sony has already started shipping the first battery to use the olivine material, which the company sells under its Fortelion series branding. It holds a capacity of 1.1Ah with 80 percent capacity retention after 2,000 charge-discharge cycles, and is able to recharge to 99 percent of its full capacity in 30 minutes, Sony says.

Image Credit: Sony

Release Notes: Notebook Battery Life is a Trap

Will Smith — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:30:33 -0500

Battery-life claims never seems to line up with reality. You’d think testing battery life would be straightforward, but benchmark results rarely jibe with real-world results—in part, because there are an infinite number of potential workloads (each tapping power differently), and battery life decays over time. Both Intel and AMD make mobile CPU platforms designed for low power consumption, but due to the massive number of variables involved, I’ve found it nearly impossible to determine which architecture sucks the least juice.

Think about it. There’s a lot of hardware in a laptop that can affect battery life besides the CPU and the battery itself: the LCD screen and backlight, the optical and hard drives, the GPU, chipset, and memory config—to name just a few. The upshot is that if you want to fairly compare Intel and AMD hardware, you really need to test what we’ll call core power draw, isolating all the other variables. There are just a handful of ways to do this fairly, and each comes with its own problems.

The best approach would be to test notebooks that are identical save their chipset and CPU. Indeed, if there were a notebook family with the same battery, display, drives, etcetera, that came in Intel and AMD flavors, that would be perfect. We would be able to test performance and battery life (and the relationship between the two) for results relevant to both test machines as well as the broader AMD-versus-Intel debate. This would be the best-case scenario, but unfortunately, these machines don’t exist.

A slightly more realistic option would be to get reference boards from AMD and Intel and put them in a machine with dual power supplies. The mobo, CPU, GPU, and memory would draw from one supply, and everything else would pull from the other. With this config in place, we’d simply measure the power draw of the PSU connected to the motherboard and the benchmark results of both systems.

This is a totally artificial test, but it perfectly isolates the stuff we want to test. That said, were we to go down this path, we could give readers the wrong impression that the CPU, chipset, and GPU are the only things that matter for battery life. If a reader looks at the benchmarks and thinks, “Oh, vendor A has better battery life,” he’s going to be pissed when he buys a big desktop replacement with the winning architecture, but also a 17-inch panel and a puny 3-cell battery, and gets just 30 minutes off a full charge.

So, you see the dilemma. This is why I always say that battery-life testing is a trap. Either I test in a way that actually measures the performance of the CPU, chipset, and GPU, or I give readers actionable buying advice. But I don’t think I can do both at the same time. What do you guys think? Write an email, or let me know via Twitter (http://twitter.com/willsmith).

AMD: Notebook Battery Life Claims are Bogus

Paul Lilly — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:00:00 -0500

AMD isn't happy with the way some battery claims are made, saying the reliance on a test called MobileMark 2007 doesn't yield an accurate indicator of what to expect. The problem, says Patrick Moorhead, a vice president for marketing at AMD, is that the parameters for the test include dimming the screen the just 20 percent brightness, turning off WiFi, and making sure no music, video, games, or webpages are running. Not only is the test flawed, says Moorhead, but it also favors Intel.

"Intel is advantaged in this environment because they have optimized their architecture to have bettery battery life when the computer isn't doing anything," Moorhead said.

Intel shrugged off AMD's complaint, saying if the No. 2 chip maker is so passionate about the subject, it would "encourage them to bring any new proposals or edits to the nonprofit industry consortium called BAPCo."

But is AMD out of line? Not likely. In the June issue of Maximum PC, Editor-in-Chief Will Smith discussed the topic in his Ed Word titled "Notebook Battery Life is a Trap."

"You'd think testing battery life would be straightforward, but benchmark results rarely jibe with real-world results -- in part, because there are an infinite number of potential workloads (each tapping power differently), and battery life decays over time," Smith wrote.

AMD warns that either the industry starts better regulating itself, or there's a high possibility of a consumer filing a lawsuit or the FTC stepping in.

Image Credit: techtree.com

Hitachi Announces Record-Density Lithium-Ion Battery

Andy Salisbury — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:56:42 -0500

Earlier this week Hitachi Ltd. and Hitachi Vehicle Energy Ltd. announced a new battery that they claim has the world’s highest power density.

The new lithium-ion battery has 4,500W/kg power density, a number that clocks in at about 1.7 times the output of their current batteries. The increase in power allows for smaller size, and is thanks to a new manganese cathode and a unique battery structure. The structure employs thinner electrodes, a new power collection method, and more effective configurations.

Hitachi plans to make this technology available for notebooks and cell phones once the automotive industries have had a chance with it, but there’s no official word as to when we could see this technology implemented on a grand scale.

Image Credit: Hitachi