Batteries Everywhere
The conventional thinking is that the
battery is an object in the device that you can easily identify and, if the
manufacturer agrees, even replace yourself. However, that’s far from what a
team at Rice University have been developing using traditional battery
chemistry.
In their concept, the battery is assembled
by spraying the components onto any surface, allowing simple household objects
to hold a charge. In one of their prototype designs, they’ve taken a simple
house tile, applied a photo-voltaic cell to one side and sprayed a battery to
the other. The concept is that a house could be covered in these, providing
both a means to capture power but also store it for future use.
What’s exciting about this concept is that
it could remove the battery as a part for which space needs to be made in any
device, but instead it could be a coating that’s made to any internal surface,
irrespective of shape.
Final Thoughts
As much as extended battery life seems both
desirable and inevitable, there are some issues with this happening, which
haven’t been addressed and might prove contentious.
The definition of a future battery might be
a compact object containing a chemical compound that can be rapidly altered to
release a large amount of energy, which, oddly enough, is also the
characterization of a bomb.
With high explosives, the chemical change
that occurs is generally very rapid oxidization, and in the battery it’s the
transfer of ions, but you can see the problem. With the restrictions already
imposed on what items you’re allowed to take in your carry-on luggage for
international flights, an energy cell that, if modified, released all its power
in a split second would seem an obvious candidate for banning.
If it proves possible to contain the
amperes that a car battery can hold in a laptop battery, then that’s a clearly
viable weapon, however the power contained inside it might be used.
For exactly the same reasons, fuel cell
technology might also prove a difficult sell to airlines and the international
travelers who use them.
These difficulties also point to a major
litigation source, should very high capacity batteries have a
manufacturing-based failure, as laptop batteries have experienced in the past.
In these incidents, electrical shorting inside the cells caused them to become
very hot and act like an incendiary, destroying the device. Some similar
incidents have occurred with phones, leaving the owners with minor burns.
It doesn’t take much imagination to consider
how much worse the outcome of these failures might be if the batteries
contained five or ten times the power. A fault that was determined to be
design- or manufacturing-based could open the originating manufacturer to
personal injury claims that would run into billions of dollars, depending how
many customers were affected.
So in our efforts to go further for longer,
we might actually open up an entirely different Pandora’s box, where having to
charge your smartphone each day is the least of our worries.
I’m not pouring cold water on the idea
entirely; I’m just pointing out that making the technology work isn’t the final
hurdle that super-batteries might need to overcome.
The challenge for electronics designers is
to create a technology where battery capacity is large but physical scale is
small, that can recharge rapidly but discharge much less rapidly, and that
isn’t environmentally harmful. If that sounds difficult, then it’s probably a
good reflection of why we’ve waited so long for longer battery life and how
getting all those opposing priorities to balance might prove almost impossible.
However it’s achieved, batteries will hold
more charge, charge faster and deliver more efficient power. Unfortunately,
history suggests we’ll come up with even more ways to use the devices they
power and, as such, it might be that we’ve eaten that lunch before it even
arrives at the table.
