Technological advances in most area of electronics have been phenomenal over the past 20 years, but battery technology still just pokes along. In 2008 I might get a few hours out of a typical notebook battery, which is about what I was getting out of clam-shell notebooks 15 years ago. I know feature sets have improved by orders of magnitude, and batteries have improved overall, but it’s still surprising how slow and pokey advances in battery technology are relative to other advances
Why is this so? Why don’t we have batteries that can power a notebook for a week instead of few hours?
First, today’s notebooks consume significantly more power than notebooks of yesterday. Second, battery technology has greatly improved, not marginally improved, regardless of your impressions otherwise. Not just in energy density, but in cost and weight.
You are asking for a way to get 1000 miles from a gallon of gasoline.
Because you can not change the laws of physics. There’s only so much energy you can cram into a given amount of alloy. Maybe someone will come up with a better, lighter alloy, maybe not.
All true about the enhanced power drain from modern laptops. Your fifteen years ago laptop had a monochrome screen (likely), low-density microprocessor, etc., etc.
There is also a behind-the-scenes issue with batteries that we may not think of but that is just as important as “how long will it last.” Getting a battery that is steadily losing charge to delivery a steady amount of current (as needed for fairly delicate electronic devices) is a real struggle. Hard drives and LCD displays don’t adapt as well as old-time flashlights to slowly getting dimmer and dimmer, as it were. So laptop batteries in particular are designed to deliver peak power until they can’t, then the computer shuts off. This probably means shutoff comes sometime before all the charge is literally drained out.
>Second, battery technology has greatly improved, not marginally improved, regardless of your impressions otherwise. Not just in energy density, but in cost and weight.
Now, wait a minute. I just did a fair bit of hunting around to figure out how to provide about 1000 Wh of line power to laptops and other small appliances in a remote environment, and was interested to see that the best way to approach this turned out to be lead acid batteries, as it would have been 50 years ago. There are some smaller and more energy-dense batteries available, but they aren’t way better and they cost much more. Lead acid batteries are better in a few ways, like the use of gel (which I don’t think is 50 years old but am not sure). But the overall picture was surprisingly unchanged.
Laptops, granted, don’t use tubes, so the other side of the picture is very different indeed.
But there are reacitons like uniting hydrogen and oxygen that give many times the energy per mass of today’s options. Perhaps ten years ago I read an article in Scientific American about intercolation of Hydrogen in metals, leaving me thinking it was right around the corner.
Batteries seem to me to evolve much more slowly than any other field of electronics, if you accept suggesting that the batteries field is part of electronics. Even if it’s part of chemical industry, it’s still slower than many other branches of the field, and the motive to have it move quickly seems unmatched, to me.
I accept the OP’s premise that the battery field is surprisingly slow moving.
There is a huge impetus for better batteries out there. If it is slow moving I suspect it is due to legitimate limitations in what can be done and not a reluctance to try.
That said I think the 1000 mpg battery (a bit overstated but still) is actually nearly here.
What did you’re clam-shell notebook weigh? Do you realize that we are now getting much more power out of much smaller batteries? The technology is there, it’s the demand that is not. If people needed notebooks to last for 10 hours, it could certainly be done. It’s just that you’re note book would go back to weighing 25lbs like they did 15 yrs ago instead of the couple of pounds that they weigh now.
The market is geared for people that want light weight in their laptops more than they want more than a couple of hours of battery.
Are small powerful sources of energy possible even in theory? What would 100 grams of plutonium in a small RTG produce power wise? I know safety issues would never allow nuclear material in “batteries” but is it technically possible?
You’re talking about fuel cells; every time the topic of energy-dense storage comes up, people want to talk fuel cells. The problem is that hydrogen fuel cells don’t scale down well because of the current limitations and problems of hydrogen storage, which still has yet to be solved, particularly in portable devices. SciAm (like its simple-minded brethren like Discover and Popular Science) always leaves you with the impression that great revolutionary discoveries are right around the corner, even when they’re not.
Development of battery technology has been evolutionary and incremental, without much in the way of revolutionary advancements to be sure, so compared to fields like microprocessors or molecular biology the advancements are slow, but not every field progresses in leaps and bounds at the same time. When someone comes up with a way to store and extract energy efficiently from nanocellular arrays, then we may see a revolution. But scaling existing electrochemical systems is a matter of incremental improvements.
Certainly, technologies don’t develop at the same rate. Look at the internal combustion engine that powers your car. There have been millions of hours of R&D devoted to it and there have been significant advancements made in its design and efficiency, yet it is still basically the same mechanical device that powered cars about 100 years ago. It has been refined to an amazing degree but if you would compare it to the advancement of the silicone chip the engine delivering the same power should be the size of a thimble and get 1000 miles per gallon of gasoline.
Why hasn’t science developed a comb the size of your thumbnail that will do the same job as the thing that your barber uses? Why is concrete a construction material that remains the product of choice? While its been improved, it remains little changed.
There are numerous other examples. Whoever breaks the battery problem will make Bill Gates look like a pauper and I hope that it happen. I’m just not going to live my life as if the breakthrough is right around the corner.
My company just upgraded me from my ‘old’ Lenovo T40 to a new T61. the ‘new’ one gets about half the battery life, but I take this to be a cost-cutting meausre more than a reflection on battery technology.
There have been some pretty impressive advances in battery technology, though. The development of Lithium-ion batteries has pretty much eliminated memory effect problems, for example.
Do you know how much lead acid and gel cell batteries weigh?
Certainly a car battery will power your cell phone for a longer period of time than that 2 oz lithium ion battery. As you quoted from my first post, one of the marvelous advances in battery technology has been lightweight and energy-dense chemistries.
Somebody that’s too smart for me to argue with told me that gasoline is the most efficient and easily transportable form of stored energy.
You can talk all you want about oil company conspiracies but until we find something nearly as good or better at the task we’re probably going to be relying on gasoline. Wouldn’t it be great if a battery that weighed the same as gasoline could store just as much energy?
I’m guessing that such a technology is practically impossible, though possible in theory.
But if it were possible, a nuclear battery would probably be able to power a laptop for centuries.
Actually, it would be fun to try to guesstimate:
A battery containing 20g of matter, could liberate up to 500 million kWh of power (I didn’t bother to do the E=mc2 calc: according to Wikipedia 1g liberates up to 25 million kWh).
I don’t know what the power dissipation of a typical laptop is, but let’s say 200W.
Given that there are approximately 8,765 hours in a year, that means this hypothetical, tiny, 100% efficient battery could power a laptop for 285,000 years!
A nuclear fission battery would be nowhere near 100% efficiency, but should be capable, I would think, of at least 10,000 years of power.
Pretty much. Here’s a chart of energy density from Wikipedia. Storage media better than gasoline are mostly fission/fusion, hydrogen in various forms, or metals. Even the best batteries are far down the list.
As a thought experiment, you could use a model airplane engine to power your laptop. The extra hardware (like the engine itself, I mean) would cut into the practical energy density of the system, and there are some other pretty obvious drawbacks, but it’s sort of a fun idea.
