Did anyone else hear this in James Doohan’s voice?
Me. “I canna do it, cap’n!”
Oh, and no thread touching on laptop computer power would be complete without mentioning the micro jet engine . I hate to think about the exhaust. On the other hand, it would be a gas* to have people watch as you refueled your laptop.
RR
*Ha.
Thanks for the supporting site. Also notice that I said “transportable”. The guy that told me the fact was an engineer that was working on a hydrogen car project. He noted that the huge problem with hydrogen is that in time it just disappears. Storage is a real problem even if it has more energy density. Gasoline has a lot of advantages and is the benchmark that new technologies have to be measured against.
Plus, all you have to do is dig it out of the ground and refine it a bit; the energy is already there, which is a big savings over having to produce it yourself.
Actually I heard Sean Connery saying it. I’m not really certain why, though.
Stranger
Without venturing into GD territory, I always think this when hearing indignant complaints about our oil/gas dependent culture. We’d have been fools (at the time) not to use such a convenient and energy-dense source of power.
Very interesting Wiki chart, it really puts things in perspective. By way of comparison the energy density of U-235 in a fission reactor is 88 million MJ per Kg while burning wood is only 17 MJ per Kg. 88 million Vs 17 wow! I guess clock work springs will not solve the nations energy demands either 0.0003 MJ per Kg. 
Actually, if you’re using an electric motor directly driven by a battery, with no internal combustion engine, then something that could store even 25% of the energy of the equivalent mass of gasoline would be doing quite well, since internal combustion engines are typically <= 20% efficient, and high HP electric motors are > 90% efficient.
Electronics advancements have to do with the ability to take their component parts and make them smaller and cheaper, without affecting functionality, then increasing the number of those parts astronomically.
With many technologies, it is impossible to do this, and has nothing to do with a lack of imagination in those industries. The equivalent would be to have the old 12" notebook screen reduced to the size of a breathmint, without reducing its functionality. If you could do that, then I’m sure you’d get remarkable improvements in battery life.
Batteries and engines are limited by the inherent energy density of the chemicals used to power them, and the fact that they have to deliver a fixed amount of power. You can’t make a 100hp engine the size of a peanut, if only because the amount of power it has to deliver would blow apart any materials we could conceivably make it out of.
Good point! Remember when they tech geniuses tried to sell us wristwatches with calculators built in? For awhile the game was to see how small they could make calculators. Trouble was, our fingers weren’t getting any smaller. Guys like me that really used them were looking for the biggest one made to put on our desk. I still have a Sharp Compet QS-2130.
As old as a fine Scotch but still the best.
The cellphone I have now is smaller than the battery of my first celly back in '96. That old cell would last about half a day, now all day long, and I talk a lot more now. Also the old battery would completly die in 6 months, I have had this phone for 2 years with the same battery.
As sort of an aside on this;
Every time I see a scifi show like the Star Gate SG-1 episode where they are presenting these “fabulous inventions” that they’d actually reverse engineered from alien tech, I want to scream at how much the writers have missed the boat.
The key ep I’m thinking of has Samantha Carter presenting a holographic projector and the other guy presenting a “ray gun” of some kind. Yup, great stuff, but you’re missing the larger picture here, people. It’s not those particular inventions that would change the world, but the energy generation and storage technology within those presented scifi devices that would radically change the entire world and earn their inventors the big bucks.
The Arc Generator in Iron Man alone would earn Tony Stark more money after taxes than his company has earned in it’s entire existence and completely revolutionize the world.
As I understand it, it’s a matter of a ratio of the storage cells to the volume of the size you’re using. Recent improvements in materials have made it so we can store a lot more in the same amount of space. That improves batteries.
>You’re talking about fuel cells; every time the topic of energy-dense storage comes up, people want to talk fuel cells.
No, I didn’t mean fuel cells, though they do seem promising. I think they’re the technology of the future. Maybe they always will be.
I mean, batteries made of hydrogen and oxygen. Charts of electrochemical energy often put them at the top. Such batteries have never been made, AFAIK.
I have long had a daydream about inventing a kind of battery - cell, more precisely - that is almost filled with some material, and as you use the energy a fairly smooth and flat interface moves along the length of the cell, with some different material behind it. And none of this wastes energy or changes the two kinds of material to limit life. An excellent daydream, like being fantastically wealthy, unfettered by details like why this interface would have a voltage across it and create a current, or like where the wealth comes from.
A more recent daydream is about how to describe the behavior of rechargeable batteries. I gather that lead acid batteries operate the way a one dimensional solution to Poisson’s equation would. This understanding grew out of reading explanations of “surface charge” in automobile batteries, as I was trying to understand deep cycle batteries like marine house batteries and golf cart batteries. So, I picture doing data acquisition on hundreds of little 50 ml lead acid cells, with various precision load resistors in a switching network, putting them through randomly generated charge and discharge cycles. Then I imagine a 1D finite element diffusion model on a computer with some minimal number of parameters, perhaps including phase changes between at least two phases, and coupled equations beyond just the diffusion equation. Next I imagine nonlinear iterative fitting to try to adjust the parameters to make the FEMs agree with the raw data. Last, I imagine a program controlling all these things, which keeps adding additional experimental runs whose characters should best improve estimation of the parameters in light of all the history to the present. I’ve done all these things one at a time, and in some problems I’ve linked a couple of these together, but the appeal of studying batteries is that they are small and inherently electronic. The result would be a program that you could feed a desired use case into. It would describe the behavior of the battery in response, in particular its life evolution.