Items tagged with Lithium-ion
There seems to be a never-ending stream of new battery technologies looking to replace the venerable lithium-ion chemistry. Today, new advances in zinc-air batteries are making them look increasingly more viable as a suitable replacement, with the potential to squeeze five time the charge into a battery comparably sized to its lithium-ion counterpart. The breakthrough comes from researchers working at University of Sydney and the Nanyang Technological University, who published a paper in Advanced Materials. As its name implies, zinc-air batteries are composed of zinc metal and oxygen from the air, which is of course readily available. This battery chemistry makes them much cheaper to produce...
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When it comes to the mobile devices that we use on a daily basis — be it a smartphone, tablet, or laptop — we are more than likely relying on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries to keep us powered through the day. However, companies have looked for an alternative to lithium-ion batteries for years, but none has fought its way to the forefront to provide a suitable challenge. One startup company, Ionic Materials, is looking to take the fight to the lithium-ion with a battery chemistry that we’re all familiar with: alkaline. While traditional alkaline batteries are not rechargeable, Ionic has developed a solid-state version that can be recharged hundreds of times. These rechargeable batteries would...
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What happened to Samsung and its Galaxy Note 7 can be considered a wake-up call for battery makers and consumers alike, or at least it should be. Despite whatever safety precautions Samsung took to ensure its Galaxy Note 7 would function properly, the batteries inside were prone to overheating and catching fire, which led to a global recall. It's an issue that has affected other electronic makers in the past, but maybe one that can be prevented in the future. To that end, a group of researchers from Stanford University developed a lithium-ion battery with a built-in fire extinguisher. "Although the energy densities of batteries continue to increase, safety problems (for example, fires and explosions)...
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Since the original iPhone was released in 2007, we have seen some incredible advances in smartphone processing and GPU power along with a wealth of features improvement (faster Wi-Fi and cellular speeds, larger and higher resolution displays). However, battery technology, for the most part, hasn’t kept up with the advances made in miniaturizing and producing higher-performing silicon. Over the years, we’ve listened to plenty of promises about the next battery breakthrough just over the horizon, and today, Sony is the latest to string us along. Sony is currently an underdog as a battery supplier, commanding just 8 percent of the market for compact lithium-ion batteries. Its three largest competitors...
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Most so-called breakthrough battery technologies we hear about come with tremendous claims, like quadrupling the amount of energy stored or being able to recharge 1,000 times faster. Heck, one day we might even run laptops on Mountain Dew (slight exaggeration). Samsung, on the other hand, makes a more modest claim with a new battery technology it just recently developed -- double the battery life. Samsung's breakthrough came in the form of using a two-dimensional layered structure of graphene and silicon. Up to this point, silicon alone has been receiving a lot of attention in the formation of next generation lithium-ion battery anodes. However, there's a large volume change of silicon that occurs...
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Elon Musk isn’t just content with revolutionizing the electric vehicle market; he also has a hand in revolutionizing rockets and cargo deliveries to the International Space Station (ISS) with SpaceX, and even has a [smaller] hand in the solar industry with SolarCity. Musk is now branching out into the home energy market leveraging technology that we’ve seen previously with Tesla Motors and SolarCity. Tesla Energy encompasses new battery systems that are being targeted at both home users and businesses, as we have previously discussed. The first system, the lithium-ion-powered Powerwall, has the most relevance to HotHardware readers. It is available in 7 kWh ($3,000) and 10 kWh ($3,500) versions...
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We reported earlier this month that Tesla could soon unveil a home-targeted battery, and lo and behold, we'll be learning about it before the month's even over. According to an email sent to investors, the announcement will take place on April 30, and as per a Tesla spokesperson, we'll learn why Tesla's solution is so great, and why previous solutions weren't. Tesla IR on April 30 event: "We will introduce the Tesla home battery and a very large utility scale battery."— John Paczkowski (@JohnPaczkowski) April 21, 2015 What's new information is the fact that Tesla isn't only targeting the home -- it's also targeting utilities. As Bloomberg puts it, "Tesla wants to power Wal-Mart", and apparently...
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Leaving the realm of science fiction behind, the super-fast charging mobile phone is inching its way ever more closer to science-fact. As reported in Stanford Magazine in advance of publication this week in the journal Nature, researchers at Stanford University have developed a high-performance aluminum-ion battery that can recharge in about a minute and do so thousands of times without significant loss of capacity. And along with being faster to charge and more durable, the new battery is also much safer than the lithium-ion batteries so many of us currently carry around these days in the mobile phones and other battery-dependent gadgets populating our pockets and purses. “We have developed...
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Many wonderful things can be and have been said about the Raspberry Pi — it's adroitness as a programming learning tool, its remarkably low cost-of-entry, the strong and varied community that has developed around it, the user creativity it inspires, its oh-so-oh-so-cool factor — but one thing never said is that it provides a clean, well-contained user computing experience. That's because, well, it doesn't. The truth is that the typical Raspberry Pi system is precisely the opposite, presenting as a chaotic jumble of cables, cords, wires, USB hubs, peripheral devices, and various power supplies. It is still marvelously useful, though, and provides a ton of techy fun for boys...
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In setting up a new lab, a group of research students at Purdue University were inspired to come up with a way to put the huge amount of packing peanuts they were receiving to good use. At the suggestion of Professor Vilas Pol, the researchers developed a potential new eco-friendly application for rendering the packaging waste into lithium-ion battery anodes.Lithium-ion batteries have two electrodes, a cathode and an anode. The anode harnesses the lithium ions (which are contained in an electrolyte solution) during recharging. Today most lithium-ion battery anodes are made of graphite, however the Purdue researchers have demonstrated a means for using packing peanuts to manufacture carbon-nanoparticle...
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Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk gave Roadster owners some good news this Christmas with further confirmation that a massive battery upgrade is on the way. Musk first mentioned the battery upgrade in an October interview, and hinted that more news would come this week. On Christmas Day, Musk sent out the following tweet: Roadster upgrade will enable non-stop travel from LA to SF -- almost 400 mile range. Details tmrw. Merry Christmas! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 25, 2014 According to Musk, a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco (which is roughly 382 miles, and would take you just under 6 hours to complete) would be completely possible with the upgraded Roadster. The current Roadster would...
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At first glance, Ford Motor Company and Samsung SDI may seem like an odd couple, but together they're working on a hybrid battery technology that could eventually be mass produced on non-hybrid vehicles for better fuel savings. The collaborative technology is part of a 10-year research effort and involves a dual-battery system that combines a lithium-ion battery with a 12-volt lead-acid battery. By combining the two, it could enable regenerative braking technology in non-hybrid vehicles for improved fuel efficiency, and could one day render traditional lead-acid batteries an obsolete technology. "We are currently expanding our Auto Start-Stop technology across 70 percent of our lineup, and this...
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Speaking of 3D printing, researchers at Harvard University have developed a 3D-printable battery that’s just 1mm wide; the tiny component will ostensibly be used to power computers and even robotic drones of commensurate size, from hearing aids to the (frankly, quite terrifying-sounding) Robobees that have also been developed at the university. The team built the tiny battery with a custom 3D printer and ink, according to Gigaom, with a nozzle that’s just 30 microns wide. As you can see in the brief video, the machine prints comb-like parts, using multiple layers of “nanoparticle-packed paste”; when two “combs” are interlocked, they form an electrode and can...
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Lithium-ion batteries have been powering our gadgets for more than 20 years and aren’t going away anytime soon, but serious competition may be emerging in the form of sodium and…sugar. Scientists at the Tokyo University of Science believe that sodium-sucrose-based batteries could deliver a 20% higher energy capacity than today’s lithium-ion batteries. As it turns out, heat-blasted sugar can convert to carbon powder, which can add storage capacity to a sodium-ion battery. Lithium can be found in several locations around the world (including Argentina and China), but major deposits are few. Sodium, on the other hand, is easy to come by and inexpensive. So, conceivably,...
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