Is there any other field of technology that promises as many revolutionary innovations as battery makers do yet delivers so few? We've heard of battery life being made
four times,
eight times, even
twelve times better... and seen pretty much none of it pan out in any sort of meaningful way. Zinc-air batteries are also
nothing new, but now some whizkids up in Norway have figured out how to make them rechargeable and set up an entire company, ReVolt, for their commercialization. With more than double the energy density of regular Lithium-Ion batteries, safer operation, lower cost of production, and environmentally friendlier ingredients, ReVolt's tech sounds as sweet as anything, but we'd advise waiting for the pudding-based proof before getting excited. Plans are for small hearing aid and cellphone batteries to show up in 2010, and if all goes well there, larger cells for electric vehicles could also follow. Sure.
[Via
PhysOrg]
posted Oct 30th 2009 6:58AM
"pudding-based proof" - awesome. Your writing alone is worth the read.
I don't know about that. The opening sentence has a pretty convoluted structure. The English-language precompiler in my brain was kicking out lots of "ambiguous reference found in line 1" warnings.
Heia Norge!
They would absolutely murder the market (in a good way), if they aimed this at smartphones. Especially if it didn't require any special hardware and worked with currently installed tech.
iDon't have a user-replaceable battery anyone?
/feeding the trolls.
The trolls are waiting for pudding proof too. Your snarky comments do nothing for their appetite.
There should be an X-prize contest for battery technology. Launching rockets and space tourism is all fine and dandy but this is one goal that would impact every industrialized nation dramatically. I personally buy into the conspiracy that Big Oil has bought much of this type of technology over the years and snuffed it out to keep money flowing into their pockets. The market for new, cheap and decent battery technology is tremendous...
Yeah, because if a company developed an awesome battery 'big oil' would buy these extremely valuable patents and then *do nothing with them*. Right. Seems likely.
I don't think there's a need for an X-Prize - the profit is prize enough.
Tim, give them a little credit. Their company name is Revolt.
Chevron owns the patents to large NiMH batteries, for the record.
I would personally like to see somebody invent an engine that runs on ambient energy and see what the oil companies would do.
There are many great ideas that are ready to be commercialized; it's navigating the minefield of patents that is slowing everything down.
how they be talking about going to market in 2010 before releasing prototypes?
"Prototypes of the new battery have been tested for more than a hundred (discharge/recharge) cycles, and are expected to last at least twice as long"
Blegh. They'll need to improve on that first.
Got a say this sounds most promising in a short term in the battery tech world i have heard.
Batteries in mobile/smartphones have been the same for ages while features have gone up there. N95-1 being good example in 2006 ;)
This is needed and i hope we actually see this soon rather than just talks about it like all the previous.
hahaha.... I also came in to just give a kudo for the phrase "pudding-based proof"....
... but too I would like to offer some defense of that industry by saying ... "eneloop"
A lack of recharge cycles won't matter much, if they become cheap and easily recyclable. As zinc-air batteries are.
ReVolting?
no
Revolt, revolting?! That is an awesome freaking name for the company. Kudos.
It is a horrible name. Just because you can make a pun, does not mean that you should. And it certainly doesn't mean you should use it as your corporate identity.
We hear you "glenn s".
Most battery tech never pans out for one simple reason, mass production, what can be made in the lab now might take 5+ years to translate into a mass production line due to the scale of what needs to be done.
LiFeC batteries for example require millions of short carbon nano tubes capped with an iron atom to act as the cathode, in the lab it took weeks to make a single cell, in mass production, no one has been able to get it to work.
Only problem is we're running out of easily accessible Zinc and it's mostly required for galvanising steel so I can see these getting very expensive in the future. Some estimates have put us running out of Zinc in as little as 30-35 years.
The simple solution to that is in approximately 32 years we'll start recycling it.
Thrilled school girl excitement for Apple products, but jaded disinterest in potentially real technological advancement? A significant shift in this field could have HUGE repercussions to the world economy and environment (well beyond how long our friggin smartphones last). I haven't heard of Zinc-air technology before, but I'm curious to learn more about it. In particular, how well it works in cold weather.
Zinc-Air batteries themselves are not new. They're commonly used in things like hearing aids. Besides the advantages of Zinc itself (cheap, relatively safe), these batteries have a low discharge curve. Their biggest drawback is a high self-discharge rate (once exposed to air).
This is the first I've heard of an electrically rechargeable Zinc-Air. Up until now the only solution was to replace the Zinc, like a fuel cell (which is kinda what a Zinc-Air battery is).
Re-Volt was the best game...I had hours of fun with it.
Oh the fun of creating your own cars and racing online with friends. Loved that game.
I'm specifically wondering what ever became of Stanford University's silicon nanowire batteries:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/19/stanfords-nanowire-battery-leapfrogs-li-ion/
Then, the Saudis steped in and gave the project a $10M grant:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-cui-040208.html
and I haven't heard a thing since...
I don't see exactly what you're implying but it sounds like you're blaming the lack of news on the saudi grant?
It's been little over a year since this article was published: http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-cui-040208.html
And, incase you haven't read it: "The grant will be spread over a period of five years."
"[He] is expected to spend between three weeks and three months per year on the KAUST campus in Thuwal, on the coast of the Red Sea, participating in the research and academic life of the institution. But the bulk of the research funded by Cui's KAUST grant will be conducted on the Stanford campus."
Now, not only does he not have the 10mil yet, even if he did he'd have to plan how to use it. He likely has other projects and this particular technology is probably still being developed by others, if not by the man himself.