Improved Li-Ion Battery Tech in the Works

I want one now to replace my T3 battery. I bet I could get 3 hours with one of these. :-)

With > density come greater weight. Surely it's not 3x in weight, but I wonder what the tradeoff is there?

Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com

The phrase "Energy Density" refers to Energy per Unit Volume, as opposed to the normal Density that refers to Mass per Unit Volume.

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

Fully discharging your lithium ion batteries frequently will seriously degrade their lifespan, especially if you fully discharge them in consecutive cycles. Fully discharing them occasionally won't really hurt them (much).

If you have a battery with a built-in charge monitor (most LiIon cells on the market really since the charging circuitry is always integrated in the cell itself and not the device that uses it), then the display of remaining power gets a little wonky over time. If you don't reset it once in a while, it starts to think that it's fully charged before it really is or starts to think that it's discharged further than it really is, both conditions effectively reduce how long your battery holds a charge (not really, but it appears that you're getting less juice the longer the problem persists, the cells are actually fine, it's just the control circuit that's confused).

There are several battery sites like the one above that go into detail about how to best prolong a lithium based battery (not just the cell, but the whole package). The problem is that, yes, this does slightly damage the cell when you discharge it once a month. But the damage from discharging it once a month is pretty minimal and won't amount to any noticable change in battery performance while not "recalibrating" the circuit will noticable reduce total operating time (this is especially apparent with iPods, and laptops. I've noticed it in some phones that I've owned but never in a Palm thankfully, since there really is no data-safe way to fully discharge a Palm).

This is something that most device and battery manufacturers try to avoid talking about, but dig around and you'll find battery maintenance documents hidden in the tech support sites of Apple, Dell, Nokia and a bunch of others (mostly to serve as disclaimers the next time some guy in NY wants to start publicly criticizing the iPod for having crappy batteries (which it doesn't, he just didn't know how to maintain them)).

Thanks Polack. I stand corrected!

-James.

"Hopefully the next gen PDAs can last for weeks on a single charge."

Palm have been making PDAs that last for weeks since 1996. It's only in the last few years that they decided that people didn't want devices with decent battery life any more. I think I'll skip a gen.

Brendan
Palm Vx

It's important to remember that in the last few years, we have seen the introduction of bluetooth, wifi, colour screens, vibration function and christ know what else. This new technology does come at a price and it will take battery technology a while to catch up.

Hmm, jackpipe, you may be right. The quote from the article says "These new materials allow rechargeable batteries to be manufactured that have three times the power of existing Lithium Ion batteries..." This technology may increase the power of the LiIon batteries, increasing the voltage and/or current output of the battery, but yet do nothing to the capacity of the battery. Say at the same voltage, the new battery can put out three times the current, thus three times the power (P=IV), but can only do so for one-third the time.

Now this statement was not a direct quote from one of the high egg-heads mentioned further down in the article, those who would know the difference between power, energy, work, charge, voltage, current, amperes, etc. A PR writer, who may have made a subtle mistake, may be written it.

Time to search the IEEE pages to see what they say about this.

You still have to dissipate that power somehow.

If the powered circuit's dissipation is the same, but a more powerful battery is connected to it, I see two options here: it burns up the circuit, or it takes longer to discharge the battery.

I know that's a basic explanation, but am I missing anything here?

_________________
Sean

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Wouldn't the amount of current being drawn affect the rate of power dissipation? If the circuit draws the same current as before, but the battery has more power to dissipate, wouldn't it theoretically last longer on a charge?

_________________
Sean

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

We are having a terminology problem.

In the electrical sense, Power is a measure of how much energy a device can deliver (or consume) per unit time. A 60-Watt light bulb consumes energy at a rate of 60 Watts. To know how much energy it will take to light the bulb for a period of time, we have to multiply by time.

The point of this thread was that this new technology may be increasing the power of the batteries, thus the rate energy can be taken out of the batteries; but may not be affecting the capacity, the amount of energy that can be stored in them. However, this is all based off of one line in the release, which may have been written by a PR person and not one of the research Engineers. A PR person may not have known the subtle difference between power and energy that an Engineer would know.