UCLA trumpets supercapacitor for wearables or implants A hybrid supercapacitor out of UCLA has got the uni's boffins excited, since they claim they've achieved high energy density but in a thinner-than-paper package. In a paper published at PNAS (abstract), the researchers claim capacitance of more than 1,100 Farads per cubic centimetre – or around 1,145 Farads per gram, which is …
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Maybe this could be just the thing that microdrones (yes this is actually a real thing) need to take off.
Picture this, a whole army of these things which when the battery gets low seek out a convenient metal immobile object with the correct magnetic properties and "clamp on", extending their shielded solar panels mounted on the rotors to capture sunlight like a leaf.
Upon fully recharging they exchange information to each other like "Hi Drone 455, there is a nice landing point here" and any other useful information then apply current pulse directly to the magnet via resistive contacts to weaken the field enough to detach then resume their SAR/etc mission.
Also an advantage with microdrones is that if they are equipped with a hive mind they can cooperate on tasks such as linking together via magnetic (alternate) clamps and lifting large objects.
Sort of like foglets but on a larger scale.
What are the failure modes?
The more densely you store energy the nastier it is when it escapes, regardless of the technology. But it's even nastier if it escapes fast.
A lithium battery in your pocket can catch fire, and dump its energy in a few minutes.
A supercapacitor in your pocket can go FA-ZAPP!
Some strange response to an inventive idea. The DVD burner video is very interesting for the combination of high-accurate COTS, combined with "kitchen cabinet" chemistry.
It might be that failure modes are caused by the inhomogeneous way in which most deposition chemistries are achieved.
If batteries were made like CPUs, perhaps there would be fewer problems, but they would cost $$$$.
It would appear this sort of addresses the manufacturing consistency part of the process..
My $0.02.
P.
Toyota has ambitious plans for the future of its electric vehicles, and it's turning to a Tesla founder to make them happen.
The North American arm of the Japanese automaker has partnered with Redwood Materials to help it develop a battery supply chain that collects, recycles, refurbishes, and remanufactures EV batteries and their materials. Redwood was founded by Tesla co-founder and former CTO JB Straubel.
Redwood's work will start with testing and recycling Toyota batteries, spokesperson Alexis Georgeson said in a statement. "We will then expand into other areas including battery health screening and data management, remanufacturing, and battery material supply throughout North America."
A new type of silicon-anode lithium-ion battery could be the solution the EV market is waiting for, as it can apparently charge from empty to full in less than 10 minutes.
Designed and built by California-based Enovix, the battery also maintains 93 percent of its capacity past 1,000 charges and was minimally affected by six months of operation at elevated temperatures, the company claims. These are both key parts of the US Advanced Battery Consortium's (USABC) high-performance EV battery goals.
Per the USABC [PDF], a battery that can reach 80 percent charge in 15 minutes and handle at least 1,000 charging cycles can be called "advanced," and by that standard Enovix has accomplished goals that USABC considered mid- to long-term.
A totaled Tesla Model S burst into flames in a Sacramento junkyard earlier this month, causing a fire that took "a significant amount of time, water, and thinking outside the box to extinguish," firefighters said.
The vehicle was involved in a comparably unexplosive accident that sent it to the junkyard three weeks ago – it's unclear what caused the Tesla to explode nearly a month after being taken off the road. Like other electric vehicle fires, it was very difficult to extinguish.
"Crews knocked the fire down, but the car kept re-igniting and off-gassing in the battery compartment," the department said on Instagram.
Another day, another legal claim against Apple for deliberately throttling the performance of its iPhones to save battery power.
This latest case was brought by Justin Gutmann, who has asked the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to approve a collective action that could allow as many as 25 million Brits to claim compensation from the American technology giant. He claims the iGiant secretly degraded their smartphones' performance to make the battery power last longer.
Apple may therefore have to cough up an eye-popping £768 million ($927 million), Gutmann's lawyers estimated, Bloomberg first reported this week.
Growing demand for lithium for batteries means the sector will need $42 billion of investment to meet the anticipated level of orders by the end of the decade, according to a report.
Lithium is used in batteries that power smartphones and laptops, but there is also rising use in electric vehicles which is putting additional pressure on supplies.
The report, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, predicts that demand will reach 2.4 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent by 2030, roughly four times the 600,000 tons of lithium forecast to be produced this year.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center in the US is ditching its lead-acid uninterruptible power supply (UPS) batteries for more environmentally friendly rechargeables – though it's avoiding lithium-ion, and going with a new form of rechargeable alkaline.
Currently, the SDSC relies on a generator and UPS to provide emergency power. Because of environmental regulations in its home state of California, the SDSC has been unable to scale up the portion of its emergency power delivered by generators. The new batteries – half of which are already installed – will be a way to avoid running into that limitation.
Providing the 5,200 batteries, which replace 20,000 pounds of lead-acid, is Urban Electric Power (UEP). UEP's founder, Sanjoy Banerjee, developed the technology behind the batteries while a professor at City College of New York before spinning it off into a commercial proposition.
New techniques for producing lithium could play a vital part in making batteries for applications ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles that are more environmentally friendly than current methods of extraction.
According to a Reuters report, car makers, mining companies and investors including the US Energy Department are pouring money into direct lithium extraction (DLE) technologies that hold out the promise of boosting global lithium production, which is mostly sourced from just a handful of countries today.
There are a number of DLE technologies which all revolve around extracting the metal from brine in various ways, such as using filters, membranes, or ceramic beads. These are touted as more sustainable solutions than existing ways of obtaining lithium, such as pumping lithium-containing saltwater from underground lakes to the surface in desert areas of Chile or Argentina, and extracting it through evaporation in large basins.
Panasonic will invest ¥600 billion ($4.89 billion) in electronic vehicle (EV) batteries, hydrogen energy, workplace digitization and supply chain software in a strategy shift for the 104-year old Japanese multinational.
The money is slated for spending over three years from 2023 until 2025. Of the total amount, ¥400 billion ($3.2 billion) will go to "growth areas", like supply chain software and automotive batteries among others, and ¥200 billion ($1.6 billion) to "technology pillars," including hydrogen energy and cyber-physical systems.
CEO Yuki Kusumi said in an online news conference on Friday that Panasonic wants to improve battery cell performance and safety while cutting costs, and that mass production of 46mm-diameter EV batteries, otherwise known as 4680s, would start in FY24 at its Wakayama Factory in Japan.
On Call A Register reader finds the inevitable single point of failure after a call-out to the heart of darkness in this week's On Call.
Our story, from a reader we will call "Philip", takes us back to the 1990s. It was a heady time of hulking on-premises servers, demanding customers, and an in-house call center. "What could possibly go wrong?" he asked.
"Well, everything as it happens."
AMD's next-generation Ryzen 6000 microprocessors, announced at CES this week, should provide another option for the Intel faithful to rethink options when buying laptops.
The chip designer claims the new processors offer up to 24 hours of laptop battery life on video playback with a single charge, and double the graphics performance when compared to the predecessor Ryzen 5000.
Laptop makers have consistently claimed "all-day" battery life with x86 chips, but that's when measured based on general daily use of laptops and not an actual full day. AMD's 24-hour battery life claim, if it holds, could be a milestone for the x86 architecture, which isn't known to be as power-friendly as, say, Arm.
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