So Your Battery's Dead. Got 10 Minutes? NTT Docomo is developing a smart phone battery that can fully recharge in just 10 minutes. The major Japanese carrier (it has some 58 million Japanese customers) was showing off the device recently at CEATEC, an electronics exhibition in Japan, where a few reporters spotted it. Details on the device, which is still in prototype, were scarce, but we have enough to get the general picture. Currently the battery takes the form of an external sleeve–not altogether unlike a Mophie “juice pack”–and only works for the time being with an Android phone, NEC’s Medias (which, while currently Japanese-specific, is supposedly coming to the US, someday). How does NTT Docomo recharge the battery so quickly? Simply by cramming in more energy, faster. Everyone wants a faster-charging battery, of course, but NTT Docomo’s presentation raised as many questions as it answered.
The question NTT Docomo seeks to answer–how do we get a faster-charging battery? Device Keeps Power-Gobbling Gadgets in Check. Electronics and appliances waste a lot of energy when they’re plugged in but not being used. There’s even a term for all that waste—“vampire power.” A home entertainment center in standby mode, for example, can draw as much electricity as a refrigerator. A range of new devices offer to help you manage this problem. The latest is ThinkEco’s Modlet, a gizmo little bigger than a “wall wart”-style plug that packs enough brains to continuously monitor the energy usage of any device plugged into it. ThinkEco claims the Modlet can reduce a household’s overall energy consumption by 6 to 10 percent. Via an interface on a desktop computer or mobile device, a homeowner can shut off Modlet-connected devices and set on-off schedules for them. A Modlet communicates with a user’s computer wirelessly, through a USB dongle, doesn’t require a smart meter, and can operate independently of a computer.
New Battery Could Be Just What the Grid Ordered. Utilities need cheap, long-lasting ways to store the excess energy produced by power plants, especially as intermittent power from solar and wind farms is added to the mix. Unfortunately, the batteries available for grid-level storage are either too expensive or don’t last for the thousands of cycles needed to make them cost-effective. A new battery developed by Aquion Energy in Pittsburgh uses simple chemistry—a water-based electrolyte and abundant materials such as sodium and manganese—and is expected to cost $300 for a kilowatt-hour of storage capacity, less than a third of what it would cost to use lithium-ion batteries.
Third-party tests have shown that Aquion’s battery can last for over 5,000 charge-discharge cycles and has an efficiency of over 85 percent. The company has now received $30 million in venture capital to step up manufacturing of its sodium-ion batteries. Aquion’s battery uses an activated carbon anode and a sodium- and manganese-based cathode. Revolutionary conducting polymer enables silicon use as next generation of lithium-ion battery anodes.
Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere, in smart phones, laptops, an array of other consumer electronics, and the newest electric cars. Good as they are, they could be much better, especially when it comes to lowering the cost and extending the range of electric cars. To do that, batteries need to store a lot more energy. The anode is a critical component for storing energy in lithium-ion batteries. A team of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has designed a new kind of anode that can absorb eight times the lithium of current designs, and has maintained its greatly increased energy capacity after over a year of testing and many hundreds of charge-discharge cycles. The secret is a tailored polymer that conducts electricity and binds closely to lithium-storing silicon particles, even as they expand to more than three times their volume during charging and then shrink again during discharge.
High-capacity expansion. Apple Wins their Second Solar Power Patent This Year & More. Apple Wins their Second Solar Cell Related Patent in 2011 Apple has received a Granted Patent relating to power management circuitry and solar cells. It's Apple's second solar power related patent win this year. Apple's iPhone patents began to roll out in 2000 and the actual iPhone came to market in 2007. That same type of patience will be required to see integrated solar technology come to market. The good news is that serious work has already begun on this front. Evidence of this came via two Intel demos during last week's IDF in San Francisco. Otellini forecasted future platform power innovation reaching levels that are difficult to imagine today.
While it will be a few years down the road before this ever meaningfully reaches the market, a company by the name of Nanosolar, who is mentioned in Apple's patent, lists a number of tech companies already working to bring this technology to market: ARM, Cisco, HP, National Semiconductor, 3Com, BMW, Siemens and more. 1. Smartphone Battery Life Could Be Dramatically Improved in "Subconscious Mode" If your smartphone was allowed to be just barely awake, it could extend battery life by as much as 54 percent.
That's the claim of a research team at the University of Michigan that has invented a new "subconscious mode" for smartphones and other WiFi enabled mobile devices. Computer science and engineering professor Kang Shin and doctoral student Xinyu Zhang found that, even when devices are in a power-saving mode and not actively sending or receiving data, they're still actively listening for incoming information and spending energy looking for a clear channel of communication on busy networks. Phones in power-saving modes were found to be performing these functions up to 80 percent of the time. "This idle listening often consumes as much power as actively sending and receiving messages all day," says Shin.
How It Works Shin and his team developed a way for smartphones to listen more efficiently, called Energy-Minimizing Idle Listening, or E-MiLi. There's a catch though. Jelly batteries all set for cheaper and thinner gadgets. With the Ultrabook fad in full-swing, and smartphone makers always keen to stress just how skinny their new devices are, there becomes a point where the power being supplied is compromised because smaller batteries simply aren't up to the job.
But that's where a new polymer jelly developed by boffins at the University of Leeds comes into play. For not only is the jelly safer than the liquid electrolyte currently used in most lithium batteries, it will also mean more power at a fraction of a cost. "The polymer gel looks like a solid film, but it actually contains about 70 per cent liquid electrolyte," explained the study's lead author, Professor Ian Ward. Professor Peter Bruce from the University of St Andrews added: "Safety is of paramount importance in lithium batteries. Conventional lithium batteries use electrolytes based on organic liquids; this is what you see burning in pictures of lithium batteries that catch fire. Walking could power your next cell phone, researchers say. An "energy harvester" in a user's shoe could convert energy from walking into power for cell phones, researchers say. Researchers say energy from walking could power cell phones and other electronics An "energy harvester" would be in the user's shoe and capture heat Research by the University of Wisconsin-Madison was published this week (CNN) -- Will you be able to charge your next mobile phone simply by walking around?
A group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison hope so. In an article this week in the journal Nature Communications, they unveiled a technology that would harness part of the energy people generate when they walk and push it to a phone or other mobile device. "Humans, generally speaking, are very powerful energy-producing machines," Tom Krupenkin, a UW-Madison professor of mechanical engineering, said in a news release from the school. "While sprinting, a person can produce as much as a kilowatt of power.
" Rollphone Cell Phone Concept Brings A Revolution In The Cell Phone Industry. Conceptual designs are flooding the market and my job is to filter the best for you guys. So, I would like to present the “Rollphone” concept that makes your already modern and small cellphone even more compact without compromising on the multimedia functionalities of the gizmo. What’s more? This little devil works using a single custom AA-size battery ,thus it’s efficient on the power consumption criterion as well. This conceptual and pretty cool design has been put on the blogsphere by a Chinese designer called Tao Ma. Since every guy and girl out there knows how fast the cell phone industry has been advancing, new cell phone designs don’t come as much of a surprise. But, with this Rollphone concept, the cellphone industry is gonna surely witness some sort of a revolution.
Looking like a camera film, this cell phone is claimed to be the shortest ever made. Honestly, I would like this concept to materialize in a usable form as soon as possible, wouldn’t you?