NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Battery 'Sponge' Made from Foam-Like Copper

The humble battery is crucial for technologies ranging from consumer electronics to electric vehicles. But for all of its necessity, it still has major limits. Batteries still take too long to charge, are full of toxic chemicals and typically last just a few hundred cycles. After that, it’s the landfill.

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The Prieto Battery Company wants to change that by building a battery that has a three-dimensional internal structure, allowing them to suck up energy faster and extend their lifetimes. The design is the brainchild of Amy Prieto, a chemistry professor at Colorado State University.

Ordinary batteries are made in layers: the part that provides positive charge, called a cathode, the negatively charged part, called the anode, and the electrolyte between them which is usually an acid. The electrolyte allows electrons to move between the cathode and anode. The layers are either flat, as in a phone battery, or rolled up, as in a AAA for the remote.

The problem is that this design only allows electrons -- the current -- to move from the side of the anode in contact with the electrolyte to the cathode. That provides fewer pathways for the electrons to move, and limits how many can do so, like cramming a crowd of people into a room and only opening the doors on one side. As a result the battery takes a while to charge and loses energy faster.

Prieto’s design does something different: the cathode and anode are like a sponge, with lots of holes. So instead of a solid block, the battery has loads of surface area inside. That allows the electrons to move more easily because they have more points of contact. In the room analogy, it's like opening up the exit doors on all four sides, allowing the people to leave faster.

The Prieto batteries are made with copper. The copper, which takes on a foam-like structure, is then coated with the negative electrode material. That in turn is coated with the electrolyte, which is a solid instead of a liquid. The leftover space is filled with the cathode, which is initially a kind of slurry that then hardens into place.

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The chemicals used are non-toxic -- one component is citric acid as opposed to stronger ones such as the sulfuric acid used in car batteries. The company says they can get it to charge quickly and do so thousands of times, though testing continues and it will be some time before a working version hits the streets.

Via Inhabitat, Prieto Battery

Credit: Prieto Youtube Screengrab

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Sweet! Batteries Made From Sugar

The standard battery for gadgets is lithium-ion, which stores a lot of energy for its weight. But lithium is a rare Earth element with most of the deposits located in Chile, Argentina, China and Australia. This is one reason the batteries in the average laptop are so expensive.

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Lowering the cost of batteries is one reason researchers have been exploring other materials. A team at the Tokyo University of Science, led by Shinichi Komaba, have been looking at sodium-based batteries, using sodium ions as the cathode (positive side) and carbon from ordinary sugar as the anode (negative side).

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To get the carbon from the sugar (sucrose), the scientists burned it in the absence of oxygen at a temperature of 1,800 to 2,700 degrees -- hot enough to melt cast iron at the upper end. That produces a hard black carbon powder of high quality. In this form, the sodium-sucrose battery stored 20 percent more energy than one made with conventional carbon.

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It will be some time before such a battery is commercialized, but if it's successful, it will mean that batteries can be made of materials that have essentially no supply problem. While lithium is recycled, it is only on a limited scale. Sodium, by contrast, is everywhere (including in table salt), as is sucrose.

One of the issues with sodium-based batteries is that they don't survive as many charge cycles as lithium-ion batteries do. Improving that will be the next step. Komaba told Diginfo.tv that it will likely be about five years before we see the first sodium batteries on the shelves. 

Credit: Corbis Images

Via The Register, Diginfo.tv

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Smart Cycles, Transparent Time, Other Disruptions

TechCrunch Disrupt SF, the annual conference held by that widely read tech-news blog in San Francisco, has become a weird, not-so-little circus.

It draws celebrities and politicos (model Jessica Alba and Newark, N.J., mayor Cory Booker each showed up to discuss their online ventures). It features interviews and panels that can be enlightening (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the company botched its mobile strategy by neglecting its apps) and enervating (TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington spent too much time asking Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff how awesome it was to be rich). It even has a soundtrack, an endlessly replayed loop of techno songs that continues to besiege my brain two days later.

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But Disrupt also serves as a useful stage for startups pitching themselves in the hope of earning extra publicity -- and a $50,000 prize to one company out of 30. (This year's winner, YourMechanic, promises house-call repairs for your car).

Some of these ventures look too oriented towards the kind of people who attend Disrupt -- for instance, an app that filters what people say on all of your other social networks. But others featured clever uses of technology to iron out inefficiencies, tell us more about ourselves and save us time. These five seemed particularly interesting.

Lit Motors

This San Francisco firm showed off its C1, an enclosed electric motorcycle whose steering wheel, sunroof and airbags make it more of a two-wheeled car. Like a Segway, it balances itself automatically with a set of gyroscopes; kickstand-style landing gear deploy when you park it. It will run for 200 miles on a charge, the company says, and should recharge in six hours on a standard outlet. But at a projected price of $19,000 in 2014, it would be an expensive way to streamline a commute.

Chronos

This iPhone app aims to provide "time transparency" by tracking where you spend your day and how long you spend at those places. It uses Foursquare's database to decide which places represent work or play and noting when you're near friends who are also using the app. Think of this service as a FitBit for your calendar instead of your calories, providing quantified data in convenient charts that you can use to improve your life -- say, by realizing you spend too much time at the gym and not enough with your kids or significant other.

MindMeld

Expect Labs' free iPad videoconferencing app listens to a conversation for keywords and then presents relevant search results--for instance, if somebody cites the iPhone 5's introduction, the program starts pulling up stories about it. The idea here is to minimize time spent on calls doing frantic Google searches to figure what somebody else just mentioned; that seems like a worthy goal.

PayTap

Consider this a sign of crummy economic times: PayTap allows friends and family to team up easily and securely to pay somebody else's bills without having to send checks back and forth, collect cash, share credit-card numbers or take turns covering the entire tab. The Dallas company charges $1 for each group payment, which beats PayPal's fees in some cases but not others.

Spinlister

Your bicycle spends much of the time sitting idle, so why not make a little money by renting it out, much as you might rent a spare room on Airbnb? This Facebook-linked service lets cyclists in New York and San Francisco do that, allowing renters to choose bikes by size and type (and, in the bargain, illustrating yet another way that technology can make transportation more efficient). Rates can go from $5 to $130 a day, with insurance included for bike owners; the site collects 25 percent of the proceeds.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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Apple's iPhone 5: The Price of Thin

There is a new iPhone, it's called the iPhone 5, it has a larger screen and it supports 4G LTE wireless broadband. That much you should have guessed.

But the smartphone Apple introduced today (available Sept. 21 on AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless for $199 and up on a two-year contract) brings less obvious changes worth discussing.

Most important among them: battery life, cited by Apple as eight hours of continuous Web browsing over LTE (Long Term Evolution). The Cupertino, Calif., company cites just six hours of 3G browsing on last year's iPhone 4S -- making this the first time I can remember battery life improving with an upgrade from 3G to LTE.

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Manufacturers of LTE Android phones that struggle to survive a day on a charge should be embarrassed by that.

Apple also thought differently (if you will) with the iPhone 5's larger screen. Instead of expanding it in every dimension -- something Android vendors have been taking to extremes in devices such as Samsung's Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note II -- Apple built up rather than out. That is, the iPhone 5's 4-inch, 1136 by 640 pixel display is taller but no wider than the 3.5-in. screens on older iPhones.

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Apps not updated for these changed proportions will appear in letterboxed form; I expect that to be a temporary and swiftly fixed inconvenience. But I don't know that reading will ever feel much different with the phone held upright.

The iPhone 5's camera has the same 8-megapixel resolution as the one on the iPhone 4S, but Apple touts updated hardware and software that allow for quicker shots and better quality in low-light situations. Phone cameras have historically been awful in those aspects.

It also includes an instant-panorama mode that catches up to what Android phones have included for a while. Apple forgot to credit its competition for any inspiration.

The iPhone 5's designers somehow also made this device thinner and lighter than the 4S: about .3 inches thick, .07 thinner than its predecessor and just under 4 ounces, or about an ounce less than before.

But to pull off that triumph of miniaturization, Apple took a scalpel to compatibility.

The iPhone 5's new "Lightning" dock connector is, Apple says, "more durable" and works even if you plug it in upside down. But it doesn't work with the enormous universe of old cables, accessories, speakers and car kits without a $29 adapter that doesn't come in the box. If Apple was going to make that kind of switch, couldn't it have adopted the micro-USB standard everybody else uses?

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On the inside, the iPhone 5 uses a "nano-SIM" card instead of the micro-SIM of the 4 and 4S. This makes the new model incompatible with existing SIM cards -- all to save about .0037 cubic inches of space. That fact seems to have gone unmentioned in Apple's keynote (which went on to feature a badly needed refresh of its bloated iTunes application and a new line of iPods).

One more thing didn't get much attention in Apple's keynote, but maybe the company doesn't feel the need to brag about this anymore. With its history of consistent software updates for older iPhones -- most will get the new model's iOS 6 software on Sept. 19 -- Apple has given iPhone 5 buyers confidence that they, too, will be supported for years to come.

Android vendors have left their users with no such assurance. They should end their sorry habit of abandoning older phones before they race to make new ones any thinner.

Credit: Image via Apple PR

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Power Cell Gets A Charge From Pressure

Energy from motion is all around us -- in the tides, in wind, when we walk, when we drive and even the vibrations from ambient sounds. A research team at Georgia Tech has taken a step towards making that energy useful.

A group led by materials science professor Zhong Lin Wang has built a power cell that recharges when it's compressed or deformed. Current versions are small, producing only a few hundred millivolts, but a larger one could supplement or even a replace batteries in electronic devices.

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The power cell is made of a cathode and anode. The cathode is lithium-cobalt-oxide (LiCoO2) and the anode is titanium dioxide (TiO2). The anode is made up of tiny nanometer-sized tubes grown on a titanium film. The anode and cathode are separated by a membrane made from polyvinylidene fluoride film, also known as PVDF.

PVDF is a piezoelectric material, the kind that generates a charge whenever it is put under a mechanical strain such as compression, stretching or bending. The charge generated by the stress drives lithium ions from the cathode to the anode. The lithium ions form lithium-titanium oxide, and store the energy. Release the stress and the electric field disappears -- but the lithium ions stay in the anode.

Connecting an electrical circuit to the cathode and anode causes the lithium ions to flow back to the cathode until the cycle is repeated.

Pressing on the cell more than two times per second produced up to 395 millivolts in four minutes. That's close to the frequency at which human steps hit the ground during a walk.

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The device was then discharged with a current of one milliamp for about two minutes. Wang's team estimated the power cell held about 0.036 milliamp-hours. That's small -- a typical lithium-ion battery holds four orders of magnitude more. But it shows that this kind of technology works. The big barrier to more efficiency is the metal casing of the cell, because it doesn't transmit all the mechanical energy from pressing on it.

The research was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has a real interest in powering mobile devices for the military without the need for generators to charge them.

Credit: Gary Meek / Georgia Tech

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Your Knees Could Power Mobile Devices

Walking could soon power mobile devices: a group of British researchers has created an energy harvester that generates electricity thanks to the motion of your knees. The device could eliminate the need for carrying batteries, an advantage especially important for the military, where 22 pounds of a soldier's backpack is made up of batteries alone.

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The device fits on the outside of the knee. It consists of an outer ring and central hub. The ring rotates as the knee joint goes through a walking motion. The outer ring has 72 guitar-pick-like teeth that "pluck" four energy-generating arms attached to the inner hub. As each tooth deflects off one of the arms it causes it to vibrate, like a guitar string, generating the electrical energy.

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The "strings" are made of a piezoelectric material, which generates current when it's under strain. Piezoelectric materials are common in many electronics, especially sonar and microphones. They are also part of the sparkers used to light gas stoves.

The energy harvester picks generate about two milliwatts. That isn't enough to be much use, but the researchers think that with a few improvements it could get to 30 milliwatts. That's enough for some types of GPS tracking, though it's only a small fraction of the watt or so an iPhone uses when idle.

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The harveseter was tested with a simulated knee that reproduced the way a human walks. A person was fitted with reflective markers and a motion capture system was used to record the patterns of movement both without a load and with one -- a backpack, in this case. Three different weights were used to see what the knees motions were like and how much energy they generated.   

The device will be presented June 15 in the journal Smart Materials and Structures by researchers from Cranfield University, The University of Liverpool and University of Salford.

The lead author of the study, Dr Michele Pozzi, estimated the cost of each unit at about $15 each, once they are mass-produced.

Credit: Philip and Karen Smith / Getty Images

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LED Handlebars Illuminate Bike Safety

When it comes to bike safety, there is no shortage of illuminating reflectors, clamp lights and frame lights to make night riding less of a dark peddle down the road of hazard.

Yet the newest addition to hop on that saddle entirely does away with the need for fastening anything to your bike. Instead, Mitchell Silva has created GLOBARS and they perform just like they sound. They're handlebars integrated with LED lights.

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"My idea was to create a bicycle light that could be easily used, and offer the same user friendliness of integrated bicycle lights, while remaining at a significantly lower price point," Silva wrote on his website.

For his prototype, Silva cut long strips out of the bars and installed plastic tubing on the inside to keep them rigid.

"I then installed approximately 40 high-efficiency LED bulbs into the inner plastic tubing, and installed a momentary actuator button on the back of the bars," Silva explained. "The whole system runs off a watch battery."

Silva envisions his GLOBARS benefiting those who face the most danger: urban cyclists. In 2009, 630 cyclists were killed in the United States alone and 51,000 were injured. Of those accidents, 70 percent occurred in urban areas.

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Besides their safety attributes, GLOBARS are super bright and, not to mention, really cool-looking. And who wouldn't want to ride around the city streets at night gripping a pair of glowing-bull-horn handlebars?

via Coroflot

Credit: Mitchell Silva

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Battery Made From Boozy Byproducts

Besides the smell, paper production creates a byproduct called "brown liquor." Although this thick substance is often reused by mills as a fuel source, Swedish electronics experts recently used it to create a new inexpensive battery cathode they say is a better alternative to precious or rare metals.

Most cathodes are made from metals, including rare ones, that drive up the cost for the whole battery. If we want more solar and wind power, we need a cheaper and more environmentally sound way to store it. Olle Inganas, a biomolecular and organics professor from Linkoping University, along with Polish researcher Grzegorz Milczarek of Poznan University of Technology, think they have a solution.

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"Nature solved the problem long ago, Inganas said in a university article about the cathode.

The researchers say they were inspired by the way chemically active molecules called "quinones" transport electrons during photosynthesis. They settled on starting with brown liquor because it contains lignins rich in organic compounds that can be converted to quinones.

To create their cathode, Inganas and Milczarek took lignin derivatives from the brown liquor and combined them with a conductive polymer called "polypyrrole." Together, the materials make for a cathode that's both conductive and can hold a charge. Their paper was published today in the journal Science.

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The new cathode does have disadvantages, though. The most significant is that the battery slowly releases its charge when idle, losing it all within hours. The researchers did find that lignin derivatives performed differently depending on how they were produced. Now the plan is to work on optimizing the batteries by trying out different derivatives.

If -- and it's a big "if" -- they succeed, brown liquor could very well turn into battery gold.

Photo: Brown liquor waste from paper pulping. Credit: Keith Weller, USDA Agricultural Research Service.

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The Only 'iPad 3' Story You Need To Read

I have no sources inside Apple. I haven't found prototype hardware left in bars. I haven't read past the first paragraph of recent rumor stories. But I still think I have a good idea of what will be in the next iPad.

And you should too, if you've kept up with Apple and the gadget industry.

The latest round of next-iPad speculation kicked off with a post on the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD site predicting an introduction in the first week in March. Follow-up coverage pointed to a March 7 date, and then a WSJ piece Tuesday reported that a new iPad would run on AT&T and Verizon's 4G LTE networks.

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That timing, however, should surprise nobody. Over the past few years, Apple has updated its mobile devices about once a year (aside from the iPhone 4S's delayed arrival in October). The first iPad reached stores in April of 2010 and its successor shipped in March of 2011, so a March unveiling for an "iPad 3" would be right on schedule.

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LTE support would be more of a surprise, considering how it's cut into battery life on the phones I've tried -- and how little difference it can make in everyday use. Maybe Apple has added enough battery capacity on the next iPad to compensate for that. Or maybe this new iPad 3 has the unified, LTE-plus-3G circuitry that people have been waiting for -- in which case you can bet that the next iPhone will also support LTE.

(Either way, my advice would be to save money and get a Wi-Fi-only iPad unless you spend serious time on the road.)

What else to expect? Siri voice input should be the most obvious addition: With Apple's history of moving features from its phones to its tablets, you don't need to ask a computerized virtual assistant to figure this one out.

Likewise, the front and back cameras could and should get sharper, especially considering the iPad 2's subpar photographic capabilities.

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Even before the iPad 2's arrival, people predicted a high-resolution equivalent of the iPhone 4's "Retina Display." I could see that happening now, but I could also see it going largely overlooked by users, aside from making photos and e-books look spiffier.

A faster processor? Sure, and you might as well pencil in some new games or multimedia apps that require the speedier chip. You should expect more storage too: The ever-cheaper price of the flash memory used in the iPad and other mobile devices all but compels that.

Maybe the next iPad will be thinner, but there's not much left to whittle away. The current design is barely thicker than Apple's proprietary connector.

But many other suggested next-iPad features -- from big shifts like a smaller model to compete with Amazon's Kindle Fire to smaller improvements along the lines of an SD Card slot, a standard micro-USB port or a Near Field Communication chip -- don't seem possible. That's just not how Apple rolls. It won't ship a product that fulfills enthusiasts' bullet-point wish lists or radically redo a gadget that had a major update last year.

Instead, expect a new iPad with enough changes to make owners of the original version want to upgrade, but not so many that recent iPad 2 buyers want to throw their tablets -- or themselves -- off a bridge.

Credit: Rob Pegoraro/Discovery

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'Battery Parfait' Made from Molten Metal

Sun and wind are not constant. So, if we're going to harness energy from them, we need a way to store the power for use when it's needed. Batteries are the way to do it, but a big question in the power industry is how to build a battery that's efficient enough and stores enough power to be useful.

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At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professor of materials chemistry Donald Sadoway and David Bradwell are investigating batteries made from molten metal.

The molten battery design uses liquids of different densities (think of how oil and water separate) to work as the anode, cathode and electrolyte. Magnesium, for example, is used for the anode on top, in the middle there is a mixture of salt and magnesium chloride that serves as the electrolyte and at the bottom, there's antimony, which acts at the cathode. It a battery parfait, really, that's about the size of a shot glass. The whole thing is heated to 700 degrees Celsius, or about 1,292 degrees Fahrenheit.

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At that temperature, the magnesium atoms lose two electrons, becoming magnesium ions that sink through the electrolyte to the antimony at the bottom. The electrons are captured and sent along a circuit to the outside, where they'll provide power.

Recharging is done the same way as ordinary batteries: hook up a source of current to the positive electrode and the magnesium migrates out of the antimony and back to the top of the cell.

Such high-temperature electrochemistry is already done in the aluminum smelting industry, so scaling the size of these batteries up for use by a power utility is doable. Sadoway's team think they can scale up their version to a six-inch battery.

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The big challenge will be keeping the batteries hot enough and reducing the temperature at which they operate, so as to make them efficient enough for industrial use. Corrosion is also something that needs to be addressed, since one component is molten salts.

Then there's costs. One reason the team chose magnesium is that it is cheap and abundant. Any large-scale version can't depend on anything too exotic, or elements that need special handling.

That said, Sadoway and Bradwell have formed a company to commercialize the technology, so there may come a day when giant battery cells full of liquid metal are helping deliver power to the grid.

Image: JAPACK/amanaimagesRF/amanaimages/Corbis

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