By Mustafa Ziraba
7 September 2008
The biggest choke-point in technology is a single roadblock - batteries. Amidst all of the amazing advances in the last 50 years, battery technology has remained primarily unchanged, engineers incrementally squeezing out a few extra drops of power from old technology each year.
With better batteries, you wouldn't just be able to make it through the day with your Nokia on a single charge, but laptops and phones would run faster, electric cars would rule the roads. It'd be like a brand new world. There are like a million different kinds, but here's a rundown of the most common ones we're stuck with in gadgets for now, and their strengths and weaknesses.
Pretty much all batteries basically work the same way. Chemicals packed inside get their freak on and produce electrons, which build up on the negative end of the battery, essentially turning chemical energy into electrical energy. So when you too want to get your freak on by connecting a battery to a gadget, the electrons run through the gadget and back to the positive end of the battery, completing the circuit. The differences between various kinds of batteries come from the different chemical cocktails inside, which they're all named for.
Alkaline batteries are the traditional ones. One wonders what happened to Tigerhead? They powered your small radios for days and your Game Boy for 20 solid minutes. They are cheap and disposable. Energy density, the amount of power packed in the space, isn't bad, but with a demanding, high-powered gadget like an MP3 player or digital camera, they die quicker than milk that's just gotten a taste of salt or lemon. Many people have been confused when they insert batteries into their digital cameras only to get a low battery warning after one flash.
Nonetheless, with subtle power-hungry gear, they're decent enough, as years of use and abuse have probably told you - biting on them, hitting them, and yeah, hanging them in the sun to probably improve their electrical generation mojo. Biggest suck point still, as you former Game Boy owners know, is that they're not rechargeable.
Silver oxide or silver-zinc batteries pack a good bit of power inside and last a long time, so they're the most common batteries in watches and small toys, not to mention torpedoes and submarines, or other applications where performance matters more than cost. The downside is that the silver makes them expensive if they're bigger than the button size for gadgets. Oh, and the mercury leakage issue at the end of their life is kind of not "cool".
Lead-acid batteries have two major types including a starting battery, like the one in your kikumi, which is designed for short power jolts, and a deep-cycle battery, which delivers a lower, steadier power level, so it's used on boats, golf carts and backup power in various gadgets.
Nickel Cadmium, aka NiCads, are some of the first decent rechargeable batteries, and are still among the cheapest, so they were popular in toys and other gadgets. They recharge fairly quickly and will take a beating, but the memory effect (a recurring issue with rechargeables) is nasty with these.
If you try to recharge it without using all the energy up until it's dead, large crystals build up and limit how much power it'll pump out next time to a level of how much was used before you recharged it (like it "remembers"). Also, they'll leak out all their power after about 90 days, so you don't want to leave them on your shelf or in a charger for a long time.
Lithium ion aka Li-ion, set the gold standard in a gadget battery and are a major bump in energy efficiency and density from nickel-based batteries. While not suffering from the dreaded memory effect, on the other hand they're not as robust and have that whole infamous propensity for explosion (statistics are still very isolated here).
Another major issue with them is that if they're use too long and drop below a certain voltage, their energy capacity can be permanently lowered, so they're designed to shut off whatever they're plugged into after a certain point. Little advances allow researchers and scientists to squeeze modestly more power out of them every year. Basically, if you've got a gadget with a rechargeable, it's probably one of these.
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