Building Better Batteries

For close to 100 years inventors have been trying to put zinc into a rechargeable dell inspiron e1705 battery,dell latitude d410 battery. Thomas Edison tried and failed to tame the feisty electrode. In recent decades dozens of companies have run into electrochemical and commercial roadblocks.

PowerGenix of San Diego has achieved some initial success. In December it began selling its AA rechargeable nickel-zinc batteries in Ritz Camera stores. It now has agreements to deliver $70 million worth of its batteries over the next three years to makers of power tools, garden tools and electric scooters and bicycles; shipping starts this fall. The attraction: Zinc is plentiful, nontoxic, recyclable and enables production of batteries with a high rate of discharge.

Among the key determinants of dell latitude d420 battery,dell latitude d430 battery success are cost and weight per watt-hour stored. Zinc’s metrics: 40 cents, 17 grams. That compares with 48 cents, 25 grams for the older nickel-cadmium, and 70 cents, 9 grams for the newer lithium-ion chemistry, which is rapidly gaining ground in the power tool market and already pretty much owns the laptop and cell phone business.

Zinc’s lower cost and high discharge give it a shot at the power tool market, says PowerGenix Chief Executive Daniel Squiller, who previously ran the power supplies and battery unit, a U.K. controls and automation company. Prices are still relatively high: a four-pack of nickel-zinc AAs (storing 10.4 watt-hours) with a charger sells for $40, 20% more than a comparable nickel-metal-hydride set at Ritz. For power tools PowerGenix expects to charge less than makers of nickel-metal-hydride batteries.

PowerGenix is still a pip-squeak, having raised only $61 million from venture capitalists and praying for revenue of $10 million this year. But Squiller’s ambitions are big. There could be room for nickel-zinc in household electronics and toys as well as in drills and hedge trimmers. Nickel-cadmium, a common rechargeable dell latitude d500 battery,dell latitude d505 battery  for consumer products, is being legislated out of existence in certain European countries because cadmium is a toxic heavy metal that contaminates the environment. Last year retailer Toys “R” Us and manufacturer  swore off nickel-cadmium in toys they make.

Seeing the coming death of nickel-cadmium, PowerGenix designed its manufacturing process to work with minor adjustments on existing nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal-hydride production lines. PowerGenix is outsourcing production to a Chinese company.

How PowerGenix solved the longtime challenge of getting zinc to recharge is a tale of insight and persistence. Rechargeable batteries use positive and negative electrodes that oxidize and dissolve to varying degrees when the dell latitude d510 battery,dell latitude d520 battery  is in use or recharging and then go back to their original states. Those who tried using zinc as a negative electrode found it tended to drift around during discharge and not return to its original location during recharge, quickly rendering the battery useless.

PowerGenix solved the problem over two years by using an electrolyte–the electrically conductive material in the battery–made with a small amount of phosphate. The phosphate limits the zinc’s solubility so the battery can recharge. PowerGenix chemists also found they could retard the faster corrosion rate of the higher-voltage zinc batteries by using purified zinc.

AMD News: Notebook Battery Life Claims are Bogus

AMD isn’t happy with the way some dell inspiron e1405 battery,dell inspiron e1505 battery claims are made, saying the reliance on a test called MobileMark 2007 doesn’t yield an accurate indicator of what to expect.

 The problem, says Patrick Moorhead, a vice president for marketing at AMD, is that the parameters for the test include dimming the screen the just 20 percent brightness, turning off WiFi, and making sure no music, video, games, or webpages are running. Not only is the test flawed, says Moorhead, but it also favors Intel.

“Intel is advantaged in this environment because they have optimized their architecture to have bettery battery life when the computer isn’t doing anything,” Moorhead said.

Intel shrugged off AMD’s complaint, saying if the No. 2 chip maker is so passionate about the subject, it would “encourage them to bring any new proposals or edits to the nonprofit industry dell inspiron e1705 battery,dell latitude d410 battery consortium called BAPCo.”

But is AMD out of line? Not likely. In the June issue of Maximum PC, Editor-in-Chief Will Smith discussed the topic in his Ed Word titled “Notebook Battery Life is a Trap.”

“You’d think testing battery life would be straightforward, but benchmark results rarely jibe with real-world results — in part, because there are an infinite number of potential workloads (each tapping power differently), and   battery life decays over time,” Smith wrote.

AMD warns that either the industry dell latitude d420 battery,dell latitude d430 battery starts better regulating itself, or there’s a high possibility of a consumer filing a lawsuit or the FTC stepping in.