Hasta La Gadget!

With the number of gadgets and gizmos that are in our possession these days, it makes perfect sense that we always have one thing at the top of our minds at all times – that is, the battery life of our devices. This is even more glaring when we are talking about going traveling – the number of chargers that we need to pack, in addition to the right adapter (especially when one is heading off for a foreign country on a different continent altogether), could prove to be quite a headache. Not only that, newer devices come with better and faster functions, so much so that advancements made in battery technology keep up with just enough to last as long as its previous generation, as it caters to the new features.

How about the idea of spray painting your own batteries? This is where future batteries might be headed, as one is able to paint batteries onto standard bathroom tiles, steel, glass – and even a beer stein! This particular battery is made possible thanks to five separate layers, where each of them has its own recipe, and together they measure a mere 0.5mm thick – or should we say, thin?

In order to demonstrate this particular technique, the team behind the battery actually spayed the batteries onto steel, glass, ceramic tile and a beer stein. This breakthrough will definitely be of particular interest in industrial applications, since it is compatible with current spray-painting technology. Right now, the most common batteries comprise of negative and positive halves (the anode and the cathode), with a material in between to separate them, while “current collector” layers are located at the top and bottom to gather up the electric charges which move through.

Plenty of batteries are constructed in a geometry that is not too far off from that of a “Swiss roll” cross section, where layers are rolled up into a cylindrical or round-edged rectangular shape. Guess the spray on battery idea from Rice University in Texas, US, has paved open a new way to place batteries on just about any surface.

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[ Batteries of the future can be painted on copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Back in the 1920s, Thomas Edison’s dream of an electric automobile was ultimately foiled by those meddling petroleum engines. But thanks to nanotube research from Stanford University, one legacy from that era may regain some glory: nickel-iron batteries. It turns out that carbon nanotubes doped with nickel and iron crystals can top up the normally slow-charging cells in a matter of minutes — according to the scientists, that’s almost 1,000 times faster than in the past. Although the batteries couldn’t power your Volt or Prius due to a lack of energy density, they could give an extra jolt to their lithium-ion siblings for quicker starts and regenerative braking. The researchers are working on improving stability to allow more charging cycles, but it might be an extra in-your-face for Edison if it pans out.

Ubiquitous nanotubes could reboot Edison-era nickel-iron battery technology originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jun 2012 02:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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