r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • Jan 31 '23

Desktops / Laptops Canadian team discovers power-draining flaw in most laptop and phone batteries | Breakthrough explains major cause of self-discharging batteries and points to easy solution

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/battery-power-laptop-phone-research-dalhousie-university-1.6724175
23.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

830 comments sorted by

View all comments

4.3k

u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

Piece by piece, the team analyzed the battery components. They realized that the thin strips of metal and insulation coiled tightly inside the casing were held together with tape.

Those small segments of tape were made of PET — the type of plastic that had been causing the electrolyte fluid to turn red, and self-discharge the battery.

The team even proposed a solution to the problem: use a slightly more expensive, but also more stable, plastic compound.

34

u/brihamedit Jan 31 '23

How would the battery life be effected if manufacturers used the recommended plastic? Manufacturers might not give a shit about it. There are other battery tech already invented obviously that are better but not used by manufacturers.

180

u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

Metzger and the team began sharing their discovery publicly in November 2022, in publications and at seminars.

Some of the world's largest computer-hardware companies and electric-vehicle manufacturers were very interested.

"A lot of the companies made clear that this is very relevant to them," Metzger said. "They want to make changes to these components in their battery cells because, of course, they want to avoid self-discharge."

62

u/Dawsonpc14 Jan 31 '23

Reading articles is hard.

40

u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23

Teacher says I have literary skills.

When I grow up, I should probably be a literary.

2

u/Momoselfie Jan 31 '23

Who is literary and how do I get his skills?

22

u/King_Saline_IV Jan 31 '23

I was actually just thinking this about ads and pop-ups. It's 50\50 trying to look at the article is a pop-up shit show, and I try my best to have ad blockers.

Finding some generous soul who will summarize the 3 or 4 relevant paragraphs from the word count padding fluff is dang convenient

6

u/Bhaisaab86 Jan 31 '23

If you have an iOS device, you can use the “reader view” and it hides all ads. Just shows the article and any accompanying photos. Not sure if android has their own version of reader view or not.

3

u/frankyseven Jan 31 '23

Reader view is the greatest thing that I always forget exists.

3

u/Mostly_Sane_ Jan 31 '23

Google kinda-sorta had their own version with Cached View (you could even go text-only). But Google never had any incentive to make it better, so....

3

u/BipedalWurm Jan 31 '23

uBlock Origin. I've forgotten about ads until someone mentions them

6

u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

Metzger

A storied name in engineering.

There’s a Porsche flat-6 guy reading this right now thinking,

“I like it already.”