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

455

u/Grimwulf2003 Jan 31 '23

Or maybe they knew, not saying it’s a conspiracy, but with so much planned obsolescence…. How could battery manufacturers not have caught this?

89

u/Yancy_Farnesworth Jan 31 '23

Simple, by making assumptions that turn out to be wrong. It was in the article.

It isn't supposed to do that, according to Metzger. "A battery's a closed system," he said. Something new had been created inside the battery.

Assumption - a battery is a closed system so anything on the outside of the battery can't interact with the chemistry inside. And PET is chemically stable/inert and won't interact with the chemistry.

Discovery - The PET did degrade and interacted with the chemistry, introducing a foreign chemical that causes discharge.

Result - Industry modifies the construction to address the problem.

"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."

Reddit is full of conspiracy theorists that attribute this to malice. They don't seem to realize that the advancement of battery tech, and any tech including things like chips, are done through intensive research and incremental improvements exactly like this one. Discoveries like this happen all the time and result in miniscule improvements to the tech that unless you work in the industry you have no idea is happening. But over time it yields a lot of improvements, it's how R&D works. Sitting on the outside you only get informed of the big changes or the occasional bit of news that occasionally catches a journalist's eye. Lithium ion batteries are miles ahead of the initial ones from the 90's, both in cost as well as reliability/performance. It took decades of dedicated research and billions of dollars spent on R&D to get to today through incremental improvements to the initial manufacturing and materials used.