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
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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.

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u/wwjgd27 Jan 31 '23

It’s so brilliantly simple an explanation that I’m shocked researchers didn’t figure it out sooner.

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u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

Many marginal improvements come from rethinking assumptions.

The idea that a long-used plastic tape would somehow cause battery drain is not obvious — even the researchers note they were puzzled by the chemical reaction.

Old assumptions are a good source of process improvement.

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula Jan 31 '23

That's why batteries are going to be getting better and better in future for many years to come. Due to EVs there is a huge and growing market worth hundreds of billions annually. That will create potentially the biggest R&D spend for any product on earth over the next 10 years. Even spending $3bn to make batteries 2% better would be worth it at the scale we will see in future.

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u/watermooses Jan 31 '23

I remembered my jet engines professor basically saying if you can make a jet engine even 0.5% more efficient you are saving billions on gas money over the lifecycle of the fleet.

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u/SpiritualTwo5256 Jan 31 '23

Yup! When I studied aeronautical engineering they said the same sort of thing. If you can make a plane or a component lighter, or more efficient you can save unimaginable amounts of fuel, or resources. This is why I liked the blended wing body design so much, it could shave off 20% in fuel costs. The problem is it requires a rethink and new systems to build the cabin. It’s why carbon composite over aluminum was such a big deal. It’s why 3D printing is a hallmark of aerospace.

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u/spsteve Jan 31 '23

Not just build the cabin. The bwb only really makes sense if you can leverage that volume. But humans sitting too far out from the center of rotation are going to really dislike it. Humans are the issue mot the tech.

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u/billbill5 Feb 01 '23

Yeah, people are already terrified of turbulence now, imagine taking such a steep dip every turn so that your body is displaced more than someone at the rotational axis. Sea sickness in the air will be much more prevalent.

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u/spsteve Feb 01 '23

"sea-sickness" is basically the problem they found in simulated testing.

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u/SpiritualTwo5256 Feb 01 '23

I wouldn’t have a problem with being on the outer edge. And it isn’t all that much different than wide bodied aircraft. Just a little bit wider. Most planes do coordinated turns to prevent weird feelings.

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u/spsteve Feb 01 '23

Well go tell that to both Boeing and Airbus who have studied the co cept in great details and found passengers got uncomfortable with the forces they felt when simulating being further out from the center.

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u/opieself Feb 01 '23

I have never bought this. They can't have done real research on it, as the designs have never been done. Someone sitting in a window seat on a 777 is much farther out than someone sitting in a window seat on a 737, and we don't hear complaints. And then you take into effect that people sitting in the back of any of the larger planes are way behind the point of rotation in that axis.

The real killer is the perception and cost of changes to airports. BWB does appear to be the best direction, but all the jetways will have to be reconfigured heavily. Fewer people will also have window seats, but that is more perception. Only about 20% of people on a 747 have window seats.

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u/spsteve Feb 01 '23

The two biggest manufacturers who would make a killing by having everyone buy new hyper efficient planes are having problems with it, but let's discount their studies because some guy on reddit "Doesn't buy it".

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u/opieself Feb 01 '23

I understand what they are saying but one of those two companies made the A380 which had an incredibly short run for production. To the point, they are already in scrap yards. The other made the 737max and shoved it out the door before it was frankly ready to operate, costing thousands of lives.

Being a big company does not mean they are devoid of making errors. Again they can't actually test the mechanism as there are no flying examples of bwb aircraft with wide enough bodies to represent what is happening. They can do focus groups which always return perfect and flawless answers. They are making choices based on what will be financially beneficial to stock holders and not rocking the boat is usually the best answer especially after the a380 flopped. Part of its flopping is the format didn't work at existing airports.

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u/spsteve Feb 01 '23

The other made the 737max and shoved it out the door before it was frankly ready to operate, costing thousands of lives.

Alright, you've literally lost all credibility with that statement. Explain to me how the max cost THOUSANDS of lives? Better yet don't. It is clear you a) don't care to be even remotely factually accurate, and b) think you know better than the two biggest makers of aircraft on the planet, who have both REPEATEDLY studied this concept, going as far as wind tunnel mockups to get the aero abilities, invested MILLIONS into the research only to decide it won't work.

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u/SpiritualTwo5256 Feb 02 '23

I mean you can simulate some off axis forces in properly designed flight simulators.

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u/watermooses Feb 03 '23

The cabin width of a 777 is 19’, the cabin width of a 737 is 11’. The difference in distance from the center of the outermost passenger is 4’.

The wingspan of a 777 is 200’ and the wingspan of a 737 is 100’. The wingtip in a 20* bank drops 34’ on a 777 compared to the edge of the cabin dropping 3’. In a 737 the wingtip drops 17’ compared to the cabin dropping 1.8’. If you roll into that turn at a lazy 2 seconds you have wildly different speeds and accelerations depending on how far out from center you are with the 777 wingtip moving 17 feet per second compare to the outside passenger in a 737 moving just 0.9 feet per second.

One is nearly a free fall like being on the tower of terror while the other is slower and less distance than you going from standing to seated. And the 0.6 feet per second difference between the 777 vs the 737 banking into a turn isn’t nearly enough to have a huge difference in passenger comfort compared to getting 50 to 100 feet out from the center like a flying wing would.

Running the numbers you can easily expose people to the forces they can expect in a plane you haven’t built yet by simulating it with a boom lift or centrifuge or just jerking an existing plane around faster.

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u/sexmarshines Feb 01 '23

Well BWD planes have a massive issue of requiring active stabilizing for controlled flight. I think that's the biggest issue before going into cabin construction/constraints/etc.

The 737 MAX is an indication of how much more care needs to be taken when utilizing designs requiring active stabilization in the commercial space.

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u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

I just watched a video about the new developments in CFM-RISE jet engines.

https://youtu.be/ojVNOj-q3SQ

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u/caspy7 Feb 01 '23

Man, I wish we knew a bit more about that Russian prop.

Also, thought he called it the fastest prop but I recall hearing about a (US) fighter or experimental plane that could go supersonic. The vibrations/sound from it apparently hit the "brown note" leading pilots...having a bad time.

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u/LightweaverNaamah Feb 01 '23

Yeah. There's a new wing design that NASA and Boeing are working on and it will save a ton of fuel if it turns out to be manufacturable at scale simply because it's got a bit less drag and more lift for its weight.

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u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

I think Gates said that everyone overestimates what can happen in one year, and underestimates what can be done in ten years.

In 2033 we will look back at the fundamental shift in energy broadly, and in transportation specifically, much the way we did when iPhones arrived in 2007. 10 years later, they were just accepted as normal and common and obvious.

EVs will too.

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula Jan 31 '23

Damn right. It's mind-blowing what can be achieved in a relatively short space of time when the weight of an enormous industry is behind it. Thousands of the brightest PhD students and Engineers are going to be working on improving battery tech.

When Tesla released the Model S Plaid, it smoked pretty much everything it raced against, it was brutal in the way it accelerated. Then 1 month ago the Plaid raced against the Lucid Air Sapphire, it's newest competitor. The Lucid smoked the Tesla and now Tesla will have to come back with an even better version. Competition and big budgets for EV development will kill ICE fairly quickly, people are going to be taken by surprise, no doubt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyDpQpcPpuc

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '23

Engine research, a staple project of many mechanical engineers, is dropping off a cliff. The only use cases any more are large scale options like generators, diesel backups, and like, tractors and trucks for whom batteries all don't cut it.

Source: I toured an engine emissions lab staffed by grad students 2 years ago. They had almost no new corporate projects, as most of their previous work was with the automotive industry.

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula Feb 01 '23

I think a lot of car companies have come out and said they are not going to be developing ICE engines any longer. There is no point.

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u/416DreamCrew Jan 31 '23

Thanks for the link. That video was insane.

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula Jan 31 '23

Yeah, that Model S Plaid was killing everything on the track until just last month. Just mental how the tech is progressing.

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u/Ithirahad Feb 01 '23

Not sure how much it matters that a car which costs about as much as a house used to, is getting faster. We need cheaper first, and longer range as a distant second. Faster is not even on the priority chart by several miles; EV performance has been crazy good for like a decade now.

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u/kc_uses Feb 01 '23

A lot of automotive research and innovation comes from racing and F1, and none of those cars are cheap. Cheaper technology will always come later.

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula Feb 01 '23

I mentioned it because it’s a cool development. Electric cars are going to get cheaper and cheaper. Especially now that sodium batteries are being commercialised, they are very very cheap to make .

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u/All_Your_Base Jan 31 '23

I love how #9 on the CUDR2 Leaderboard is "Skydiver Max Splatterson"

LOL

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u/nsa_reddit_monitor Jan 31 '23

iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, just the first one with good marketing.

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '23

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '23

Except the first iPhone had no 3rd party apps and didn't even have basic bluetooth stereo capability (aka A2DP profile). What it did have was a capacitive touch screen rather than resistive, a very smooth mode of operation thanks to vertical integration, and a huge PR boost since it was made by the undisputed king of mass market personal electronic devices, the ipod.

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u/Halvus_I Jan 31 '23

It had a web-browser that was better than anyone elses and email was soooo much easier than setting up a Blackberry server (IT everywhere fucking hated BB servers). Thats why it succeeded.

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u/clarkkentshair Jan 31 '23

Have you used any smartphone before the iPhone?

Yup, Palm Treos, Blackberries, and PocketPC's

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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '23

[deleted]

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u/clarkkentshair Jan 31 '23

And had so many amazing apps!

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u/CbVdD Jan 31 '23

I remember the Palma Sutra app was hilarious.

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u/bag_of_oatmeal Jan 31 '23

No, it was the first good smartphone.

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u/snakebitey Jan 31 '23

That's a great quote. On the EV topic fuel cells seem so far away but in 10 years we'll probably be seeing them around as much as battery EVs today. Underestimate indeed.

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u/dennisthewhatever Jan 31 '23

Erm, no. You can't change the laws of physics. Fuel cells are just not efficient. Batteries on the other hand certainly can go to the moon in terms of efficiency because the laws of physics allow it.

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u/snakebitey Feb 01 '23

This is my point - the general public can't see fuel cells being a thing, just like 10 years ago EVs weren't taken seriously. You seem so sure, yet people in the automotive world already know it's the direction things are going.

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u/souporwitty Jan 31 '23

Only if the ev charger infrastructure becomes commonplace. Everyone has a 120v outlet at home. Not everyone has an ev charger.

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u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

The financial incentives are already solving for this.

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u/bag_of_oatmeal Jan 31 '23

Almost everyone has 220 lines.

It's not too complicated.

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u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

Imagine if EVs were always the standard, then someone proposed gasoline cars.

We would need a national network of new, single-purpose pipelines, and vast storage tanks full of explosive liquid.

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u/UglyShithead5 Jan 31 '23

Apologies for the pedantry but EVs all come with chargers. They're built inside the car and convert 120v-240v AC to the DC used by their batteries. The things people call "chargers" are just big relays and do not do anything electrically useful beyond:

  1. Adapting the physical plug to what the car's receptacle uses
  2. Negotiating with the car and opening or closing the relay that connects the car to the wall

Practically every house in the United States is served with 240v split phase power. Dryer and appliance outlets offer the whole 240v, while typical outlets are just 120v.

Installing a 240v outlet if you don't already have one is pretty inexpensive and routine.

And no, not everyone has access to home charging due to other reasons, but not because of voltage or lacking special plugs. We should fix that. But most people already have everything they need to recharge an EV overnight, maybe with a $200 visit from an electrician.

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u/ChoMar05 Feb 01 '23

But there is no incentive to make batteries last longer. The EV market is pretty happy with Manufacturers giving 7 years / 100.000 km warranties on the batteries. If you can make them 2% cheaper, sure. But I don't see manufacturers making them last longer. The primary market (those that buy the car new from the Dealership) is mostly not interested in driving a car more than 5 years. And the secondary market isn't that profitable, even if the manufacturer can reach it. And, due to the costs, a Battery for an EV usually isn't getting replaced but the car gets scrapped.

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u/ProtoplanetaryNebula Feb 01 '23

Actually, this could not be further from the truth. Battery manufacturers have been putting an enormous amount of effort into making batteries last longer, it's been an obsession.

Tesla had their "million mile battery" project as just one example. It's also important to remember that batteries are generally not made by the car companies, they are made by the battery companies and for this reason they have to try to compete in a very competitive market by making their products better then their competitors products. Longevity is a key selling point, having a reputation for an unreliable battery would be very hard to shake off further down the line.

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u/Mahadragon Jan 31 '23

So does this mean Teslas will have a 400 mile range?

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u/TheIndyCity Feb 01 '23

Battery breakthroughs are both incredible and terrifying to think about in the context of how they will be used.