Simple Chemical Trick To Boost Battery Efficiency 149
space_mongoose writes "Hitachi thinks that a simple chemical additive could significantly improve battery life. Alkaline batteries have a positive electrode of manganese oxide and a negative electrode of finely powdered zinc, but zinc oxide forms around these grains of zinc. Hitachi's solution is to replace the zinc with a fine powder of zinc-aluminum alloy, displacing the zinc within the zinc oxide layer making it a much better conductor."
Costs? (Score:4, Informative)
P.S. the skyrocketing metal costs, including important ones like copper and silver, are part of an ongoing commodity boom and response to out of control inflation in the USA and depreciating US dollar. The rapidly increasing costs of these metals will be reflected in goods we buy, like batteries.
Re:Energizer super ultra-platinum pro? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Voltage. (Score:5, Informative)
The new Sanyo Eneloop [thomasdistributing.com] NiMH batteries don't have that problem.
I recently $wapped out my vast collection of piss-poor Energizer (2500 mAH) AAs for Eneloop (2000 mAH) AAs, and there's no going back!
Re:Voltage. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Costs? (Score:2, Informative)
On your question of costs, according to lme.co.uk, Aluminium is currently $2,185 per tonne and Zinc is $3,850 per tonne, so I wouldn't be worried about the raw metal cost since Aluminium is cheaper. Anyway, neither of these costs is likely to be at all significant when making a battery.
In the last 2 years the Zinc price has gone up about 300%. By comparison, Aluminium has only gone up abut 60% in the same time period. The price of Aluminium is probably less affected because its cost comes more from the highly energy-intensive manufacturing process rather than the discovery and mining costs which would more heavily affect Zinc.
Re:Voltage. (Score:2, Informative)
In particular, consumer products that can't deal with 1.2v cells simply have a supply-side electronic design that is 30+ years old. A lot of old designs get reused over and over again, as their patents have expired and the designers find it easy to replay the same theme over and over again.
Although it generally costs no money to design and build something that works properly using 0.9 to 1.8 v cells, some manufacturers like to milk old designs well beyond their useful life, because any engineering or manufacturing change costs at least some money.
Powertop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Costs? (Score:2, Informative)