Researchers Develop Foldable and Bendable Battery

[Mike Temporale]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8R0CGT00&show_article=1' target='_blank'>http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8R0CGT00&show_article=1</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>&quot;It's a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches square right now, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources. &quot;We would like to scale this up to the point where you can imagine printing batteries like a newspaper. That would be the ultimate,&quot; Robert Linhardt a professor at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at RPI said in a telephone interview.&quot;</em></p><p>Battery technology hasn't changed in ages. There's always talk of new smaller and more powerfull batteries but we never see them make it to market. A bendable/foldable battery would be really cool and could really change the size and shape of todays devices. But, I'm not holding my breath. There's a pretty good chance that we'll still be using the same old LI-ION in our phones for years to come. </p>

[Kirkaiya]

While battery tech progress does, at times, seem slow as molasses, there has been a fair amount of incremental progress in the last decade.

We've seen the mass-use of Lithion-polymer batteries (I remember the first device I had with a Li-Poly battery was my iPaq 3650), which are a variant on Li-Ion that allow batteries to be made into different shapes, included curved inside of cases, etc.

The paper-battery thing seems more useful because they might be very cheap to manufacture, and light-weight, so that even if the energy-density is no better than a current Li-ion battery, you'll be able to carry a couple of spares that weigh no more than a small paper notepad.

The overall storage per volume and weight have been steadily (if slowly) increasing, and with supercomputers getting ever more powerful (for modeling the chemical interactions inside batteries), we're getting ripe for another 'revolution', in the way that Li-Ion revolutionized rechargeables.

Plus, there are possible fuel-cell "batteries", and hybrid Li-Ion/fuel-cells that are near-term (maybe 2 - 4 years from our PDAs or notebooks).

I'm pretty optimistic, myself. Batteries are a mundane tech, but they only reason we perceive them as not making much progress is that our devices have bigger screens, faster cpus, and more memory to power, so they have to keep improving energy storage just to keep pace!

By 2010, I think we'll see some innovate new batteries - either fuel-cells or hybrids, or a completely new chemistry (a la the change from Nickel-Metal Hydride to Li-Ion/Polymer).

[ditch_azeroth]

if this technology hits mainstream, you can be assured that there will newer design for phones... coupled with the "ribbon-like" displays that has been around for quite some time now...