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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday October 29 2015, @05:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the it-keeps-going-and-going-and-going-and-going-and-going.... dept.

Zhongwei Chen, a chemical engineering professor at Waterloo, and a team of graduate students have created a low-cost battery using silicon that boosts the performance and life of lithium-ion batteries. Their findings are published in the latest issue of Nature Communications .

Waterloo's silicon battery technology promises a 40 to 60 per cent increase in energy density, which is important for consumers with smartphones, smart homes and smart wearables.

The environmentally safe technology could also make dramatic improvements for hybrid and electric vehicles. The findings could mean an electric car may be driven up to 500 kilometres between charges and the smaller, lighter batteries may significantly reduce the overall weight of vehicles.

Current lithium-ion batteries normally use graphite anodes. The Waterloo engineers found that silicon anode materials have a much higher capacity for lithium and are capable of producing batteries with almost 10 times more energy.


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  • (Score: 2) by VanderDecken on Thursday October 29 2015, @05:46PM

    by VanderDecken (5216) on Thursday October 29 2015, @05:46PM (#256127)

    It won't matter ... while one group improves cell phone battery life, another figures out a new application to drain it.

    My first cell phone would last a week to ten days on standby. Good luck getting much more than a day with current phones.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:16PM (#256146)

    My current phone lasts a week on standby: as long as I disable both radios :P

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:32PM (#256154)
    You can do that easily with current phones. Use your smartphone like a dumb phone and you'll have the battery life of a dumb phone, probably even longer. My current smartphone will last at least a week on standby, and I think many other recent smartphones would do about as well. Just turn off GPS, wifi and mobile data, don't use it to take pictures/videos, watch videos or play games or have the screen on for much longer than you would on a normal dumb phone.

    I usually only charge my phone to 70% (to preserve overall battery lifespan) and with my normal usage throughout the day it only goes from 70% down to about 50+%, so even if I don't use it like a dumb phone it will last more than two days without a charge especially if I charge it to 100%. Continuous intensive usage (games, browsing etc) drains it much faster of course.

    Of course if you turn on wifi/mobile data and have apps like Google's Android Device Manager or Whatsapp or Facebook enabled your battery life could go down much faster - 2-3% or more an hour on my phone. Obviously battery life will go down faster if your phone has to keep reporting to Google/NSA/CIA where it is and also transfer other data to/fro Whatsapp/Facebook etc.
  • (Score: 2) by Tork on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:43PM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:43PM (#256162)

    My first cell phone would last a week to ten days on standby. Good luck getting much more than a day with current phones.

    Yes, my first phone sat unused for 2-3 weeks at a time as well, and I don't miss it. First is because all those "new applications to drain the battery" are applications that make my phone a lot more useful as a communications device. Second is because when that 2-3 weeks actually did end, it was typically in the middle of a work day leaving me phoneless during a critical time. For the longest time I actually had the habit of buying an extra charger with my phone just because I was too silly to charge it at night. Third is that even though I could wait that long in between charges, the talk time was nowhere near as long as I have now. I regularly have 3-4 hour chats on my current smartphone and still have enough left-over battery to stay on until after-hours, I don't recall ever having a call last more than 2 back in ye good ol' days of cell phone technology.

    I really don't get why standby time is such a BFD. If I could get that sort of standby time AND get all my email notifications etc, then hell yeah I'd be excited.

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