Lithium-ion or lithium polymer? What's the deal with lithium?
Lithium-ion batteries have been in use for some time in our personal electronics devices, most notably in laptop computers. The switch was made to lithium-ion from NiMh, or nickel metal hydride batteries because they are lighter, cheaper, and smaller than other kinds of batteries. They don't suffer from the 'memory' effect that gave nickel batteries a bad name, they contain relatively few toxic metals and are fairly simple to recycle. Nickel metal hydride and ni-cad or nickel cadmium batteries were the batteries of choice for high power applications before lithium-ion.Recently, though, lithium-ion has had some controversy. It seems that in the quest for ever-higher capacities, some manufacturers (SONY is the big one) have pushed the technology too far. Some laptops were catching fire or exploding because the batteries got too hot.
Enter lithium polymer? Perhaps... Li-po or lithium polymer batteries have been in use under pretty demanding applications such as battle-bots and radio control airplanes for a little while, and some companies are investigating them for other uses. Treehugger investigated them as did CNet news. Time will tell if these new-tech batteries can challenge other newcomers in the field like A123Systems, Altair Nanotechnologies and Firefly Technologies offerings.
Related:
[Source: wikipedia.org]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tim 3:39PM (1/05/2007)
Here are some interesting battery technologies under investigation and/or development. Follow the link for some very interesting reading... http://peswiki.com/energy/Directory:Batteries
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Howard Lee Harkness 3:48PM (1/05/2007)
"They don't suffer from the 'memory' effect that gave nickel batteries a bad name"
You must be talking about NiCd, not NiMh here. Nicads have pretty much gone away these days.
The main problem with the current dominant LiON technology is that the substrate expands and contracts with the level of charge, eventually reducing the capacity and/or causing too much heat (thermal runaway). There are at least two competing LiON products that don't have this problem, and there are probably more on the way.
"What's the deal with lithium?"
Lithium is very likely to be the dominant material for rechargeable batteries, due to some fundamental laws of physics and chemistry. Most chemical reactions involve only the outer electron shell (although there are some that use the outer 2 shells), so the lightest element with the desired outer shell configuration and physical characteristics will have the best energy/weight ratio.
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davidl340 4:58PM (1/05/2007)
I'm using the a123 cells and lith. poly. I really think the a123 technology is going to great if the price comes down. Not as light as lipo, but safer and faster charging.
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