Speaking of batteries ...

[unixronin]

... The consumer electronics industry needs a better commodity-rechargeable-battery technology.  Purely aside from the issue of charge life, come on, people, is it really any surprise to anyone that many devices designed to operate on 1.5v manganese-alkaline¹ primary cells don't work well (or, sometimes, don't work at all) when you replace them with 1.2v NiCd or NiMH cells?²

[1]  Or lithium-iron, or silver oxide ... pretty much all the commodity primary-cell technologies in common use run somewhere in the 1.5v-1.6v range.

[2]  I'm seeing some references to a titanium, titanium-lithium, or titanium-NiMH rechargeable battery that's a true 1.5v primary-cell replacement.  However, I can't find any definitive technical information, just marketing claims that don't specify things like internal resistance or discharge rate.

Comments

[tww1fa]

Unfortunately, battery voltages depend on the valences of the chemicals used, and only a few chemicals are useful as battery chemicals. It's a better solution to design devices to support a wider range of input voltages and in fact that is what is being done more and more.

Probably the best battery solution that's currently available are the A123 lithium iron phosphate cells - they run pretty much at 3.0-3.3V so they could be used as replacements for two 1.5V cells, without the thermal runaway hazards of standard lithium-ion cells.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

We don't use NiCd cells much anymore. Only when the almost nonexistent internal resistance is a benefit instead of a liability. Remember that the Li-ion cells had pretty poor performance when they first came out. It takes a while to get all the usefulness of a technology once it is proven to work. We are constrained by the properties of the periodic table of the elements when choosing elements to work with. Some elements are harder to get than others, so cost is also a factor. Battery technology is primarily a chemistry problem, so I don't know anything more than an interested amateur on the subject. What I do know is that we need a better rechargeable energy storage technology. I am not certain that batteries are the best bet. I have seen some work about using capacitors that have greater charge density than batteries.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a lot of very intensive work being done on supercapacitors.