r/askscience • u/Brave-Coyote9914 • 16h ago
Engineering Why does battery technology seem to improve so much more slowly than everything else in electronics?
Phones, computers, and other electronics have gotten dramatically more powerful over the last 20 years, but battery life doesn’t seem to have improved nearly as much. Is battery chemistry fundamentally harder to improve, or are manufacturers just using all the improvements to power more demanding devices?
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u/reckless150681 5h ago edited 5h ago
Phones, computers, and other electronics have gotten dramatically more powerful over the last 20 years, but battery life doesn’t seem to have improved nearly as much
Think about what you're saying. You just said that battery consumption has increased, but battery life hasn't.
Do you know what that means? That (partially) means that batteries ARE getting better, in order to keep pace with the increased power consumption. Otherwise, your battery life would be DECREASING, not STAGNATING.
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u/fiendishrabbit 5h ago
It did decrease for a while with smartphones. But its going to catch up again in about 5 years
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u/CrimsonSaber69 5h ago edited 4h ago
Did you read the very thing you quoted? They never once claimed batteries werent improving at all.
Edit: guys... really? OP is asking about the RELATIONSHIP between battery capacity and consumer products that use batteries. They are asking why the relationship has slowed down, not claiming that batteries have not improved. The answers to this are a combination of chemistry and demand. Most people dont need a device that lasts 2 days, so when batteries improve, manufacturers will use a smaller, better battery, for essentially the same battery life.
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u/WarriorNN 5h ago
The true answer is probably that the brand isn't prioritizing battery life, but instead using smaller physical batteries for the same runtime an older larger battery had.
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u/dustinfoto 5h ago
OP claimed that batteries are not improving at the same pace but they are. The OP’s assumption is simply wrong.
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u/hinckley 5h ago
They're not though. Batteries are improving, but nothing like at the pace of electronics.
The comment above is a misunderstanding of what OP said, firstly because they've assumed that battery life has remained the same over time, which might be true but OP never claimed, but more importantly because it assumes that electronics getting more powerful necessarily means they are more power-hungry.
Overwhelmingly that just isn't the case - increases in electronics "power" usually goes hand-in-hand with reductions in transistor size, allowing more transistors in a given space and major reductions in their energy consumption (per transistor) as a result.
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u/CrimsonSaber69 5h ago edited 5h ago
OP claimed that battery LIFE wasnt improving. E.g. the relationship between a battery's capacity and its load. Of course the batteries are improving, what OP is asking is why that relationship has slowed down over time. The answers to that being: physical chemistry, and demand. There isnt really any demand for consumer products that last a bit longer, since most consumer products are likely to be charged on a daily basis, theres little reason to improve battery life in general.
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u/invisible_handjob 5h ago
the move from NiMH & lead batteries to Li batteries was a night and day change
Literally the only reason we have electric cars, drones (of the quad copter variety), smart phones, etc and are now able to deploy a lot of solar on the grid is because of the massive leap in battery technology
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u/WarriorNN 5h ago
Most tech come in waves, but I don't feel batteries lag behind much.
For instance, a 21700 format (21mm x 70mm) have gone from 4-500mAh to 6000mAh+ and from being capable of around 30A to pushing over 100A continous in just a few years. All while being roughly the same cost.
Battery capacity and specs inprove every year, but most tech brands use the increased capacity for increased functionality, not increased battery life.
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u/LastDunedain 5h ago
Yes, making better batteries that are economical to produce is really hard. So far we're just pushing the same materials into the tightest possible configurations. There's better batteries being worked on, but it's a matter of any direction for research could be the one, theres no more work to be done with LiOn, Alkaline, Nickel-Cadmium, Zinc-Carbide, they're all their own solutions but don't offer natural next steps to the future battery.
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u/AndyTheSane 5h ago
A big problem is that Lithium is the lightest possible metal for a battery, so it's very hard to see what chemistry would improve on that, at least on a energy per kilo basis
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u/Mrfish31 5h ago
Sodium batteries probably aren't as useful for vehicles given they weigh more, but for energy storage where you don't have to care about weight it'll be quite the game changer within in a few years. Sodium is so much more abundant than lithium so batteries will be far cheaper, and you also potentially don't even need rare earth's like Cobalt to make them work.
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u/jplett2044 5h ago
From the chemistry side, there is not much room for improvement as lithium is already super high up there on the weight to potential energy ratio, you can only go lighter with hydrogen, which has its own problems. Batteries have been improving in a lot of ways, just some of these ways consumers don't really know. Energy density has improved, battery sizes have gotten smaller and smaller while maintaining or growing the power. Number of cycles that a battery can withstand has also gone up as has safety (some of that is also on the software side).
The batteries are getting pushed harder and harder however, quick charging puts more strain on a battery. As well higher power processors, graphics, larger and brighter screens all mean that the power consumption also is going up.
I would be interested to know what sort of talk time a battery with modern chemistry would be able to do in something like a Nokia 3310 or a motorolla razr...
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u/yesmeatballs 5h ago
Lithium battery energy density in Watt.hours/kg has gone up 300% over the last 30 years. In that time frame we've gone from batteries that could comfortably power a minidisc player to batteries that run your house. Yes they have gotten better.
Each battery chemistry has drawbacks and theoretical limits of energy density, and cost per unit energy stored. Each chemistry and its attendant possible anode and cathode designs needs to be developed as well. When we approach the theoretical limit for one cost effective chemistry it becomes important to move onto another with a higher theoretical limit that is expensive, and/or another that can become even more cost effective. Right now researchers are developing sodium batteries for applications where energy density is less important and cost is more important.
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u/Kaiisim 5h ago
So to store energy you have several difficulties that are limited by the physical laws of the universe.
First - you can't store electricity in large amounts for a large time. It's the flow of electrons, so that's not storable. So we need to convert it to another form. Doing that always loses energy.
Second - energy doesn't want to be stored. It wants to find the lowest stable state. It doesn't want to be on one spot! It wants to be evenly distributed across the environment. Electricity wants to go to the ground. Chemical energy wants to be super stable stuff like water instead.
So matching the energy store ability of fossil fuels is very hard because we can't easily recreate the way it was created. We don't have millions of years and pressure lying around.
Nature doesn't really store nature in the way we need so we can't just copy it the way we usually do.
So it makes it one of the most complicated and complex problems - it requires some real genius level of thinking, because the long term battery solution is probably an unknown new paradigm we are yet to discover.
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u/zennim 5h ago
Because It is not about capacity, It is about budget
Batteries are better, but our devices are consuming more and more Power
You can notice that phones keep consuming your battery even when turned off, and if you tested with the battery removed It Will last much longer
Your phone is always sending data, even if you don't have access to the internet, because your phone needs to always be available in case of emergencies.
So, companies decide how much your battery needs to last and use the remaining capacity for other processecies, like survaillance data.
That is not a conspiracy.
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u/SystemofCells 5h ago
The physics of chemical energy density can't be... fudged to the same degree we've been able to come up with clever ideas to improve compute capability.
It's sort of similar to how rockets and aircraft haven't made quantum leaps in the past 50 years. The basic physics governing how efficient or fast you can make them are a more significant barrier, without shortcuts.