Better Finish this Quick, I think my laptop is about to DIE!
I can't count the number of times a week I have to worry about my laptop running out of battery. I feel like they shouldn't even be considered portable devices anymore because mine is plugged in so often. Everyone claims that they're Mac has great battery life, which is probably true in comparison to my Lenovo Thinkpad, however I still know plenty of people that are looking for outlets to plug their Mac's into while studying. The truth is, we could always use more battery life. At full charge, my Lenovo only holds a little over 1:30, which just isn't cutting it.
There's too many times when I'm basing my seat in the library on its proximity to an outlet. Either that, or I'm getting in other people's way while trying to plug my computer into an outlet. So, what's the next step...better battery technology? A definite possibility. Bigger batteries? I mean, we could do that but who really wants their laptop to be even heavier?
Our generation has been receiving a lot of bad publicity because we keep technology for just a few years and then dispose of it for something better and nicer. Ultimately, with the plastics we are throwing out precious metals and plenty of re-usable stuff. Creating better battery technology will just cause us to throw out the batteries we have now much faster, which is just adding to the technology junkyard.
Luckily, over at MIT we have professors working on alternative solutions to problems such as low battery life. Professor Peter Hagelstein is co-author an interesting manuscript which is now published in the Journal of Applied Physics. In his studies, he claims that the heat that a laptop generates has the power to DOUBLE battery life! Basically, when operating a computer only a portion of the energy that goes into it is actually successfully utilized. Some of this energy is lost in the form of heat or friction. Many forms of technology such as engines, microprocessors, and power plants need to give off excess heat in order for the machine to perform at an optimal level.
Hagelstein seems to think that the current heat to energy technologies not performing to their full potential, so he is working to create a better heat energy converter. According to theory, heat to energy transfer cannot go over a certain value called the Carnot Limit. Hagelstein claims that we are only maximizing about 1-10th of that limit. According to their statistics, using their new technology they can possibly reach about 90% of that limit.
Hagelstein is using a new system in which power is being generated by a single quantum dot device. It is a type of semiconductor that restricts electrons in all three dimensions. Although there is a current technology that can convert heat to high energy returns, he explains that with the current technology you can only get high throughput (converting heat from a less efficient system and getting more energy), but in this way you are sacrificing efficiency, price, and size. Hagelstein claims that in his new system there is no catch.
After performing a significant amount of research, Hagelstein learned that by lessening the distance between a hot surface and the conversion device you can create significantly larger amounts of power. MTPV Corp. (for Micron-gap Thermal Photo-Voltaics) and founder Robert Dimatteo plans to take Hagelsteins concept into the commercial market, claiming that this could be a huge jump in the battle to harness more power from the devices we use today.
According to DiMatteo, in the cars and technologies for generating electricity, about 60% of the possible power is lost to heat. Can you imagine if we changed this!!??
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