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Lithium-Ion Batteries Going the Way of the Dinosaurs

ZPower launches the silver-zinc batteries

By Alexandru Pancescu, Hardware Editor

24th of September 2007, 08:52 GMT

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One of the most important features of a mobile device, be it computer, music player or cell phone is the life time of its internal battery and nowadays customers are asking for devices with longer operating periods between battery charges. While the most used technology for creating batteries aimed at a variety of mobile devices is based on lithium-ion cells that are reasonable easy to manufacture and quite cheap, a new technology was just announced that could offer greater power densities while minimizing the safety concerns as well.

This new battery technology was just

announced by the company ZPower and it is aimed at replacing the lithium-ion power cells with a battery makeup that is offering higher power outputs while being safer to operate as during this year the older technology created many problems like fire hazards and so on.

ZPower presented this new battery technology which is based on a silver zinc composite at the Intel Developer Forum and according to the news site dailytech, this new battery is able to offer an energy output that is 30 percent higher than previous lithium-ion based power packs and it is also a safe technology as the ZPower president and chief executive officer Ross Dueber said that these batteries can be overcharged without problems in order to allow for extended operating periods.

Inside the new ZPower batteries there is a composite polymer zinc anode that is surrounded by a layered separator and a nano-particle silver cathode while the cells used are water-based. Thanks to this fact the ZPower batteries are also very safe to use and they will surely not catch fire.

The two metals that are found inside those batteries are recyclable in proportion of around 95 percent and the manufacturing company announced that there will be a program that will reimburse clients returning the old and damaged batteries with the value of the zinc and silver recovered. While so far things are really looking good, ZPower batteries are having a downside too as they are good only for around 100 recharge cycles unlike the lithium-ion cells that are almost guaranteed to hit the 300 cycles mark. In order to make this technology more attractive to customers, the company announced that it will continue to develop such batteries and improve the technologies used as the aim is to reach 200 cycles until 2008 and 300 cycles until 2010.

As the new battery technology is pretty different from the one that is largely used today, Zpower's products may not be at their best when used with currently available lithium-ion based devices, so an entire new class of mobile electronic devices will have to be designed and manufactured.

TAGS:

ZPower | zinc-silver | lithium-ion | battery | power cell

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