Batteries forgotten by technology

NEW YORK -- Batteries, the technology that time forgot, should have disappeared alongside the wood-paneled station wagon.

The sealed chemical cocktails we use to power computers, boom boxes and mobile phones are little changed since the 1950s.

For decades, electronics designers have struggled to tailor the latest concoction in silicon chips and integrated circuits to the power limitations of the lowly battery.

"They're holding us back big time," said Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future. Had batteries advanced at the pace of the computer processor, "a double-A cell would contain more energy than a tactical nuke."

Other than a few devices like weak solar cells and mechanical cranking devices, there isn't an alternate portable power source. Batteries are it.

"There's not much you can do about it," said Boris Donskoy, who designs portable electronic instruments for InHand Electronics Inc., of Rockville, Md. "There are basic limitations in physics."

Researchers talk of batteries being replaced at some point by portable fuel cells and tiny jet engines -- or a new battery made of a better combination of chemicals. But no one can say when.

Until then, we're stuck with a power source whose origins date to 1859, when the first lead acid battery was made in France.

The same basic energy storage concept still fuels the four billion disposable batteries sold each year in the United States. And vestiges of bygone days infuse the industry vernacular.

Shrinking in size

The name of No. 3 battery seller Rayovac Corp. dates to the 1930s, when radio technology got a boost from the onset of vacuum tubes -- an anachronistic technology replaced long ago by the transistor.

Rayovac engineer Jim Pilarzyk said his industry has no hope of keeping up with fast-morphing computer processors, which double in speed and halve in size every 18 months.

A 5 percent improvement in power capacity every two years is about the best battery scientists can manage, he said.

"The battery industry is somewhat limited," Pilarzyk said. "They're analog devices in a digital world."

For all their shortcomings, comparing batteries with computers isn't fair.

Batteries' roots lie in chemists' beakers. Computer speed is pushed by advances in manufacturing, and the ability to make circuits and transistors smaller and smaller.

"A battery isn't a microprocessor," said Prof. Donald Sadoway, a battery researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's a chemical device. It observes different scaling laws."

For designers of portable electronics, who yearn to shrink their gadgets and add gobs of features, battery power is the choke point that stunts their ambitions.

"The last 20 years have been aimed at designing around the limitations of batteries," Saffo said.

If the device needs to be small, it won't run long. If it needs to run long, it can't be small -- or have power-guzzling add-ons like a fast processor, DVD drive, audio or a color display.

"When I want to design something, my first question is, 'How much power does it consume?' There's a big trade-off between size, power consumption and cost," Donskoy said.

Limited by physics

The thirst for portable power is relentless. As soon as a better battery emerges, designers quickly respond with new gadgets that push the cells to their furthest limits.

In the early 1990s, laptop computers were made possible by rechargeable nickel metal hydride and nickel cadmium batteries, which gave portables an operating life of four hours or so.

When more powerful lithium ion batteries emerged in the late 90s, the breakthrough allowed cell phones to shrink to shirt-pocket size. Lithium cells fueled the release of handheld computers, which could run for several hours and even sport backlit color screens.

Since then, battery science has reached a plateau, scientists say.

"We're starting to approach the engineering limits of that chemistry," Sadoway said, referring to the lithium ion cell.

Another problem with batteries is environmental.

Of the billions sold each year, most wind up in landfills and incinerators, where their toxic contents -- mercury, cadmium, zinc, nickel and manganese among them -- leach into groundwater and air, said Allen Hershkowitz of the National Resources Defense Council.

While chemists and engineers struggle to eke out a little more power -- giving batteries thinner skins, a less inert material -- consumers locked into buying and discarding batteries wonder whether there's a conspiracy. Do manufacturers refuse to make a better battery?

"It's not economic for battery manufacturers to develop new technology," said Bruce Rittenhouse, president of Electronic Automation Inc., a Grand Rapids, Mich. company that repairs industrial electronics. "Why do it? They want to sell you batteries every month, not every six years."

Powerful propulsion

Lew Urry, a scientist with Energizer Holdings Inc., pshaws the notion. With Energizer and its archrival Duracell leapfrogging each other, a slowdown in innovation gives the other company powerful boasting rights.

"You can't afford to let that happen," said Urry, 76, who helped invent Eveready's first alkaline battery, which hit store shelves in 1958.

Before then, weaker lead acid batteries were important to still unelectrified farmhouses in rural North America, powering flashlights and radios.

In 1958, it wasn't portable computers that were made possible by Urry's alkaline battery, but a flood of battery-powered toys.

In a Cleveland plant owned by Union Carbide -- the former corporate parent of Eveready and Energizer -- Urry gave an early demonstration of an alkaline battery by letting a toy car zip around the cafeteria floor.

Batteries, which have long been derided for polluting the environment, will soon do their part to clean it up, MIT's Sadoway said.

The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car.

"I didn't get into batteries because I wanted to help some guy yak longer on his cell phone," Sadoway said.

Within a handful of years, batteries will be powerful and cheap enough to propel a car 250 miles without a recharge. When this happens, automakers will junk the internal combustion engine, Sadoway predicted. Except for the battery, the clean car is ready to roll, he said.