I have read of recent incidents in Dallas, Connecticut and Yorkshire where fires have started from cellphone chargers being incorrectly used. In one case three children died in a fire.
The common aspect in all of them was the danger of leaving a cellphone under the pillow while it's plugged into the charger. The pillow began to burn and smoulder, and toxic fumes caused breathing difficulties. The fumes from burnt synthetic materials can case brain-death whilst the victim sleeps, a sleep from which they will never waken.
I have blogged about batteries before. But I do find them amazing and even frightening. How do they work?, and why are they becoming more and more dangerous with every innovation in the technology?
All batteries rely on the energy difference between the beginning and end states of a chemical reaction. It works like this. Imagine a waterfall. As the water falls from the the top it releases spray. In a battery, as the reaction procees down the energy slope it releases free electrons which can power your device.
The clever bit is that we can push the water back up to the top of the waterfall so it can do it all over again. The battery charger pushes the electrons back in, and runs the reaction back up the energy slope to where it was before.
My cellphone can easily run 72 hours continuously. It will then recharge in about 30 minutes. That means pushing the waterfall back to the top 144 times faster than it fell down in the first place. Thinking about that, call me a sceptic, I always wonder what the cost of this has to be. No system can be perfectly efficient. There have to be losses somewhere, no?
Of course. It's always the same thing. Heat - more and more of it as battery technology evolves. The latest generation of rechargable batteries (for driving electric motors) are heading towards a packaging limitation where the materials cannot handle the heat. In 2013 Boeing grounded its entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners while they dealt with exactly this problem.
These days, as our electronic machines get thinner, lighter, faster, gruntier, more desirable, they contain ever longer, finer copper pathways folded with ever more complexity around in a tighter space. This costs heat, through friction - as simple as that. And that heat must be conducted and vented away somehow.
And that is the central design problem of our age. It drove the innovation of duo-core processing, because single-core processors got so powerful they were melting off their motherboard. The (probably temporary) solution was to split a processor into two parts and make them work together. The unexpected advantage was that this new architecture allowed more complex processing operations to run exponentially faster by removing downtime (measured in nanoseconds) between tasks.
That was the clever bit: a problem in packaging solved by rolling it back up the innovation slope.
The common aspect in all of them was the danger of leaving a cellphone under the pillow while it's plugged into the charger. The pillow began to burn and smoulder, and toxic fumes caused breathing difficulties. The fumes from burnt synthetic materials can case brain-death whilst the victim sleeps, a sleep from which they will never waken.
I have blogged about batteries before. But I do find them amazing and even frightening. How do they work?, and why are they becoming more and more dangerous with every innovation in the technology?
All batteries rely on the energy difference between the beginning and end states of a chemical reaction. It works like this. Imagine a waterfall. As the water falls from the the top it releases spray. In a battery, as the reaction procees down the energy slope it releases free electrons which can power your device.
The clever bit is that we can push the water back up to the top of the waterfall so it can do it all over again. The battery charger pushes the electrons back in, and runs the reaction back up the energy slope to where it was before.
My cellphone can easily run 72 hours continuously. It will then recharge in about 30 minutes. That means pushing the waterfall back to the top 144 times faster than it fell down in the first place. Thinking about that, call me a sceptic, I always wonder what the cost of this has to be. No system can be perfectly efficient. There have to be losses somewhere, no?
Of course. It's always the same thing. Heat - more and more of it as battery technology evolves. The latest generation of rechargable batteries (for driving electric motors) are heading towards a packaging limitation where the materials cannot handle the heat. In 2013 Boeing grounded its entire fleet of 787 Dreamliners while they dealt with exactly this problem.
These days, as our electronic machines get thinner, lighter, faster, gruntier, more desirable, they contain ever longer, finer copper pathways folded with ever more complexity around in a tighter space. This costs heat, through friction - as simple as that. And that heat must be conducted and vented away somehow.
And that is the central design problem of our age. It drove the innovation of duo-core processing, because single-core processors got so powerful they were melting off their motherboard. The (probably temporary) solution was to split a processor into two parts and make them work together. The unexpected advantage was that this new architecture allowed more complex processing operations to run exponentially faster by removing downtime (measured in nanoseconds) between tasks.
That was the clever bit: a problem in packaging solved by rolling it back up the innovation slope.
