Sion Power thinks its new Lithium-Sulfur batteries will provide the power to tomorrow's new devices. If their electrical capacity claims are true, they may do just that.
Sion Power is showing off its new battery design this week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), based on a new Lithium-Sulfur design. SION believes that its new Lithium-Sulfur (Li-S) batteries are the answer to the industry's woes.
Most rechargeable batteries in mobile devices today use either Lithium-Ion or Lithium-Ion Polymer technology, which although it has served well can't keep up with today's power-hungry devices. Most modern batteries store power chemically, and then convert that chemical energy back into electricity on demand via a chemical reaction. Different chemical combinations can "store" different amounts of power. The important factors in battery technology are Watt-hours/kilogram (power vs. weight), Watt-hours/liter (power vs. size), and cycle life, how many times a battery can be recharged before it wears out.
At least in theory, Lithium-Sulfur potentially offers over 50% more Watt-hours/liter than Lithium-Ion batteries, and over four times the Watt-hours/Kg. That allows for smaller, lighter, or longer lasting (pick two) portable devices. Those are theoretical maximums that have not yet been reached, but current Li_S batteries already have a better power/weight ratio than conventional Lithium Ion. The downside, however, is that currently Li-S offers only 150 recharge cycles to Lithium-Ion's 500. Sion expects to get that number up to 300 by the end of the year.
Commercially widely available Li-S battery technology is still 3-5 years out, according to Sion, but some working prototypes have already been demonstrated. At WinHEC, for instance, an HP TC1000 Tablet PC ran for eight solid hours on a Li-S battery pack. In the future, Sion hopes to be able to power a new generation of mobile devices, or keep conventional ones running for longer periods of time.
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