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A tiny radioactive battery could keep your future phone running for 50 years
(www.techradar.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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I've heard of these kinds of batteries before and it'd be cool to have long-running electronics, but would these produce enough power?
They do, if you give them enough room. And if you are born into an oil family.
The power density is about 0.01125m³ per watt. A high end smartphone (11w of peak power) with a body size similar to Galaxy s23 ultra, would be almost 10 meters thick.
To be fair, it only needs to cover the phone's average power draw if you put in a supercapacitor or small conventional battery.
But there's another problem.... if I understand how this works correctly, for a 1W battery, the radioactive element must be outputting AT LEAST 1W of radiation energy at all times, whether it's being consumed as electricity or not. Ideally that's all trapped inside as heat in a best case scenario, but having to cool your battery while it's not in use is kind of a deal breaker for anything more than milliwatts (or it will have to have a heatsink as big as the battery)
The batteries are already connected to a "heatsink" in the phones we use now. Fast charging can be as lossy as 86% for lithium ion batteries qt very high charge rates, so the 60w fast charging will dissipate more than 6w of heat already.
And yes, the radiation battery either has to constantly use the power or it will be just pumping the voltage up until something starts to conduct