battery

424 Articles

EV Batteries Are Proving Hardier Than Expected

November 11, 2026 by 72 Comments

Batteries have a habit of quietly getting worse. Anyone who has nursed an old smartphone through its final years knows the routine—it leaves the house at 100% and is begging for a charger by lunchtime. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common worries about electric cars is what happens to the pack after a few years and a lot of kilometres. Nobody wants to buy a used EV only to discover it can barely make it across town. Fears around battery degradation and high replacement costs were the catch cry of many EV doomers over the years.

The good news is that we now have a pretty big pile of data on the question. Austrian battery diagnostics company Aviloo has crunched the results of more than 500,000 tests on used EVs  covering 20 popular models from the likes of Tesla, Volkswagen, Hyundai and Nissan. The data thus far tells us that EV batteries are holding up far better than the naysayers would have you believe.

Continue reading “EV Batteries Are Proving Hardier Than Expected” →

A person's hands are shown holding a small camera. An aluminium cage runs around the outside of the camera, the viewfinder display is tilted up, and below the viewfinder a battery is mounted.

Upgrading An Action Camera With An External Battery

October 31, 2026 by 4 Comments

[Evan Monsma], the prolific experimenter with cameras, found himself with an issue: he had a small Sony action camera with good performance in every respect but battery life, which was as low as twenty minutes. This was too short for practical everyday use, so [Evan] built an external adapter to add a larger battery and a few other features.

In fairness to the camera’s designers, it wasn’t really meant for consumer use; it was meant as more of a stunt camera, where endurance is less of a concern than size and weight. [Evan] wanted to use it for more general situations, hence the new battery. He first attached a small CNC-machined aluminium half-cage, which provided mounting points for additional hardware, including a screw-mount for a neutral-density filter.

[Evan] next designed, 3D-printed, and attached a mount and battery clip for a larger Sony camera battery; the mount also held a voltage converter to step the battery’s 7.2 V down to the original battery’s 3.7 V. A USB power adapter slotted into the battery compartment and broke out the power leads to the converter. Unfortunately, short battery life isn’t the camera’s only issue; it also eventually overheats with continuous use, which kept [Evan] from running a real battery-life test. He is, however, confident that it will last long enough for practical use.

We’ve seen a similar action camera mod before, as well as a mod to allow the use of third-party batteries in a vendor-locked camera. For larger cameras, we’ve even seen a hot-swappable battery pack.

Thanks to [Luis Mercado] for the tip!

Battery Prototype Uses Superextensive Quantum Effects To Charge Faster

October 28, 2026 by 18 Comments

Although the term ‘quantum battery’ is a bit of a vague term, the cell that [Kieran Hymas] et al. demonstrate in a recent paper does seem to suggest that it uses quantum effects to charge faster than would otherwise be possible, with this rate increasing faster than its volume, meaning at a superextensive rate.

The general idea behind a quantum battery is that these somehow use a quantum effect to store and release energy faster than would be possible using classical physics. First proposed in 2013, the initial Dicke model saw its theoretical quantum advantage shot down by 2020, leading to the search for alternative models.

We have previously seen claims of a quantum advantage in batteries based on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, such as by [Davide Rossini] et al., but this new paper may be the first prototype cell demonstrating a reproducible effect.

In the here demonstrated cell a microcavity is created with strong light-matter coupling, allowing for both energy storage and discharging, with the illuminated particles super-absorbing the light with what the researchers claim to be due to these particles cooperating using a quantum mechanism. Effectively scaling up the cell would thus scale up the charge- and discharge rate faster than in a conventional chemical cell.

Whether this demonstration can be replicated and expanded upon remains to be seen, naturally. The stored energy in this experiment was very small and the storage time only very brief, so for now it serves primarily as an interesting experimental result for researchers to dig through.

NASA Batteries Survive Extreme Cold And Heat

October 22, 2026 by 6 Comments

One of the major limits of mass-produced batteries is the electrolyte. From lead-acid to lithium ion, there’s some temperature where the electrolyte will freeze and cause all sorts of problems, from cracked casings to various non-favorable chemical changes in the battery itself. But if there’ a solid electrolyte available, many of the downsides of charging and discharging batteries in extreme cold disappear. These batteries developed by NASA, for example, can survive some wild temperature swings.

The electrolytes used for these batteries are either a ceramic or polymer electrolyte, both of which are solid. In testing, the batteries could meaningfully operate at temperatures of -60° C and up to 80° C on the high end. Further, the solid electrolyte helps protect them even outside of these temperature ranges. Bringing the battery temperature down to -170° C was not enough to damage the battery at all, and using a small heater to bring the temperature back up to its operating range showed no capacity losses or other issues.

These batteries are eventually intended for use in some of the coldest places outside of Earth still accessible to humans (in theory) such as the south pole of the Moon where the temperatures regularly get that cold and stay cold for long periods, especially in permanently-shadowed craters or places on the Moon we might want to put some telescopes eventually. There are other terrestrial situations where these batteries might be useful as well, since they don’t need as much thermal management as other battery types.

Power It With Sodium (But Please Don’t)

October 1, 2026 by 19 Comments

[Applied Science] has a new demo of an old 1970s patent for a portable generator that is both interesting and terrifying. The generator uses sodium and water, which, if you remember your old chemistry classes, will combust spontaneously. Turns out, though, it won’t if you draw power from it fast enough. Don’t draw enough power? BOOM, apparently. Check it out in the video below.

Of course, lithium-ion batteries might catch fire, too, but this looks a lot more likely. The patent made some wild claims about how much you could draw from the device, but the video shows that practical results are somewhat less.

Continue reading “Power It With Sodium (But Please Don’t)” →

Battery Tester Gets An App Upgrade

June 18, 2026 by 2 Comments

Do you have a ZKETECH EBC-A20 battery tester? Perhaps you don’t like the default software used to control the device. In that case, you might like the alternative whipped up by [Kazhuu.]

A reverse-engineering effort targeted at the EBC-A20 served as the basis for the work. The battery tester is ultimately controlled by a simple serial interface, running at 9600 bps, 8 bits, with odd parity. Armed with a relatively complete understanding of the commands used to control the device, [Kazhuu] was able to whip up a simple web app to control the device instead, using WebUSB to access the device over a USB-to-serial converter, though a desktop version for Linux and Windows is also available. If you’ve got one of these battery testers sitting on your bench, using the app is as simple as pointing your browser here with the device plugged in via USB. Then you can run basic load tests on battery cells and graph the results right on your computer without having to deal with the proprietary software.

Of course, if you don’t like the EBC-A20 battery tester, you could always build your own. If you’re whipping up your own test hardware on the lab bench, don’t hesitate to notify us on the tipsline.

Solid-State Batteries Take To The Sky

June 17, 2026 by 13 Comments

There always seem to be a handful of revolutionary technologies perpetually out of reach: fusion energy, quantum computers, and full self-driving cars are always in this list, and it seems like there’s also some battery technology which will finally let us fully decouple from fossil fuels in there as well. Although lithium batteries have allowed some ground-based electric transportation, the energy density is still not enough to enable full electrification, especially for things like aircraft. Solid state batteries may be on the verge of changing some of this, though, and a team has recently put them to work in a test aircraft to help make some headway with this novel battery chemistry.

The main contributing factor of these batteries’ improved energy densities is the ability to use a solid lithium anode, which has much higher energy density than the graphite-based anodes in modern liquid electrolyte batteries. Solid state batteries also have improved safety, since the solid electrolyte is generally not flammable and the battery itself is less prone to thermal runaway. The tests in this aircraft, a modified motorized glider, bear this out as well. With a standard lithium ion pack the team was able to harness 250 Wh/kg and with their new solid state battery they managed 410 Wh/kg, which let them fly the craft up to 24,000 feet (7,315 m) with the help of some wing-mounted solar panels.

Of course, a motorized glider is a long way away from battery-powered commercial flights, but tests like this are an important step on the way to de-carbonizing one of the more impactful industries on the planet, as well as hopefully making it less expensive to operate aircraft in the way EVs are generally much cheaper to operate than their internal combustion equivalents. But the limiting factor to adopting solid state batteries isn’t going to be implementation but rather the discovery of a cost effective way to manufacture them at scale. It’s the same reason we haven’t seen mass adoption of things like algae-based biodiesel or economic carbon capture yet.