- New research examines battery degradation in different devices
- Design might make more of an impact than you expect
- Understanding the issues might lead to longer-lasting tech
It looks like it’s official: batteries may well be running out of juice at an unpredictable, somewhat alarming rate. And we’re not talking about the bunny-branded AAs you stick in the remotes of one of the best TVs.
Instead, new research suggests internal batteries are suffering from escalating battery degradation due to real-world factors that can’t easily be measured in a lab, with batteries in wireless earbuds used as the big test case example.
All lithium-ion rechargeable batteries will degrade and lose their maximum charge over time. but using X-ray infrared tech, international researchers at the University of Austin Texas (as reported by SciTechDaily) are trying to get to the bottom of why some devices devices may drop charge faster than you expect.
The quest to discover why lifetime battery length is now seemingly diminishing at a faster rate in buds was inspired by Yijin Liu’s frustrations with his headphones. After only wearing the right one, the associate professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering discovered “that after two years, the left earbud had a much longer battery life.”
This then prompted Liu to spearhead fresh research that has since been published in Advanced Materials (a weekly scientific journal that has been going for over three decades).
Batteries not included
According to the team’s findings, it appears real-world factors, such as sudden temperature changes and air quality can fundamentally damage long-term battery life in your favourite tech. And that’s despite the fact internal batteries are normally tested under extreme lab conditions.
Other internal components can also have a negative effect on earbuds battery health; such as the positioning of internal mics and other circuitry causing subtle conflicts with your buds’ battery chemistry.
The fact we all use wireless earbuds and our smartphones in vastly different environments under varying degrees of stress levels has led the researchers to rethink how they can redesign electronic devices to withstand a greater variety of real-world conditions.
“They [electronic devices] could be exposed to different temperatures,” says Guannan Qian, who posted the first paper as part of Yijin Liu’s study. “One person has different charging habits than another, and every vehicle owner has their own driving style,” which “all matters” according to Qian.
Cue a battery (sorry, not sorry) of experiments where Liu’s team joined forces with various international labs to learn more about real-life battery degradation. Working with the likes of Brookhaven National Laboratory’s National Light Source II (phew!), and France’s European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, their goal has to be to unearth the secrets of how and why batteries are reacting differently to real-world conditions compared to lab environments.
So what does this mean for you and the best earbuds going forward? Well, advanced X-ray imaging seems to hold the key. According to Brookhaven’s National Laboratory, physicist Xiaojing Huang believes that they must “understand the differences between lab conditions and the unpredictability of the real world and react accordingly” in order to “discover and develop new types of batteries,” according to Huang.
That's easier said than done, of course – solid-state batteries (generally considered to be the next big thing) remain elusive. But if Liu and his fellow energy-obsessed researchers can make progress in their experiments in how real-world factors affect – and in the case of earbuds in particular – diminish battery health, we can maybe at least make current batteries last longer. Or acknowledge more than ever the need for easily replaceable batteries, such as those in the Fairbuds.
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