First Silver-Zinc Battery Demo’ed at IDF 2008

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Tech News
• Date: Aug 24,2008

Lithium-ion battery overheating, explosions, fires, whatever … they’re no secret. Whether it’s iPods, cell phones, PSPs, or laptops, it’s not all that uncommon.

ZPower, who’s been talking up their silver-zinc battery technology for a while, demonstrated the technology for the first time at IDF 2008 last week.

ZPower claims their batteries will offer 20 – 40% more computer time per charge than lithium-ion batteries. And even more on the positive side, they are free from explosiveness, as well as being free from toxic materials:

ZPower silver-zinc batteries have an intrinsically safe water-based chemistry that contains no lithium or flammable solvents. Unlike lithium-ion and lithium-polymer batteries, ZPower batteries are free from the problems of thermal runaway, fire, and danger of explosion. ZPower batteries are also free from the regulations that limit the size of lithium-containing batteries on airplanes.

In addition to offering high-performance and safety, ZPower batteries use an environmentally friendly chemistry that allows battery cells to be recycled and the contents reused. Unlike other traditional batteries, ZPower batteries have no heavy metals and no toxic chemicals. That means silver-zinc is green-clean.

As someone who carries around (sometimes) a Dell XPS M1730, realizing I am not going to get much usage out of the battery, I’d love to see this tech become reality. And, at IDF, the company said it has signed a deal with “one of the major” PC makers to use its silver-zinc batteries in a notebook line slated for 2009. Now that would be great, except that 2009 could be as long as 16 months away.