“When we talk about the things that constrain us in terms of the development of new products, there’s really two that I lose the most sleep over these days. One is batteries and one is displays,” says Steven Holmes, vice president of the New Devices Group and general manager of the Smart Device Innovation team at Intel. Despite demand for flexible batteries, Ho says no standard has been developed for measuring their flexibility, frustrating customers who want to compare chemistries. So the company built its own test rig and began benchmarking its batteries against commercial batteries that claimed to be flexible. Existing batteries failed catastrophically after fewer than 1,000 bending cycles, she says, while Imprint’s batteries remained stable. Imprint has also been in talks about the use of its batteries in clothes and “weird parts of your body like your eye,” Ho says. The company also recently began working on a project funded by the U.S. military to make batteries for sensors that would monitor the health status of soldiers. Other potential applications include powering smart labels with sensors for tracking food and packages.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 05:26:23 +0000
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