Main content

Battery Matters

What are businesses doing to reinvent the battery?

Out of juice?

Perhaps the biggest problem facing makers of new technology is battery power.....or lack of it. The battery is so critical that engineers design handheld devices around the battery, rather than the other way round. It's not just mobile phone and wearable technology manufacturers that are striving for longer lasting batteries, the electric vehicle is stalling (so to speak) because of the short distances between recharging and a limited service life of the battery.

So what are businesses doing to reinvent the battery? Is an average annual gain in capacity of 6% really the best we can do?

We'll ask whether Lithium-Air batteries can revitalise the electric car market, explore whether flexible graphene batteries and solar cells hold the key to enhancements in mobile phone battery life and look at the 3D printing of micro batteries the size of a grain of sand.

Available now

30 minutes

Last on

Sun 4 May 2014 21:30

Contributors to this programme

David Cleevely

Founding Director of the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University

Ìý

Ìý

John McCann

mobile phone and tablet reviewer for TechRadar.com

Ìý

Ìý

Doron Myersdorf

CEO of Storedot

Ìý

Ìý

Donald Sadoway

Professor of Materials Chemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston

Ìý

Ìý

Georg Ell

Tesla country director for the UK and Ireland

Ìý

Ìý

Professor Emile Greenhalgh

from the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial College London

Ìý

Ìý

Professor Milo Shaffer

from the Department of Chemistry at Imperial College London

Ìý

Broadcasts

  • Thu 1 May 2014 20:30
  • Sun 4 May 2014 21:30

Download this programme

Subscribe to this programme or download individual episodes.