Installing New Electronics In An Old Home

Posted on: 20 April 2017

Although they have been around for years, batteries have always been updated and improved to offer greater reliability and longer lasting performance for particular industrial applications. Nothing has changed and, today, battery developers continue to make enhancements to their products. Here are some of the latest trends in battery products and what the future may hold for the industry.

Adaptable Batteries

Customisation is a term that is often spoken of in the professional battery world. Custom-made battery engineering offers certain benefits to developers of consumer electronics. Firstly, it allows research and development divisions to size the battery to the product they are prototyping. Led by the huge growth in mobile phone batteries, this approach overturns the traditional method of designing a product to meet the demands of a specifically sized battery pack. Increasing customisation will lead the way for batteries with unconventional shapes to be made which, in turn, offer a better fit for their given application.

Fewer Instances of Lithium?

It is fair to say that lithium polymer batteries altered the way in which consumer electronics operated when they first came out. Popular in things like camera batteries, lithium may still be around for a while, but more battery makers are looking for alternative technologies. This is due to the fact that a lithium battery will always need safety electronics to be provided in a consumer product, and this leads to additional costs for the manufacturer. They also afford less form factor flexibility than other battery types and are not really ideal for certain applications, such as disposable consumer products and certain medical gadgets.

Flexibility in Film

Flexible thin film batteries have been around for a few years, but many experts are betting that they will start to become better soon. Therefore, this technology will continue to be the mainstay of a number of battery development laboratories in the coming twelve months at least. Wearable electronics, so-called smart packaging solutions and a number of healthcare applications are all identified as relying on flexible thin film batteries, so the potential markets are huge if production costs can be brought down sufficiently.

Wireless Recharging

Already proving to be popular with consumers, battery packs which are able to be recharged without the need to plug them into the mains will continue to be developed. Indeed, some say that the future of battery technology will be based on the industry's ability to improve the speed and effectiveness of wireless recharging systems.