By Li Fangfang and Mitch Moxley (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-01-14 17:16

　　

Tired of cursing your laptop for giving out early? Struggling to find the power outlet at your favorite Starbucks? Worried your battery might die at any moment?

Boston-Power, Inc, has a solution: a next generation lithium-ion battery for laptops - a battery that lasts longer, charges faster and is better for the environment.

The battery, known as Sonata, "is reliable in a way that consumers have never seen before, with a lifecycle as long as the computer", says Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Boston-Power, an emerging United States-based developer of lithium-ion batteries for portable devices.

"That means high-end business users who consume two or three, even five to six batteries with every laptop, will be able to have one battery that lasts the life of their laptop."

According to Lampe-Onnerud, the Sonata battery can reach an 80 percent charge in as little as 30 minutes and can be fully charged in an hour without degrading cell performance. Current batteries typically take as much as an hour to reach 80 percent power in a fast-charge cycle that can reduce cell performance by 60 to 80 percent in 300 charge cycles.

The Sonata line of batteries "will not fade" for three years, while today's batteries fade after just six months, Lampe-Onnerud tells China Business Weekly during a recent trip to Beijing with a clean-energy trade mission led by US Assistant Secretary of Commerce David Bohigian.

Boston-Power plans to bring the Sonata battery to market this year. The company has held talks with major players in the notebook industry, including Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, but has yet to publicly announce any customers.

That could bode well for Boston-Power. Notebook PCs are increasingly replacing desktops and the trend is expected to accelerate from 2007 to 2011, according to US data tracking firm IDC.

It forecasts that global laptop shipments could grow to 116 million units this year compared to around 93 million last year.

Besides a longer lifecycle, one of the Sonata's main selling points is safety. Boston-Power uses proprietary safety features that include slower chemical kinetics, current interrupt devices, thermal fuses and pressure relief vents.

"When a battery generates power, it also generates chemical gases. In the traditional battery, after the gas pressure accumulates to saturation, a blast can occur at any time," she says.

However, adding vent holes in the battery lid and using nickel-plated steel reduces the battery's melting point, Lampe-Onnerud explains.

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