Originally Posted by
Cynical Sid
The trouble with new battery developments is that the driving force is increased power density. That is the opposite of safety. With lithium batteries, the power density is already similar or even higher than some explosives. The time will come when the power storage capacity of devices has to be limited and not just for aviation safety. So manufacturers will have to do more work on efficiency. Maybe future mobile devices will have to be plugged to an external supply to realise their full potential in terms of processing speed and screen brightness. That would be progress
There's more to this than energy density...A typical candle that you might put on your dinner table stores more energy than a stick of dynamite, but the rate at which it can deliver that energy is limited. Batteries with a huge energy storage capacity are not inherently dangerous, until they try to deliver all of that energy in a hurry, in which case they become extremely dangerous. Rate limits can be imposed by circuitry external to the battery itself (the simplest example being a fuse), but that doesn't address the question of internal malfunction. The safest batteries would be ones in which the internal chemistry somehow imposed an inherent limit on the rate at which the battery's stored energy could be delivered.