dell battery tips

Time change perfect for battery change
As Missourians set their clocks ahead one hour this Sunday, State Fire Marshal Randy Cole is reminding everyone to also change the batteries in their smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors.

The semiannual time changes are great reminders to change the batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors,” Cole said.

At 2 a.m. Sunday, daylight saving time goes into effect, and most of the U.S. “springs ahead” one hour.

Recently, Yanqing County, with the Air Force chief of United Energy Technology Co., Ltd. signed a letter of intent, the Air Force’s long-established Beijing the same time zinc - air battery research center. The company assigned to the Badaling new energy industry base, it will invest 500 million yuan in the next three years to study the production of energy-saving environmentally friendly zinc - air battery.

It is reported that zinc - air batteries with energy density, long storage time, long life, stable performance, non-toxic harmless, low production costs, etc., is a very good energy storage material. Late last year, Yanqing County, a signed four billion yuan of new energy projects, including photovoltaic power generation, wind power generation, this zinc - air battery project introduction Yanqing expanded the field of development of new energy industries, as well as the city stretched the Yanqing The new energy industrial chain.

It is understood that the Air Force has a long city authorities signed an electric buses and electric cars sanitation project cooperation letter of intent, plans to produce 100 electric buses next year, the battery and 300 electric vehicle batteries sanitation by 2013 to achieve zinc — Air Battery large-scale production, reaching an annual output of 1000 and 1000 electric buses battery electric vehicle batteries the size of sanitation.

It’s happened to the best of us - you’re out and about and suddenly realize that your phone is about to die. We all love rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but they’re not exactly an easy power source to replace while on-the-go.

That’s where the Olice FvrOn mobile phone comes in. Available only in India (for now), it claims to be the country’s first dual-powered cell phone. That means that while it does come with a standard rechargeable battery, it can also be powered via a standard AAA battery.

The device also has a built-in FM tuner, a 1.5-inch color display, and a packed-in stereo headset.

Well, it’s certainly not an iPhone (you’d need 50 C batteries to charge that guy), but it is a novel idea for the minimalistic phone user. And it’s nice to see that the Energizer bunny is still relevant to some capacity.

The District Attorney’s office has filed a charge against Redlands East Valley High School athlete Tyler Shreve following his alleged Feb. 24 assault of a school baseball coach.

Shreve, 18, was charged Friday with one misdemeanor count of battery on a school official. He faces a $2,000 fine and up to one year in county jail if convicted, said Susan Mickey, spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office.

He is scheduled to appear in court on May 16 for an arraignment.

Calls seeking comment from Tony Shreve - Tyler’s father - were not returned Saturday.

The citation stems from an incident on campus involving Shreve and Head Baseball Coach James Cordes, who notified the 6-foot-4 senior he was being dismissed from the baseball team.

According to Tony Shreve, he pulled his son off Cordes after he “wrestled him to the ground.” He said no punches were thrown during the incident.

Cordes declined to comment on the incident.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies were called to the school to investigate, and acted on a citizen’s arrest at Cordes’ request.

The report was then forwarded to the San Bernardino District Attorney’s office.

Battery against a school employee could be classified as a felony, according to the California Penal Code. Prosecutors said the severity of Cordes’ injuries did not warrant a felony charge.

The Redlands Unified School

District has not yet released word on the results of a disciplinary hearing Wednesday to decide the consequences of Shreve’s actions.
At a Redlands Optimist Club meeting Thursday, Redlands East Valley Principal John Maloney refused to comment on the matter.

“I will talk to you about anything in the world, but I won’t talk to you about school,” he said.

Pat Hafley, athletic director for the Redlands Unified School District, also refused to comment during a brief phone conversation Saturday.

Shreve’s future in collegiate athletics is still in limbo.

He signed a letter of intent to attend the University of Utah after he was offered a football scholarship. Utah’s Head Football Coach Kyle Whittingham said the school will wait until the final resolution of the case before commenting on the status of Shreve’s scholarship.

As a quarterback at REV, Shreve passed for 4,732 yards and 54 touchdowns in helping the school compile a 33-4 record.

The U.S. Marshals Florida Regional Fugitive Task Force arrested a man Monday who is wanted on multiple assault and battery charges where he allegedly tried to strangle the victim several times while continuously beating her.

Foster Jermall Gibbs, 26, wanted by Escambia Sheriff’s Office was arrested at a home on Theresa Street in Pensacola. Deputy Marshals along with Task Force Officers from Escambia and Okaloosa Sheriff’s Offices, and a K9 Task Force Officer from Pensacola Police Department were assisted by Escambia Patrol deputies.

The warrant charges Gibbs with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery using a deadly weapon, domestic battery by strangulation, burglary with assault or battery and property damage.

According to police reports, Gibbs kicked in the front door of the victim’s house. He attacked the victim while she was in bed. The victim tried to run away several times but each time he caught her. The report also states that he kicked her and grabbed a knife from the kitchen and threatened to kill her. At one point, Gibbs supposedly used a piece of the broken door frame and struck the victim before she finally escaped. The report also indicates that the victim’s children were home during the attack. Gibbs was brought to Escambia County Jail.

“Because of the extreme threat of violence he posed to the community we made him public enemy #1 until we tracked him down and locked him up,” said Supervisory Inspector Ross Hebert with the Task Force.

MIDLAND, Mich., Feb. 25 (UPI) — Michigan economic development officials said Dow Kocam MI LLC has committed to a $294 million investment that would bring 320 full-time jobs to the state.

Dow Kokam MI is a joint venture of Dow Chemical Co. and TK Advanced Battery LLC that was formed last year, The Detroit News reported Thursday.

The Michigan Economic Development Corp. confirmed Dow Kokam MI had plans to build a 400,000 square-foot facility in Midland, Mich., for lithium-polymer battery production. The plant is expected to be up and running at full capacity by Feb. 2014, the News said.

The development corporation said the Dow Kokam MI project would receive $3.4 million in business tax abatement on top of $4.3 million in property tax breaks.

“This puts us a step closer to being the first advanced battery facility to break ground in the state,” said Dow Kokam MI spokeswoman Kristina Schnepf.

A University student told police former Georgia running back Knowshon Moreno knocked him out with a punch to the face in a downtown bar last Saturday.

Stephen Anderson, 18, filed a report with Athens-Clarke County Police Monday accusing Moreno, a running back for the Denver Broncos, of misdemeanor battery.

According to the report, Anderson said he was intoxicated at the time of the incident, so he is basing the account on what several witnesses told him after the fact.

The confrontation reportedly began when three males “jumped” Anderson, striking him in the back of the head and ear and tearing his shirt.

Later, as his friends were escorting him out of Bourbon Street Bar, Moreno reportedly ran up and punched Anderson once in the face, knocking him unconscious.

Although Anderson didn’t seek law enforcement or medical help at the time of the incident, he did go to the University Health Center the following Monday, where he was diagnosed with a concussion.

At press time, Anderson had provided the name of one witness, but he told police there are several who could identify Moreno.

Anderson declined to comment, and Moreno and representatives from the Broncos could not be reached Wednesday.

Microsoft is looking into why battery life on laptops is dramatically reduced when the computer is running Windows 7.

Some users have been complaining on Internet forums that battery life has gone from normal to short after a laptop is upgraded from an older operating system to Windows 7.

Some users say their computers can only last 15 to 30 minutes before they need to be plugged in.

Others report getting a warning from windows urging them to consider replacing the battery.

Microsoft acknowledged Tuesday that it is investigating the issue.

Behind a 2,000-pound blast door, federal researcher Peter Roth spends his days torturing electric-car batteries. He overcharges them, drives nails into them, presses them between scalding brass plates. He dunks them in salt water, sets them on fire, crushes them, drops them, dissects them. Again and again, he watches them explode.

The goal: To make sure all this mayhem happens in his lab—and not in your car. Because, as Mr. Roth says dryly, “One bad incident can spoil the public’s opinion.”

Electric cars are about to hit the market en masse: General Motors Co. plans to launch its Chevrolet Volt this fall; Nissan Motor Co.’s Leaf is slated to debut by December; and new gas-electric hybrids are in the works at Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit. Even BMW AG has an electric compact in the works. Nearly all are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which pack six times the punch of a standard lead acid car battery and more than twice as much as the nickel-metal-hydride batteries used in hybrids such as the Toyota Prius.

Lithium-ion batteries have been around for years in cellphones, laptops and other consumer electronics. Even on this small scale, the batteries have caused sporadic trouble; several computers have been recalled in recent years after their lithium-ion batteries were found to spontaneously catch fire. Scaling up the technology enough to power a car raises fresh safety and reliability questions.

Shoestring Operation
That’s where Mr. Roth comes in. In a windowless warren of small test bays—several singed with the soot from past explosions—Mr. Roth seeks to discover what can go wrong with different types of lithium-ion cells, and under what conditions. His guiding principle? “If you build it, it can fail.”

The abuse lab is located at Sandia National Laboratories, in a high-security building mostly used for nuclear research; the reception desk displays a small sign instructing couriers: “All explosives go to Room 1107.”

Much of Mr. Roth’s research is funded by the Department of Energy, which recently awarded the lab $4.2 million in stimulus money to upgrade equipment. Auto companies and battery makers also pay the lab directly for tests on proprietary technology. “It’s our key go-to national lab for abuse tolerance testing,” says Ted Miller, a senior manager of energy storage strategy and research at Ford Motor Co.

Mr. Roth’s lab for the most part studies lithium-ion batteries—from single cells that can be smaller than a tube of lipstick to full-size automobile battery packs weighing several hundred pounds. Then there are the thin silver pouch batteries, which look fit and trim when they are new but “swell up like a Jiffy-Pop bag when they go bad,” Mr. Roth says, pulling out badly charred, misshapen pouches.

He and his research partner, Chris Orendorff, emphasize that they are testing these batteries under worst-case scenarios, often after disabling internal controls. “Then we can develop strategies to mitigate those problems,” Mr. Orendorff says. “Knowledge is power.”

The lab, whose clients also include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. miliary and consumer-electronics manufacturers, relies on an unlikely mix of sophisticated equipment and home-made contraptions for research.

The scientists use a state-of-the-art accelerating rate calorimeter to measure the heat generated by various types of batteries when they begin to overheat and a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, which can cost about $50,000, to analyze the gases released as a battery breaks down after a catastrophic failure. Thanks to the stimulus funds, the lab will soon get a CT scanner, for peering inside single cells, and a thermal chamber to test how batteries react to extreme temperatures—anything from minus 70 to 200 degrees Celsius.

Yet the researchers rely on an old locomotive relay switch to perform other critical tests, such as the short circuit (a battery is hooked up and the switch is thrown closed, which causes an immediate and intense short circuit). They protect the hydraulic lines on another machine with crumpled tin foil. And their computing center looks like it was built in the 1980s and never updated. “It’s a bit of a shoestring operation,” Mr. Roth says.

Toxic Grit
With a shock of white hair, an unruly beard and impish eyes, Mr. Roth, 62 years old, looks every bit the mad scientist as he bounds through the lab reminiscing about disasters he has engineered. In one memorable test a few years back that didn’t involve lithium-ion technology, he overcharged a battery made of 48 cells lashed together, then exposed it to sparks. The cells immediately began venting a tremendous cloud of gas and then exploded like fireworks, ricocheting off walls and disintegrating so completely, nothing was left but a thick layer of grit so toxic that cleanup crews had to wear hazmat suits.

His report to the manufacturer was simple, Mr. Roth says: “Back to the drawing board.”

As for his test bay? “We put in a steel ceiling after that,” he says.

Making an Impact
Overcharging is one of Mr. Roth’s standard tests. He has repeatedly found failings in the electronic monitors that are supposed to deflect the current when the battery is full. That can cause overheating—known as “thermal runaway”—and explosions.

Armed with this data, battery manufacturers have developed a backup system of mechanical circuit breakers that interrupt the current flow when the battery’s temperature begins to climb to unstable levels.

The Sandia lab also compares the safety of various chemistries used for the positive and negative charge in a lithium-ion battery. Much of this information is confidential, but the researchers say that certain materials are clearly superior in terms of safety and that the industry is shifting in that direction.

“They’ve made a significant contribution to automotive technology,” says Menahem Anderman, president of Advanced Automotive Batteries, a consulting firm in Oregon House, Calif.

Mr. Roth’s lab has also dispelled some fears. Manufacturers worried, for instance, that if a car plunged off a bridge, its lithium-ion battery might electrify the water and shock first responders. Mr. Roth tested the scenario and dismissed the concern as unfounded.

Mr. Roth, who plans to retire this spring and turn over the lab to Mr. Orendorff, says that in more than a decade studying battery technology he has seen huge advances in safety and has been impressed by the industry’s attentiveness to his research.

So does he plan to buy a car powered by a lithium-ion battery? He hesitates. “I will certainly be inclined to buy one eventually,” he says. “But I am disinclined to buy the first of anything.”

The purpose of EGN 18 is to set safety standards and ensure that those who select, use and maintain batteries in broadcasting environments are aware of their responsibilities under BBC Requirements and the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989. It is intended to cover the selection, maintenance and disposal of batteries in all areas and in particular it will apply to Resources, N&R, DEC, F&L, Sport, News, World Service, Radio & Music, Siemens Business Services, Red-Bee Media and CBBC.
 
The batteries covered by this Guidance Note will be various types and will be found in:
 
Portable equipment such as audio recorders, camcorders (including DV cameras) and lightweight cameras used on location, in News, PSC (portable single camera), and OB work.
Power tools, test meters.
Various equipment for back up purposes (maintaining date, time information and set up).
Office equipment e.g. clocks, mobile phones, torches, remote controllers, laptops.
Portable lighting equipment.
Vehicles, including OB units, radio cars etc.
UPSs (uninterruptible power supplies).
Generators.
Emergency lighting battery cubicles.

This EGN replaces all previous safety documentation with regard to the selection, use and maintenance of batteries, issued by BBC Safety or by the former Engineering Management Safety Committee. It does not however, replace documents issued at Divisional or Departmental level, although such documents must neither conflict with nor set standards which are not as rigorous as those given here.