IBM research proposes putting old laptop batteries to use in slums

IBM's Indian research lab has come up with the idea of putting old laptop batteries too feeble to power a ThinkPad as off-grid power sources, The Register reported.

In a paper titled ''UrJar: A Lighting Solution using Discarded Laptop Batteries'', IBM and Radio Studio India researchers explain, ''Forty percent of the world's population, including a significant portion of the rural and urban poor sections of the population in India, does not have access to reliable electricity supply.''

As against this in other parts of the world, people were increasingly tossing out old laptop batteries. While many countries were finding ways to process the resulting e-waste, the authors cite various sources to explain that lithium ion batteries required much greater effort to recycle than to manufacture. Re-use, rather than recycling, was therefore the preferred option.

In the paper the researchers propose a device called an ''UrJar'' that would be charged when an electrical grid was on and which would pack enough juice to power a light bulb at night. UrJars comprise old laptop arrays batteries, re-assembled into viable rigs that despite being too feeble to run a laptop, in concert with several other such batteries, could provide a few hours of power for a light, fan or USB charger.

The study presented at a conference in San Jose, US, analysed a sample of discarded batteries and found 70 per cent packed enough power to keep an LED light going over four hours a day for a year, PTI reported.

The researchers said many of the estimated 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries discarded every year could provide electricity storage sufficient to light homes in developing countries.

It was possible to combine LED lights with solar panels and rechargeable batteries, however, using discarded batteries could make the approach much cheaper, according to MIT Technology Review.

According to Vikas Chandan, a research scientist at IBM lab's Smarter Energy Group, who led the project, the most costly component in these systems was often the battery.

In this case, the most expensive part of your storage solution was coming from trash.

Opening discarded laptop battery packaging, the IBM group extracted individual storage units called cells, which they then tested individually to pick out the good ones and recombined them to form refurbished battery packs.
 
They then added charging dongles as also circuitry to prevent overheating. They gave them to five users in Bangalore who lived in slums or operated sidewalk carts. When contacted three months later the users said that the battery packs had worked well.