ReVolt Technologies
Energy storage
Staefa, Switzerland
Product description: advanced batteries
Employees 36
Year founded 2004
revolttechnology.com
Hearing aid-wearers, arguably more than any other users of technology, know just how important batteries are.
That's why they'll be very interested to learn that a small company based in Switzerland hopes to prolong the life of these batteries so that they can be recharged overnight and provide power for the best part of a year. ReVolt Technologies believes it has cracked an old problem in battery technology and managed to find a formula for creating rechargeable zinc-air batteries. The secret lies in the combination of materials used. Still in research and development, ReVolt hopes to go into commercial production of small batteries suitable for hearing aids in 2012 and to branch out soon afterwards into larger batteries, which could be used for a range of applications including laptops, power tools and electric vehicles.
Zinc, already used for non-rechargeable hearing aid batteries, is a plentiful, cheap metal. "Where lead is mined, you usually find zinc," says James P McDougall, chief executive officer and a 20-year veteran of the battery sector. By producing rechargeable zinc-air batteries, ReVolt believes it would broaden the applications in which they could be used. McDougall says that these batteries could sell "at about half the cost of [conventional] lithium-ion batteries" and prolong typical battery life "two or three times for a typical user". On a laptop, he thinks the technology could triple the time before recharging is generally needed up to about 24 hours "or even longer". For electric vehicles, he thinks the same energy could be provided but for about a fifth of current prices.
For mobile phones, however, this technology would not work, as many hearing aid-users probably already know. He says: "I'm not sure that our technology is best-suited for cellphones. They get stuck in people's pockets and the amount of airflow coming to them is limited," he says. "You can't suffocate our system. It needs to breathe."
ReVolt has just received $5m (£3.2m) from the US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it is opening up a research and development site in Oregon this year.
Rechargeable zinc-air batteries will not last forever in hearing aids, as the zinc tends to become damaged eventually through the recharging process. But changing batteries after nearly a year would clearly be more convenient than the 10-day cycles that many hearing-aid wearers have to accept now.
