Battery booster

MP3 players, phones and hand-held games devices are particularly unforgiving when it comes to battery performance. These gadgets require a decent level of current when draining the battery, which is tricky if you're concerned about battery life. Japanese electronics giant Hitachi, like the rest of us, wants it all: more juice and a longer life.Common alkaline batteries have a positive electrode of manganese oxide and a negative electrode of finely powdered zinc, which has a large surface area to maximise the rate of discharge. The flaw with this system is that, during discharge, a layer of zinc oxide forms around each grain of zinc, which acts as an insulator, degrading the overall performance.Hitachi's solution is to replace the zinc with a fine powder of zinc/aluminium alloy. The beauty of this is that the aluminium tends to displace zinc within the zinc oxide layer. And the electronic nature of aluminium (it has a higher valence than zinc) frees up electrons within the zinc oxide, making it a much better conductor. This gives the battery better staying power and means there should be no stopping those drumming bunnies now.