Slashdot Mirror
Recharge Batteries in 30 Secs
An anonymous reader writes "NEC has developed organic radical batteries
which are recharged in 30 seconds. Good news, they won't (probably) cost more than the current NIMH batteries." Why is it that I'm not holding my breath to have this technology in a laptop?
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
April 2, 2004 (TOKYO) -- NEC Corp has developed a battery that can be recharged only in 30 seconds, company sources said. Called an organic radical battery, it can be recharged to the same level of power as that stored in nickel-hydrogen cells, which are widely used in digital cameras, portable MD players and other electronic devices.
It takes only about 30 seconds to recharge the battery enough to allow 80 hours of continuous operation of an MD player, compared with around an hour needed by conventional rechargeables, the company claims.
Because of its ability to recharge faster, the new battery, which stores power in a special resin, is expected to make radio-controlled toy cars, shavers and other products much more convenient to use.
The battery can also discharge power in a short time, making it useful in applications requiring a large amount of power.
NEC believes the battery can be used as an emergency power source for computers in case of blackouts as well as in hybrid cars driven by a gasoline engine and electric motor.
The company plans to convert existing production facilities into ones able to manufacture the new product. The company expects the price of the new battery to be about the same as nickel-hydrogen cells when mass production starts, since it does not contain any expensive materials.
NEC is also developing a recharger for the battery that can be used at home as well as working on a way to prevent excessive discharge of power from the cell.
The company will initially try to commercialize the technology for using the battery as an emergency power source for computers, according to sources at NEC.
You can see a picture of it here:
r o/
http://www.nni.nikkei.co.jp/FR/TNKS/TNKSHM/newp
It's a battery, it stores the energy chemically. Capacitors store it as an electric charge.
It's a non-issue with most existing batteries, so I guess these are similar. Batteries aren't that expensive and you'll get 1000+ charge cycles from them. That equates to several years of standard use from something that costs less than a can of coke, if these become unusable considerably faster than normal they wouldn't risk the bad publicity until they'd fixed it.
my laptop battery is a 4400 mAh at 14.8 V
/T
4.4 Ah * 3600 sek *14.8 -> 234432 Ws
(Whow a palindrome number... coool)
divide this at the recharge time
30 sek
~ 7.8 kW
I live in an appartment.
My outlets cant handle that much..
+ Needs heck of an transformer to handle that effect.
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
Found an old press release from '01 on NEC's web site documenting the discovery of this battery technology.
With this latest (today's) press release it sounds like they're finally ready for product.
Now, take the square of the charging current and multiply by the internal resistance. This gives the heat dissipation in watts.
The article gives no real numbers, but let's assume the battery can supply about 5 amp-hours. To get a full charge in 30 seconds, you would need a charging current of 600 amps (!!) Heat dissipation would be 360000 times the internal resistance of the battery -- in order to dissipate fewer than 10 watts the internal resistance would have to be less than 0.000028 ohms.
At 0.000028 ohms, and a made-up terminal voltage of 7 volts, you could draw 250000 amps out of such a battery when shorted. Jesus Christ. But those numbers came out of my ass. We need real values...
http://www2.electrochem.org/cgi-bin/abs?mtg=012&ab s=0186&type=pdf
Abs. 186, IMLB 12 Meeting, (C) 2004 The Electrochemical Society, Inc.
Organic Radical Battery:
Transition-metal free Lithium-ion Battery
Kentaro Nakahara, Jiro Iriyama, Shigeyuki Iwasa, Masahiro Suguro and Masaharu Satoh
Fundamental & Environmental Research Laboratories
NEC Corporation
References here and here.
Hmm, they may have some competition on the speedy recharge front, Moore improvements yet?
350 F, 2.5 V UltraCapacitors in D cell size from Maxwell Technologies.
We've been stuck with NiCad, NiMH for a while for Raido Control Aircraft... The Helicopters only get about 8 minutes of flying time on typical NiCads. Recently, LiPoly (That's Lithium Polymer) batteries were developed. They use the same technology of laptop batteries, but can discharge power at 5C or more, yielding flight times of 20-30 minutes. Unfortunatly, they cost about $200 on average... (High current is needed for the brushless electric motors that put out nearly 1 horsepower) The LiPoly's typically take 2 hours to charge to 80% charge of their energy density. The shorter flight times of NiMH wouldn't be bad if #1 they charged faster & #2 the could discharge faster. If your interested in electic helicopters and the like you can check out this site: http://www.ezonemag.com or http://runryder.com both have great info on electric models.
NIckel Metal Hydroxide. AN alternative to Nickel-Cadmium batteries developed in the last decade. More environmentally friendly.
If the battery will be cheap, it's because it will be cheap to make, not because it's a loss-leader to sell chargers.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I saw no mention of the level of heat generated when charging a battery this fast. I haven't worked out any equations, but I was under the impression that there was a certain amount of heat generated per unit of time when charging / discharging batteries.
That depends on the efficiency of the charging process in the battery.
The heat generated is the main limit on charging rate, so I suspect that these puppies have VERY little internal loss when being charged.
The result will be that even when packaged you won't have a lot of problems with charging heat. If they don't get hot enough to damage the "organic resin" in their own guts, your nearby circuitry should be safe.
This also implies low losses for the total cycle. That will be very good for the automotive application. As will the lack of anything rarer than Nickel in their construction.
Nickel-cadmium would have been much better than lead-acid for automotive starter batteries - but that never took over for that service. That's because, if you wanted to put a NiCad starter battery into every car in service even back in the '60s there just wasn't enough readily-minable cadmium reserves known to do the job. It only appears in nature as an impurity in zinc. (So don't even think of making enough NiCad batteries to replace the engines).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
STFU!
RTFA!
In 30 seconds of reading you can find out that NEC estimates up to 80 hours in MD players.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
To get a full charge in 30 seconds, you would need a charging current of 600 amps (!!)
But those numbers came out of my ass. We need real values...
Yes, the recharge current for a 5 Ahr battery would be at least 600 Amps. If the laptop battery runs at 14 volts, that means that one would need at least a 8400 watt recharger - a solid 70 Amps on a 120 AC circuit.
As for heat, its more likely that the battery will dissipate a percentage of the input as heat. My understanding is that batteries are only about 80% efficient during a recharge -- suggesting that the fast-charge batteries will dissipate at least 1680 watts. In reality, cell resistance will make this even worse.
Ultra fast charging is a nice idea, but, except with very small batteries, this is not at all practical.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
30 seconds eh? My laptop battery (HP Pavilion Notebook) delivers 11.1 volts and holds a charge of 3.8 amp-hours. Lets do a little math.
3.6 amp-hours * 3600 seconds/hour = 12960 amp-seconds
12960 amp-seconds * 11.1 volts = 143856 watt-seconds
As a US resident, I'll be charging from a 120 volt source. I'll skip the AC to DC intricacies and for the sake of simplicity I'll also assume a 1:1 charging efficiency (i.e. no energy lost to heat).
143856 watt-seconds / 30 seconds ~= 4800 watts
4800 watts / 120 volts = 40 amps
Now, your typical household circuit is 15 amps. Try to charge that laptop battery in 30 seconds and you're going to throw the breaker.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Samsung is promising this one sometime this year - 10 hours on a single shot of methanol - if only i could do the same ;)
I use them in all of my portable devices (mp3 players, digital camera, minidisc, discmans etc) and they are by far the best battery I've ever used.
Full charge in 15 minutes, or i believe it's a 75% charge in eight minutes. I know wal-mart carries them...check them out.
Well, that would be assuming you had recharging stations along the way. As you don't the limited battery capacity is really the limiter of the distance an electric car can go. Hybrid cars, on the other hand, recharge and exhaust batteries repeatedly in any given drive. The ability to absorb a large amount of energy and return it at will would be ideal.
The ______ Agenda
Not necessarily; there are some practical problems with this kind of charger. Consider that a typical AA NiMH battery has a charging capacity of about 2 Ah at a voltage of 1.2 V. That's 2 Ah * 3600 s/h * 1.2 V = 8640 J. To charge that in 30 seconds, you need 8640 J / 30 s = 288 W, and that's assuming no losses anywhere. If you want to recharge 4 batteries at a time, you'll need a charger that draws 10+ amps of 120 VAC. A single D battery can have a capacity of up to 11 Ah, so you'd need about 1600 W to recharge one in 30 s. That means that a dual battery charger would draw over 25 amps at 120 VAC. Since most wall sockets are only rated at 15 amps, you'd need a dedicated circut for your charger! It's not an insurmountable problem, but it would make this style of battery a bit less practical.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I think this might have something to do with that decision:
NEC is also developing a recharger for the battery that can be used at home as well as working on a way to prevent excessive discharge of power from the cell.
It looks like right now the battery is good for high amp charge/discharge but they still need some work to safely power low amp devices.
From the discussions below, one also gets the impression that this thing needs one hell of a charger to charge it in thiry seconds which would explain why they are still working on a home charger.
But this looks really promising. Other documents mention that organic radical batteries are being researched because they are more enviromentally friendly , and because they could have a better energy density. And now this article says they have quick recharge and near capacitor like discharge capability, and are competitively priced. I don't know how many of these properties this particular battery has, but it would be pretty amazing if it had all of the above. You'd think that they would have mentioned it in the press release though, so I have to assume not.
Read the article again, it isn't an MP3 player, it is a minidisc player. That is a huge difference. My lowend mp3 player runs for ~10hrs on a single AA battery, compare that to a minidisc player that runs for ~50hrs on a single AA battery. There is a world of difference between these two devices.
Fear trumps hope and ignorance trumps both
One of the nice things about NiCads is that you can get them to discharge very quickly, making R/C racers stuck with the bloody things.
These batteries will absolutely revolutionize R/C car racing, virtually obsoleting fuel cars, except for those that get off on the sound.
Extrapolate.
Yes, that causes issues. I once saw a guy cut a screwdriver nearly in half when he acidentally shorted his pack (on the other hand being able to make an emergency spot weld from a battery pack could be held to be a virtue in some situations).
And I've seen battery packs that were pushed so hard that their solder connections melted.
But racing is like that, and there are other applications where a high discharge rate is the primary virtue being looked for.
KFG
The total heat lost to resistance is proportional to the charging current, so you would be better off using the same power to charge your entire battery string at a lower current than to charge cells individually at higher current. The higher voltage probably makes it easier to make a high-efficiency charger also.
On another note, I can't help but notice that this is another development from NEC, which developed the proton-polymer battery. I have heard nothing about the proton-polymer battery since the press release some years ago, and maybe this is why: the resin technology is better suited for typical uses.
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
If you know where to get AA batteries with 2Ah of capacity you are soon to be a rich man. The RC Plane community will beat a path to your door. FYI, AAs never hold over 1Ah, and usually far less than that depending on quality.
1. Ground power. The airplane can plug into ground power when it's on the ramp to avoid drawing on the storage batteries when neither the APU nor the engines are generating electricity.
2. Storage batteries. For emergencies and for use during preflight until the APU gets going.
3. APU. A small turbine that drives a generator to provide electricity during preflight or in emergencies. Can also provides bleed air for starting engines.
4. Generators or alternators driven off of the engines. There is a gearbox attached to the engine that takes power off of the shaft and delivers it to things like generators and hydraulic pumps.
NiMH batteries are actually very low energy density: an alkaline battery has like 3400-4000 mAh (for low discharge currents - an alkaline's main problem is its high internal resistance, which means pathetically low energy density for high discharge currents).
Lithium batteries have the energy density of alkalines (3000 or so mAh), and even higher discharge currents than NiMH, but not rechargable in the AA packages (Yes, lithiums are best for digital cameras).
AAA alkaline and lithiums will easily hold 1000 mAh - without even being well-designed (NiMH AAAs typically hold between 400-700 mAh).