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?

Comments

Picture

[Fortress]

You can see a picture of it here:

http://www.nni.nikkei.co.jp/FR/TNKS/TNKSHM/newpr o/

more info

[vittal]

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

Re:Moore's Law?

[robslimo]

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.

Re:perhaps you assume too much

[rgmoore]

if it was electricity, wouldn't the creation of a recharger be trivial?

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.