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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?
So, 7.5 seconds in 18 months?
. . . they're only available in "A" and "B" cells.
Stefan
Now I know why I use glasses ... thought it said "orgasmic radical batteries". Whew! Was wondering about the charge my laptop was about to get!
Somehow I get a picture in my mind of Japanese engineers studying how Berkeley hippies have the energy for university classes AND for protesting every cause under the sun. :)
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
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.
30 sec to charge--but how long do they last?
...a use for those outlets in airplane bathrooms.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Not only at the laptop but that would be really usefull at cellphones and nobreaks (!?).
Is it powered by coffee too?
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 mean so I can even get first posts when the power is out?
Though I'm curious with something...
Will this be plagued by the Mysterious Memory Effect of Rechargeable Batteries?
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
I don't know much about batteries but there is a certain number of charging cycles the rechargable batteries can handle and after which they die(or performance becomes poor). I wonder how they address this issue.
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.
The bad news is that they start to pulsate gamma radiation, require the sacrifice of an unborn child conceived during a full moon and each recharged battery causes an angel to lose his or her wings.
Please, think of the angels!
Hate me!
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.
so...the batteries will be cheap, but the recharger will be the moneymaker? Am i correct in my assumption.
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.
I'm suprised the first thing they're shooting for is the UPS market. I would have thought a bigger market would have been standard-sized batteries (AA, AAA, etc)
The article itself mentions many other uses, including RC cars, digital cameras, etc...
Guess they know their market better than I do.
Unless they have a 100% conversion of source electricity to storage these batteries are going to have very limited capacities. Imagine how much heat a 1200mAh battery would give off if only 90% of the charge is actually stored and the rest goes to waste heat during that 30 second charge cycle.
One of the nice things about current batteries is that you can't get them to discharge very quickly. Shorting these out might cause excessive heat issues.
So fast discharge is allowed as well...
At first, I thought of quick-charging camera flashes. Maybe even video with flashes? But then I started thinking about railguns and emp devices...
Actually, being able to drain batteries very quickly is an advantage. Nickel-cadmium batteries are popular in R/C applications because of this. With a lower internal resistance, these batteries will be able to provide a massive jolt of power.
...
NEC is ... working on a way to prevent excessive discharge of power from the cell.
So, it can be used to discharge a great amount of power, but the trick is keeping it from doing so when you don't want it to!
I wonder what the polerisation and memory effects will be though. Most rechargable devices are pretty good (have acceptabl life times) when new, 6 months in the battery usage level has falled to almost unacceptable levels. As an example Sony only waranties batteries for 1 month! If they offer 80 times more storage but die off to 1 times storage in 6 months, this would infact be worse, because devices would be made to "use" the extra power.
James
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.
Because carrying around a human being in a por with life sustaining fluids being pumped in through tubules and feeding a fake virtual world to imprint on his consciousness until he realizes that he's not living in the real world after taking the right pill is just not as portable as today's batteries. ;P
Un-news
The article states it is good for Hibrid cars what about electrical ones. I thought a Major problem with electric cars is the time it takes to recharge thus making them impractical in long drives.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Ow! Hot! Hothothothot!
Why is it that I'm not holding my breath to have this technology in a laptop?
Hmm... Lets look at the numbers here... I'll use the numbers for my trusty 17" powerbook.
The power supply for charging the battery puts out about 60 Watts of power. The article mentions that instead of taking an hour to charge, these batteries only take half a minute. That's 120 times the power, which means the total power used by a charger for my laptop using these batteries would be...
7200 Watts! Holy hairdryers batman! With power consumptions like this, your athelon wouldn't be the only thing that's ON FIRE in your laptop!
And remember where we like to keep our laptops!
Cheers,
Justin
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. ==> *
And also how long will the batter life last? I don't wanna change batteries on my cellphone/laptop more than I havta change my underwear.
Also, if this thing catches on, could this be used in electric cars, maybe as the 'oil for the new millenium'? All we could have to do is charge every once in a while, and change batteries every weekend.
Is that National Institute of Mental Health (I'm serious; I don't know what it means. (I know it's NOT that!))?
If we assume that these batteries have a capacity of 1000 mah, which seems like a reasonable figure since they say they can power an MP3 player for 80 hours, then charging it in 30 seconds implies that during the charging process it is accepting 120 watts.
a) That's not going to be any tiny little wall transformer doing the charging.
b)I sure hope they have the safety and quality assurance issues worked out, because if it doesn't shut off at the exact instant when the battery is fully charged, that 120 watts is going to go somewhere.
It might not be much more dangerous than a firecracker but I suspect it could be pretty dramatic.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If you've ever had the misfortune of keeping a server up and running while there is major construction going on nearby, you know you can get multiple blackouts of varying duration.
I like to use a UPS to support a server to the last safe second with enough time for an orderly shutdown... but I can't, because I need to know the UPS will last through at least two consecutive blackouts without time to recharge.
Now, with a 30 second recharge, servers under my care could survive twice the blackout duration without increasing the risk of a sudden shutdown.
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.
Occasionally these organic radical batteries will burn down your SUV and they're constantly complaining every time you eat pork chops or wear fur.
perhaps a 30 second recharge means, opening a cap, dumping the contents, and refilling it.. (no heat involved)
note the words organic and resin
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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
A good compliment to my current laptop battery which, at 3 years of age, discharges in under 30 seconds.
References here and here.
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.
Article seems to speak nothing of the size of these things (I'm thinking BIG). Otherwise, since the marketing is looking at 'emergency' power, air batteries come to mind. Perhaps these things don't recharge very many times before dying a permanant death (less usefull than Nickel-Cadnium).
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
Well, just because you _can_ charge them in 30 seconds doesn't mean you _have to_.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
With all the improvements in technology, the only thing majorly lagging has been battery performance -- something critical as we're going mobile everything. The only reason I've never bought a laptop is because the damn things die so fast that there's basically no point when you can just wait until you get back to your desktop. All this fuel-cell/fission battery nonsense has struck me as vaporware at best, I hope this is for real.
My question is if a battery can be refilled that fast, how much juice is needed for the job? More than what a 12-volt adapter would put out? If it's small enough, you could conceivably put your own "Stratotanker" in your suitcase and refill your batteries on the road with no need for a power outlet.
Oh yeah, and all these silly electric cars could now become practical. You could recharge your vehical faster than a conventional gas pump. Way to go, NEC! Bring on the radical batteries.
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
It takes me about 10 days of listening to rolling surf sipping rum drinks with little umbrellas to recharge my organic batteries.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
How big are these batteries compared to standard laptop cells? Would it be possible to expand in the other direction, by keeping the charge time around today's levels but greatly increasing the discharge time? I wouldn't mind charging my laptop for the usual 3 or 4 hours if I can use it for a day or more without having to plug in again.
Somebody mentioned heat generation. What about other issues regarding the current? If that much energy were to be drawn from a single power socket in my house in 30 seconds, something would break. Even if it had wires thick enough and some cooling unit for the battery, a fuse would break. How do they deal with this?
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.
Pretty much anyone using rechargeables has at least one extra set so that there's always a fresh pair to swap to when the ones you're using runs out. In that scenario even halfing the recharge time doesn't matter a bit.
Actually it's vs 1 HOUR so it's a factor of 120 reduction (as others have pointed out).
The real point, though, is that they've got the charging time down to less than the time it takes to swap in a fresh set of batteries. So no need to swap any more. Just do a "pit stop" with the fat electric cord in place of the fat pump hose. B-)
(Unfortunately that won't work for a REAL car, which will take a bit longer to charge even if the batteries are capable of better. You're looking at something like a thousand megawatts to charge one of those in a minute. Even if you included a small nuke plant at each filling station, the mag fields around the charging cables might bend the sheet metal. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'll point out that home circuit breakers blow around 10 to 15 amps, so it would be physically impossible to run such a charger off a normal house circuit (and illegal and dangerous if you modified the fuses to allow it).
i remember readng an article once that said if battery technology had advanced over the last 50 years as fast as electronics has (smaller/more power) that by today, a battery the size of a watch battery would be able to power your house.
its nice to see any kind of advancement in the powercell area
Direct solar power. Battery is for the cops.
--
make install -not war
180W can be over 100C [hint: an 80W Athlon can hit over 100C].
That may be bad for a battery to be running that hot.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Thus the battery holds about 1.2 * 3600 * 1.2 = about 5KJoules.
90% charge efficient means 500Joules as heat.
E = c * m * delta_T
where c = specific heat capacity, m = mass, delta_T = temperature change.
According to Sony, a AA battery is 30g. I don't know what the specific heat capacity of a battery is, but metals are between 0.1 and 0.9, and water is 4. Lets assume it's 1.0 J/gK.
delta_T = E/c*m = 500/(1.0 * 30) = 16 celcius.
That's about 30F for those of you who like odd units. Not such a big deal.
Of course the 90% number is drawn out of the air.
All these assumptions are made presuming that the battery will be recharged by a convential current flow recharger. There is nothing that suggests that the charging isn't done with some electric/magnetic field mechanism instead (read: alignment of magnetic domain, redistribution of charge in a lattice, etc...)
Well, 30 seconds for a laptop might not be so reasonable, but how about ten minutes? It seems that if the technology is there for such an ultrafast recharge, it should be possible to slow it down (obviously only very special 120VAC outlets in the US will allow you to draw 70 amps). This would knock down our consumption to a much more reasonable 3.5 amps for ten minutes. Still quite a few watts, but not as unreasonable.
Also, laptop batteries have multiple cells. Perhaps they could be charged in series in an ordering such that adjacent batteries were not recharged in direct sequence, spreading the 'hot spots' out over time.
There seem to be a lot of ways to potentially slow down the recharge to make the technology more reasonable/scalable, while still having a relatively fast recharge. I'd love to be able to recharge my laptop in the ten minutes between classes, or go halfway in five. It would extend my percieved battery life incredibly. Getting to an outlet for a few minutes at a time is easy. An hour or two is more difficult, as lecture halls aren't wired.
I like the direction this is going...
Brian
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
I use a system almost like the one you guys describe, except instead of a giant capacitor I have a spare set of batteries, and instead of using it to charge the drained batteries, I just take it out of the charger and put the drained set in its place. Voila, I have a new fully charged set of batteries in about ten seconds.
Man, I'm way ahead of the technology curve.
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.
You can also measure the resistance of your body by sticking paperclips into the wall receptable and measuring the time it takes for you to catch on fire.
Hmm. Imagine these become popular as UPS devices (computers, buildings, etc). Then, there is a huge blackout that drains them down. At that point, the power comes back on.
Suddenly, there is a massive surge far greater than the power usage before the power outage as all these UPS devices suck down power trying to recharge in 30 secs.
Wham! There goes the power again. Rinse. Repeat.
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA