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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
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.
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!
In a break from /. style I actually RTFA - it says 80 hours of MiniDisc use.
If that's accurate I want one for my iPod, I guess with less drive spinning than an MD it'd last even longer?
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!
Hopefully longer than the attention span of morons who can't read entire articles.
You can see a picture of it here:
r o/
http://www.nni.nikkei.co.jp/FR/TNKS/TNKSHM/newp
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.
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. ==> *
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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