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Toshiba's One-Minute-Recharge Li-ion Batteries
TheGuano writes "No idea if this is related to Altair's six-minute-charge Li-ions,, but Toshiba has just announced a similar Li-ion that recharges to 80% capacity in one minute, while losing only 1% total capacity after 1000 cycles. It's set to debut in 2006 for use in hybrid cars (my current Toshiba Satellite doesn't get very far on battery power, but it's a beautiful shade of blue), but 'should' make its way to other, hopefully smaller devices eventually."
From the New Scientist article: From the press release by Toshiba: It would be futile for Toshiba to try to mimic Altair, since the New Scientist article also states:
Hopefully that means your 1 hour of charge would net you at least 3 minutes ;)
Maybe this technology will allow the battery size to be reduced in hybrids. That would definitely cut some cost out of hybrids and make them more pocket friendly.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If you can put the same power into your battery in one minute that your laptop sucks out in two hours, it follows that, for that one minute, your battery sucks 120x the power. So, if your laptop uses 100W or power, you need 12 kW for a minute to recharge it. It's going to take a special circuit to deliver that power (100 amps at 120V).
If you read the article, you'd see that the battery looses 1% of life after 1000 charge cycles. So you can see they already last quite a bit longer than typical Li-Ion batteries.
When can I expect one of these beasts in my iPod!!??
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
The new battery can quickly store energy produced by locomotives and automobiles.
So, they intend to use these in large scale applications. I wonder how that would work out on a train that has to climb a long grade, then decend for miles. On the decent, the batteries charge up quickly, then the power is available for the next upgrade.
I can see where they would want to show these batteries off in cars and trains before bringing them to our favorite Toshiba Laptop.
Concerning laptop power, don't we have fuel cells being tested in laptops that would do better than these batteries?
Those are supposed to last all day.
Rapidweather's Linux Screenshots.
NiCd and NiMH cells, on the other hand, last longer, especially if not being charged and discharged a lot.
You're not getting it. Just because the battery is capable of absorbing 80% of it's total capacity in a minute doesnit mean it must.
The real benefit here is from having a battery that is very efficient at absorbing energy in a situation where energy comes inconsistantly in intermittent intervels.
See, hybried cars charge the car battries when
1) The gas engine is running at such a situation where part of the power is used to run the car and part of it to charge it.
2) When the car is breaking.
So, when both situations occur isn'ty all that predictable and depends on the drivers driving style, meaning that the battery cannot get it's charge in a slow and steady stream but in occasional big gulps.
The problem with the big gulp today is that if the gulp is big enough and the battery can't take it, energy is going to waste. So this new battery solves that problem by giving the battery the ability to drink up energy faster then the car can generate it.
And if the reverse is true and the battery can discharge as fast, imagine what it can do for acceleration.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Short Answer: No
lithium batteries can take a fast charge, up to a point, after that most chargers (or is it the internal circuitry) will switch to a slower charge rate.
this is done to avoid thermal runaway = disaster.
with good cooling, most rechargeables can handle a very high recharge rate (Cx2 or Cx4) till around 75% capacity, but you'll need to slow charge 'em to reach 100%
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The braking force exerted by a motor/generator is proportional to the load on it. Many diesel-electric locomotives brake by shunting the drive motors into a dynamic braking grid (actually a humongous resistor) which provides resistive loading on the motor/generators. In the case of hybrid cars, the batteries can only absorb so many amps, and therein lies the limitation of their regenerative braking.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Yes motors and generators are essentially the same thing. However a generator is not a motor spinning backwards. A generator is a motor that is being spun by an external power source.
Connect a motor to a powersource and it will start to turn. Connect the output shaft to an input that is powered (a turbine for example), and the motor will try generate power. However the motor is still turning the same direction, it is just being driving faster than the electrical input would make it go, so it is putting out electric power.
Lithium Ion/Poly batteries charge using "constant voltage" charge, so the last 20% often takes as long as the first 80% (because the voltage difference between the charge source and the batter gets smaller and smaller meaning less power is being transferred for a unit of time).
:-\
I know with my aircraft, we use LiPoly batteries and it's a real curse to sit there and watch your batteries race to 60~70% charge in 30 minutes only to then sit back for another hour waiting for the rest
Paul.
Probably you would want actually to stop from 60MPH in about 3.5 seconds, and also you would not likely need to dissipate all the energy as generated electricity.
The real trouble is that I was being consevative with the energy. An actual car would need to be able to handle a panic stop from 80 MPH plus. So you have to double all your numbers.
And you have to be pretty conservative with you current ratings, since you may have just done a full-throttle acceleration up to that 80MPH.
I think there's probably a point of dimishing returns after you're getting a certain percentage your breaking force from regnerative breaking.
(Consider the extra weight of all the equipment to handle a full panic stop, vs that percent of the time that you're actually going to use it.)
Also consider the bigger wires, motors and batteries add weight, which in turn makes stopping harder.
Life is too short to proofread.
If the loss rate is 1% every 1000 charge cycles that is 20,000 charge cycles to get to 80%. If it works like that then these would have replacement timelines on the order of engine rebuilds/replacement.
Ok now I want my T-zero with these batteries in it.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Chemical batteries and capacitors may both store electrical energy, but they are very different. Batteries have a much larger capacity while caps have historically been able to to discharge vastly more quickly. In fact caps are capable of discharging 100% in a second or less, producing very high power levels. Having batteries that can discharge faster can allow them to be used in applications that used to require caps.
Electric motors bring true 4x4 power to cars. Don't know how that can be done? Look here about Variable Speed Drives http://www.psnh.com/Business/SmallBusiness/Motor.a sp
Now about recharging, well, true, it will be hell of a lot of current on the battery cells. But that does NOT mean a lot of current in the input. If you want to recharge a 100Ah 24V battery, that's about 24*100=2.4kWh and recharge in 1 minute, you need to provide
ASIDE: Motor effiency is >>95%, not some 70% crap. Even if you have have physical gears, you get >90% efficiency for the entire drive train. http://www.tech-m4.com/eng/tm4transport/moto_centr almotor/
The answer is high voltage input and it can be done. Especially in the US/Canada where power is distributed at high votage (ie. no need to worry about melting transmission lines).
Anyway, the battery cannot be recharged this way because the wires feeding the battery would melt, although more research in superconductors could fix this problem.
What's the point of your post? Haven't you heard of S-curves? This technology will not replace internal combustion engines overnight, but if the capacity is sufficient for certain customers, the adoption will gradually increase, supporting additional R&D investments. Eventually both cost and performance will be better than those of existing technologies.
Complaining that it haven't happened yet is ridiculous.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
There are good and bad things that come from battery technology finally making some headway:
The Good: Efficient transportation,
are you nuts?
I recently bought a car that was designed in the 1980's that regularly get's more gas mileage than a honda Insight.
It's a Geo Metro with a 955cc engine. After adding low rolling resistance tires and adjusting steering camber to 0 (just like the honda) I get on average 58mpg. I have yet to see an insight with that high of an average. (I know of 5 owners of them, the insights are dirt cheap on the used market now)
Call me when they can take the fuel efficency from 1989 and add hybrid tech to get real increases in fuel economy. the Insight should be getting 70+mpg regularly if an econo-box from the 80's can get almost 60 without any real effort.
A friend of mine is looking to reduce the diameters and weight of the power steering and alternator pullies on his. he is guessing he will gain 3 hp and possibly another mpg.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Common forms of abuse (not specific to LiPo cells, however) :
leaving a battery in a hot car, especially in the sun.
discharging a battery completely in 4 minutes, like many R/C car and plane guys do. The battery generally tolerates it, but it won't last long.
charging a battery at 4C (full charge in 15 minutes.) (Some batteries can tolerate higher charge rates, some can't.)
overcharging a battery (like leaving it on a charger for days at a time. LiPo chargers MUST have circuitry to prevent this, as LiPo cells can explode if overcharged, but NiMH and NiCd cells tolerate it, even though it's still abuse.)
discharging a battery too much (for a NiCd/NiMH cell, you reverse-charge a cell or two, which is bad, and for LiPo/Pb, discharging too much ruins the cell.)
dropping the battery onto a concrete floor. Yes, physical abuse is still abuse.
People deliberately overcharging a LiPo pack and filming it to see what happens.
There's a lot more, but this should give you an idea.