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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."
I regularly run through airports leeching power briefly between flights. I would pay handsomely to recharge 80% in a minute my: Laptop, Cell Phone, Video Camera Batteries, etc.
2) High Energy Density Small and light, the new battery offers a high level of storage efficiency. The prototype battery is only 3.8mm thick, 62mm high and 35mm deep and has a capacity of 600mAh.
Given the recharge times that is an amazing amount of energy for PDAs, cameras and the like. However, if you're going to scale up that system for cars, you are going to have a hellishly dangerous amount of current flowing in order to get a charge in a minute (or time similar to a gas station) so they better figure out some good safety systems if they want to go to market with this for pure electic cars rather than the hybrids they're planning for in 2006. However, they might not need the one minute charge if they use the charge at home system the some electric car designs. You could charge to full in an hour or get enough of a charge at the supermarket or other store to make short hops without a problem.
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Wired article as proof
Actually that would be a very usefull ability if in fact it could discharge 80% of its capacity in a minute, for that would lead to a awesome power-density.
This will go well with my 6 Minute Abs tapes.
Though I may have to throw them out if they come up with 1 Minute Abs.
Seriously though, you still have to pump in the energy you want to get out later. For a car this is a LOT of energy. I'd do the calculations if I were more clever. Without distributed power generation (think fuel cells) it may be hard to get that much juice in one spot without frying someone.
You'd have to bump up the voltage to keep the wires from being too thick to be managed by a single person. Then you have to worry about shocks (rain anyone?) and fumes (presumably there would be filling stations in/near gas pumps for legacy support). Also, some batteries vent hydrogen. not sure if these do though.
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... and how much power will they require to charge? People are forgetting something. If you expect steady, large power over a large discharge period then you'll need huge power if your charg period is a small fraction of the discharge period.
It makes me question the scaling the article implied for hybrid cars. The "one minute" charge timeframe is very much depending on having a power source capable of delivering that much energy to the battery. Hybrid batteries are many times the size of standard car batteries. That's a lot of power to deliver in a minute.
TW
Unfortunately, energy output will never equal energy input on any machine. The speed that the battery could recharge has nothing to do with the amount of energy that is being put into it. That's 7th grade physics, sir.
This might be a great combination with fuel cells. A 5 minute charge and a tank of hydrogen might be good for a couple of hundred miles and still allow service station convenience.
"A good friend will bail you out of jail. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying, 'damn....that was fun!'"
The best part of this is the batteries are being developed for cars. Compare this with the various high tech alloys and such that end up being available first in luxury items such as golf clubs or tennis racquets but not making it out to more fundamental products for another generation, or more. If this really starts showing up in 2006 models, it should slow the increase in gas prices within a few years, maybe a great deal if sales are good.
For Americans, would you rather have these batteries make it more quickly to your MP3 players and laptops, or have 2010 gas prices only rise to say $4.50 instead of $5.75 a gallon?
(And for most Europeans figure somewhere around EU 8 or 9 instead of EU 12, even if the Euro rises against the Dollar, as most of your governments have already agreed to discout hybred fuel costs in various ways, but a lot of the cost will still be taxes).
Indirect savings, i.e. from trucked goods costs and smaller winter spikes in heating oil prices would add substantially to that.
$1.25 a gallon difference (or likely more) will pay for lots of older model batteries for all your smaller appliances, and then some.
Who is John Cabal?
Thee words, conservation of energy.
Less you are going down a hill you can't reap more energy from regen braking than you put into it... and wind resistence means constant input to the system you will never see back from regen. However this will make regen systems more effective since you would not need to further complicated the system with large banks of capacitors to absorb the high energy output of hard braking.
Makes times in between refuling farther apart as well.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
If you only had to recharge the electric car once per day, waiting a few hours for a recharge wouldn't be that big a burden, since it could be done overnight. This would be less of a burden than stopping every 50 miles on a long trip.
Um, since electric vehicles are much heavier than conventional ICE cars, a greater proportion of the energy is expended on rolling resitance and acceleration of mass.Otherwise, why would the range of an EV1 have been only ~40 miles? If aerodynamic resistance were the principal factor, then then EV1 should have had a greater range than conventional cars, since its drag coefficient was much smaller.
You are taking a figure from ICE cars and wrongly applying it to EVs.
I never claimed any such thing. You (wrongly) inferred that my claim implied it.Cars obviously do not consistently operate at any speed (they start and stop). The EVs were touted as "commuter vehicles" which obviously won't operate consistently at 60MPH then suddenly stop for the day.
The original figure did not include the weight of what the car was carrying, which is difficult to estimate and which depends on the number of people in the car, how fat the people are, the weight of their luggage, etc.IIRC the EV1 car minus the batteries weighed only a few hundred pounds, and the car with the batteries weighed ~3100 lbs. The car was touted as a "commuter car" and therefore most of its energy was expended in acceleration of its enormous mass, and in rolling resistance. Regenerative braking only recaptures a relatively small proportion of the energy expended during acceleration.
900 amperes may seem like a lot, but I have seen electrical systems in aircraft designed (with safety margins) for 1500 A, and have also seen ground equipment peg an ammeter past the 2500 A mark. Starter/generators in larger, general aviation, aircraft typically draw 750 A at room temperature with cooled down engine, to get the engines up to speed. More current when cold, and at altitude they have to be able to spin an engine that could easily be at ambient temperatures around -40 degrees.
Large bus bars, and multiple 00 or 000 guage wires can easily handle that much current with high temperature insulation. The common tables of ampacity for stationary use are very conservative, and you must take into account the assumptions of those tables.
Then, my understanding is that most hybrid and electrical cars use more like 250-400 volt battery systems, so current handling would only need to be in the 225 to 360 ampere range.
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. In any case the engineering is not as difficult as it might seem, and with good enough bumpers and airbags, who needs brakes anyway?
The parent shouldn't be so confident because he/she is obviously lacking a background in chemistry (or patent law, for that matter...) Simply from the quotes he/she gave, it is likely both technologies are very similar. They both rely on vastly increasing the reactive surface area of chemicals in the battery using nano particles. For those not chemically inclined, if you wanted to soak a loaf of bread with water, it would be a lot easier if you chopped it up into tiny pieces. In this case, pieces on the scale of nanometers, or thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. I can't comment on any specifics concerning the patents the companies hold, but suffice it to say that the information in the article certainly does not preclude both companies from using nano particles to increase surfaced area of a lithium ion battery. (For example, the short description of Altair's patent given appears to state that the patent covers a specific method for producing these nano particles for lithium ion batteries, not their use in lithium ion batteries period.)
So far, two of you moderators just modded the idea for a AM/FM radio as insightful. I know the iPod was mentioned and you probably got excited but you guys need to focus man, focus.
It was Funny. It was also Insightful, but only because it was Funny in an Ironic way. Unfortunately it was too Subtle for some people to realize it was meant to be a joke, prompting several Clueless posts who have taken the liberty of explaining the punch line to the joke's author, mistaking his Insightfulness for their own. I hate when people do this to my own jokes. Recognizing something as being Funny without realizing it was meant to be Funny means you didn't get the joke!
And here I was ready to build on this Fiasco, by noting that if such a thing were invented today, it would surely be smothered under a swarm of intellectual property motions and lawyers, forced to incorporate scrambling, subscriptions, and licenses. They certainly knew how to innovate a century ago. Nowadays everything has to be against the law unless it Sucks.
It's called lightning.