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."

Comments

Altair's == Toshiba's?

[TopSpin]

Doesn't look like it. The Altair battery uses "nano-crystals" to vastly increase the surface area of the anode. Toshiba has come up with some kind of "nano-particle" that... absorbs more Lithium ions. Neither of these advances appear to directly contribute to capacity. They improve charging (and discharge) efficiency.

So how much heat do these give off?

[DeafDumbBlind]

How hot do these babies get?

Re:Battery Tech: Good and Bad

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

You get used to the gas engine cutting off after a few weeks. After that, it sounds weird when you drive a twentieth century car and hear it idling at stop lights.

It is my hope

[eobanb]

...that this breathes new life into electric vehicles. The real problem with them right now is that it takes hours to recharge, whereas an internal combustion vehicle can just tank up at a service station in a minute or two. If this could work with electric vehicles as well, the scene could TOTALLY change. Imagine plugging in your car at the BP station for a minute or two, and being off on your merry way. The same goes for the insignificant capacity loss over time. Cells for electric vehicles are currently REALLY expensive, and heavy. Lithium ion cells are much lighter, and you could keep them for the life of the car.

Re:It is my hope

[cartman]

The problem wasn't that it takes hours to recharge. The problem was energy density: electric cars used conventional lead-acid or NiCAD batteries which were terribly heavy, relative to the amount of energy they stored. This greatly reduced vehicle range, because so much energy was expended carrying the heavy batteries. Adding batteries helped little, because that increased the weight of the batteries still further.

An example of these problems was the GM EV1, which had a range of ~40 miles in an underpowered subcompact. The problem was energy density: the EV1 devoted ~90% of its energy to carrying its own batteries.

Car manufacturers (like GM) considered using Lithium-Ion batteries, but were deterred by two facts: LiIon batteries are very expensive, and they need to be replaced every few years because they lose the ability to hold a charge. Replacing expensive batteries every 2 years or so made the vehicle costs skyrocket.

A LiIon battery that can be recharged many thousands of times, and that can be recharged in a few minutes, solves all of these problems. An EV can be built with a range >100 miles and an acceptable cost. Even long distances could be tolerated if you don't mind stopping every 100 miles or so for a brief recharge.

This potentially wouldn't even require a hybrid. Straight electric seems achievable.

Re:It is my hope

[Osty]

A LiIon battery that can be recharged many thousands of times, and that can be recharged in a few minutes, solves all of these problems. An EV can be built with a range >100 miles and an acceptable cost. Even long distances could be tolerated if you don't mind stopping every 100 miles or so for a brief recharge.

How many cycles before the batteries start losing capacity? If a battery has a 3000 cycle life (call it 8 years of daily recharges, more than enough life since most people will have replaced the car by then), but starts losing capacity after 750 recharges (2 years), that's not good. If the range is only 100 miles at 100% capacity and the battery is down to 80% capacity after two years, range has been significantly shortened.

Also, a range of 100 miles is still very small. 200 miles is really the sweet spot (that's about where the worst gas guzzlers are at today), but to be really fair that measurement should be in terms of end-of-warranty battery state. If the warranty is 4 years and the battery has degraded to 65%, I still want 200 miles. That means the car needs to do better than 300 miles when new.

100 miles on a new battery is fair for a commuter car in an urban area. However, that's not enough for most people* to replace their existing car. Keep in mind that if you misjudge your remaining charge, you can't just dump a can of gas in the tank and make it to the next stop.

* By "people", I'm really referring to "Americans, or other folks that live in an expansive country where a typical commute may be 30-40 miles round-trip, and vacation spots may be a couple hours away". Your 100 mile electric car would not be able to get you from LA to Vegas on a single charge, and good luck finding a place to recharge in the long, empty expanses of desert.

Re:It is my hope

[Deliveranc3]

Bugger that... plop the damn things down in front of traffic lights... long left turn boom full power!.

Auto credit card payment... Have it stick up to the bottom of your car.

This is cool because it helps efficiency

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Lightly touch the brakes in a Prius, and the drive motor spins backwards as a generator, putting drag on the wheels and transferring the energy to the battery.

Stomp hard on the brakes in a Prius, and the battery can't absorb current fast enough to deal with the power surge. Mechanical brakes come into play. Energy that could have been recycled turns into heat in the mechanical brakes.

A super-fast charging battery could eliminate any need for mechanical brakes except as safety backups.

Re:This is cool because it helps efficiency

[theLOUDroom]

A super-fast charging battery could eliminate any need for mechanical brakes except as safety backups.

Except that your electrical system would burst into flames if you did a 60-0 MPH panic stop.
k=.5*m*v^2=.5*1000*26.82^2=359656.2 joules spread this out over 4 seconds and you get about 90,000 watts!

If you were using a battery voltage of 100V, you would still need a battery system that could handle 900 amps of current. If you were using 0000 gauage wire, which is 0.46" in diameter, you'd be running 3X the reccommend current for that wire guage. So even if your motors and your batteries could handle the current (which they can't), just your wiring itself would probably end up weighing as much as a set of normal, mechanical brakes.

It would be neat if all that energy could be recovered, but I expect mechanical brakes are going to be around for quite some time. Of course if you did build a car that could do this, and it ever broke, the electrical system in the car could provide enough current to weld itself together (and a half dozen other cars...simulatneously).

Re:This is cool because it helps efficiency

[ars]

You have a mistake in how much wire you actually need.

The reason for the "standard" wire sizes given in electrical code is that they are designed to be stuck in insulation, and conduit and other places where they can't dissipate heat.

However in this case first or all you are only running current for 4 seconds! So they hardly have time to heat up much, and second you can easily put some cooling fins on them.

You don't need anywhere near as much wire as you might think.

(i.e. if it's safe to run 15 amps in a wire for 1 minute - you can run 90 apms in it for 15 seconds! And on top of that the electical codes are spec'd for continuous use.)

fuel cells

[Lotharjade]

Im still waiting for fuel cell vehicles to become standard. If they would just make a car we would ACTUALLY use. None of these tiny little fly traps. Get me a BIG fuel cell vehicle and Ill be there in a flash.

Im sure we will use the lessons from hybrids and new battery design in the future of fuel cell vehicles, but I suspect that hybrids are only a step on the way to better cars.

One minute?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

What sort of amperage would that be on a typical battery? The articles aren't specific. For laptops, I can see that the limitation would be what can be drawn by wall power.

Talk about some amps

[Anonymous Coward]

How does one charge a ev in 1 minute? I mean the EV1's lead-acid pack is (16.3 kW-hr). So 80% of that is 13.04kw-hr. So what is this magical charger that can do 782.4kw for one min? Its gona be nice sucking 3556 amps from the 220 line.

Re:There go the circuit breakers

[baboon]

A quick Google suggests that a typical peak might be 50W, but an average laptop consumption is more like 10W.

That would be 1200W to recharge, about what a vacuum cleaner uses.

Re:Battery Tech: Good and Bad

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

The Bad: People get totally freaked out when the engine on a hybrid car shuts down as the electric kicks in.

Yeah, kind of like IE users get freaked out the first time they use FireFox and experience browsing without pop-up ads.

I drive an '05 Prius. I love the fact that the engine cuts off so much. A small fraction of people who ride with me think it's weird at first, but they get used to it after 5 minutes. Most people think it's the coolest thing ever.

interesting? More like fiction

[bluGill]

The problem wasn't that it takes hours to recharge. The problem was energy density

No, it was both. People want a car that they can take on vacation, easily refueling ever once in a while. While refueling every 50 miles isn't ideal, people would live with that if it only took a minute and was cheap. You shouldn't be sitting still for longer than that anyway for health reasons. However nobody is willing to wait hours for a recharge.

The problem was energy density: the EV1 devoted ~90% of its energy to carrying its own batteries.

90% that doesn't fit. At high speeds (60mph) most of the energy is spent on wind resistance which is function of frontal area and other such variables, none of which are affected by mass.

Even if we assume 20mph where rolling resistance is the dominate factor you are making a claim that the the entire car minus batteries weighs -84lbs! (the car specs at 3086 lbs, + 200lbs driver, 90% of that is 2970, which subtracting the driver out again comes out to negative weight!)

chewbacca's flux capacitor

[goombah99]

lets suppose that we want a car with the aerodynamic profile of a honda accura to be able to achieve 60 miles per hour. this takes about 25 horsepower to overcome drag. toss in some headroom for decent acceleration and overcoming drive train and wheel friction and we'll want a tad over 30 horsepower. assume we desire ten hours of travel time for a cruise range of 600 miles. and also assume 70% electric to machanical conversion. thats roughly 445 horse-power-hours = 336 kilowatt hours or 1.21 gigajoules. if you push in this much energy in say ten minutes that requires a 2 megawatt power source. if you could live with 1 tenth the horse power and 1 tenth the run time then that is 20,000 watt power source to recharge. ha! this is chewbacca absurd. I must be making a mistake or electric automobiles are infeasible to charge quickly. this makes no sense

Re:chewbacca's flux capacitor

[mlyle]

It's for a hybrid car; so it's for a relatively short runtime that it's being charged repetitively onboard. (To aid in peak acceleration, but to allow the gasoline engine to be sized for cruise consumption).

Say 50 horsepower for 30 seconds of output; using your numbers for electrical-to-mechanical efficiency, that's about 26kW to charge in a minute; or about 51 horsepower at 70% alternator efficiency. So you could have a 50 horsepower gasoline engine running flat out at a stoplight charging the battery pack, and have 100 horsepower of initial acceleration for 30 seconds. Not so absurd, eh?

Re:chewbacca's flux capacitor

[bobcat7677]

RTFA, it says that the new technology not only makes faster charging possible, but also allows the batteries to handle much faster discharge. That's why the first applications will be Hybrid cars and powertools. Both applications beg for batteries that can handle massive power drains and turn around and fast charge without blowing up or shortening their lifespan.

Personally, this is exactly the type of battery breakthrough I have been waiting for. I opted to buy a standard Honda Civic because I realised that the battery packs in the current hybrids are likely to wear out as quickly as my laptop's battery and cost considerably more to replace...which makes the option fiscally irresponsible for someone like me (not to mention the performance deficit in the current models). But once this new battery tech hits the hybrids, they can be made to perform better and have the battery pack life more in line with the longetivity of the rest of the vehicle's components...which will mean the technology has matured enough to be mainstream.

Given that they say this tech should be here as soon as NEXT YEAR, I'm excited! There will be no excuse for car makers not to have hybrid models of all shapes and sizes after this.

One more quick item to note...fast charge/dischare hybrid power packs do already exist in a different form. It was setup as sortof a hybrid of hybrid. The power pack was a combination of huge capacitors for the quick power drains and charges, and then normal batterys along side those for sustained moderate charge/discharge (pulling a long hill or caosting down it). This hybrid/hybrid thing was discussed on slashdot before but here is the link for reference: http://www.ecolectrictechnology.com/

Re:sigh heard round the world

[thisissilly]

Can you wait 15 minutes? Try Radio Shack for Rayovac's 15-minute IC3 technology. AA and AAA batteries that recharge in 15 minutes, no joke. I find it handy for my digital camera.

1% after 1000 != 2% after 2000

[Anonymous Coward]

So after 1000 cycles, it loses 1% capacity. Very nice, but these things are never linear, and manufacturers are very good at choosing their stats (as anyone who's ever read a datasheet will know). After 1050 cycles, it may have lost 1%, 2%, 20% or even more capacity. Guess I'll have to RTFA, but I doubt they give a graph of capcity vs. cycles.

But sounds interesting, none-the-less.