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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'm still waiting out for wireless power :-D
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:
women sigh round the world heavily, while dreaming of AA size waterproof versions.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Ok...I just charged these things for exactly one minute. Everything is working fine so fariweofaidfoiafoaif
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.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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.
These batteries also drain 80% in one minute!
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
There are good and bad things that come from battery technology finally making some headway:
The Good: Efficient transportation, long lasting mobile electronic devices, and of course light sabers.
The Bad: People get totally freaked out when the engine on a hybrid car shuts down as the electric kicks in. That silence is just plain wrong, the engine should stay running. Oh, that and a lot of my clients are oil companies.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
How hot do these babies get?
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
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.
...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.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
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.
--
Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
If a Lion battery with enough Kwh to run a car can be recharged in one minute, do the lights in the entire block dim? Or after looking at the photograph, is this for a hybrid slot car?
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.
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.
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.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
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.
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.
this sig has been rated E for Everyone.
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).
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.
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
easy way around, decent speakers and a recording of your engine idling. So you have virtual engine idling. Could add Dual Shock ability to make the car rumble as if the engine is idling. But only if you buy the rights 1st :P
Automation - The Car Company Tycoon Game
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.
That's fine, but how about my nutty idea? Imagine a service where music could be transmitted wirelessly, and you could have a receiving device even smaller than an iPod to listen to the music with. I wonder if anyone would or could ever invent something like this?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Hey - go easy. It's his first day at the patent office.
NiCd and NiMH cells, on the other hand, last longer, especially if not being charged and discharged a lot.
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 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.
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!)
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 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?
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
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.
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.
Toshiba announces a thin stick-on device using nanocrystals that you can use on your cell phone....
More details about this amazing technology can be found here.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Not stolen - Toshiba *licensed* from space aliens.
It's called lightning.
Wasn't that supposed to be the big selling point for Li-ion battery's several years ago when they first appeared on the horizon. "No recharge memory like Ni-Cad!". :-(
Well it's clear they don't have "recharge memory". It's more like "recharge Alzheimer's", i.e. they completely forget how to recharge
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.