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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:
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?
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.
...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.
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Want a free iPod?
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof
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.
Huh why?
Oh wait a minute... you mean when they get caught out in the rain.. don't you?
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.
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).
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
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.
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?
If they wanted AA size, I'd be getting a lot more action.
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.
And if you could push that much energy in one second, it'd be 1.21 gigawatts!!
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
and the goat.se guy is wondering if this technology could be used to make 24V deep cycle marine batteries for his 90 lbs. jack hammer
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.
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/