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Toshiba To Launch "Super Charge" Batteries
ozgood writes in to let us know about Toshiba's announcement that it has developed a new type of rechargeable battery dubbed the Super Charge ion Battery, or SCiB. Toshiba claims the new battery will mainly target the industrial market, though they hint the technology may eventually find a home in electric vehicles. The SCiB can recharge to 90% of total capacity in under five minutes, and has a life span of over 10 years. "Toshiba also says the battery has excellent safety with the new negative electrode material having a high level of thermal stability and a high flash point. The battery is also said to be structurally resistant to internal short-circuiting and thermal runaway."
Awesome, I would get one of these. I hate sitting in an airport recharging my laptop battery for eons at a time. 10 minutes to get 90% of the charge back eh? I want one now! ::jumps up and down::... Now if only my cell phone could do this too... and my Digital camera, and camcorder too... I like how they point out that it has more safety features too. Although, I am wondering if we will still see these batteries exploding at the most inopportune time... like a presentation on how awesome it is...?
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
And if you leave them charging for too long, they explode. Looks like Sony has a rival...
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
performance characteristics remind me of ultracapacitor technology. Makes me wonder how the two technologies will compete, price-wise.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
What about storage density?? That's the big question. If it beats current battery technology in this aspect, that would ROCK!!!!!
As long as they don't blow up or catch your lap on fire, I welcome these new batteries. Sure beats the ones I have seen so far, expensive, shot inside of 2 years. Need to move this up and get rid of batteries that die so quick.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/11/toshiba-launching-scib-batteries-in-march-5-min-charge-10-year
According to this article, hybrid cars will be the first use for these batteries.
As long as the energy density is comparable to current Lithium-ion batteries, then this will be some pretty cool tech.
If these are large batteries with many AH, how big of a power supply would you need to charge 90% of the battery in ten minutes?
TFA says "The SCiB batteries can recharge with as much as 50 amperes of current", which puts a limit on how fast you can charge it. If the capacity is, say, 10 Ah, then you would need 120 A current to charge it in five minutes.
You're going to need a fairly high powered AC-DC converter to draw the amount of current required to charge a battery to 90% in 5 minutes. My thinkpad has a 65w converter and it gets very hot when charging.
... that I can live in fear for 10 years that one of these bad boys might set my crotch on fire!
The article makes reference to amperage, but without voltage that value is basically meaningless. Now if they were talking wattage then we would know exactly how much power these batteries produce (and consume during charging).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
How big/heavy of a wall-wart will be required to pump the 50 to 100 A of current to do that?
I would think one of the first uses for this type of thing would be for contractor grade cordless powertools. With current battery tech any heavily used battery lasts less than 2 years with the kind of abuse construction guys give em. Of course you're going to need one heck of an extra alternator to charge em that quickly, more likely a separate generator.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This sounds like A123/LiFePO4 batteries with a different name.
My cell phone charges at 1A at 5V - that's a fairly hefty load for a cheap, minuscule wall wart. To get it to recharge in 10 min would take - well - anyone care to lug around a 12-gauge extension cord to deliver the 10A it would take to deliver that much power?
Alternatively, you could make your power cord really short - build the charger to plug directly into the wall without a cord. But it would still be big.
What next - I'll be asking for a 408V 1000A 3-phase industrial drop to recharge my electric car in an hour!
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Disclaimer: IAAEVE (I am an electric vehicle engineer), so my analysis is biased toward vehicle applications.
According to the specs on their own website, the energy density for their modules is about 50 watthours per kilogram (24V * 4.2Ah / 2.0kg). At 50 Wh/kg they're barely competing with lead-acid batteries, and competing quite poorly with Nickel-metal batteries, which are near 100 Wh/kg and have proven safety and durability in vehicle applications.
Modern Li-ion cells (the ones that aren't even remotely pushing the safety envelope) are over 200 Wh/kg.
I calculated the energy density from Toshiba's specs for a module containing multiple cells plus some charging electronics. This works out to about twice the figure for a deep-cycle lead-acid car battery.
It's a good thing they didn't have to use anions: Super Charge Anion Battery just might not make as good an acronym.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Ok, over and over again I see the same nonsense. "Lithium batteries burn because they contain lots of energy".
If this was the case a discharged battery would be safe, yet it contains just as much lithium as when it was charged, meaning it is still a fire hazard. The problem with lithium ion batteries is NOT their electrical energy density, it is the low activation energy of the chemicals they are made of.
To really put this in perspective, your cutlery and pots all contain A LOT of chemical potential energy. Burning iron in air releases vast quantities of it. Of course, because steel has a very good heat conductivity, and as the activation energy is high, you can't really set a piece of steel on fire at normal temperatures. If, on the other hand, you were to grind that iron into a fine powder, then you better make sure not to bring it close to sources of ignition as it will explode into a fireball.
Similarly, iron oxide doesn't burn in air because it is already oxidised, but if you mix it with aluminium powder, a strong reducing agent, then you got a Thermite mix which will burn at such a high temperature that it is little you can do but wait until it has completed. Even choking it doesn't work since it contains its own oxidiser.
The reason lithium ion batteries can catch fire is simply that lithium is easy to ignite. If the energy recoverable from a battery was directly related to how strongly it burns, then you would most certainly see batteries made from titanium or aluminium, and not lithium ( which releases a lot less energy when combusted than does many other metals ).
I've been in meetings where I wished something like that would happen (whether mine or someone else's depends on which meeting)...
I knew there was a catch... now I don't have to RTFM!
Let's say I have a biodiesel powered, water cooled generator (so that I can use the excess heat to warm my house or water or ?) or a wind-turbine, or some other peaking power source providing most of my house juice, along with a bank of these batteries. Plus the ability to use the house pack to charge a hybrid electric family vehicle with say a sixty mile range before I have to kick in the car's bio-diesel driven engine. Or vice versa: the vehicle's bio-diesel engine can be used to charge both the electrical drive train for the vehicle when on the road, or the home battery stack when the vehicle is plugged into the home's grid. This seems to be the ultimate win/win for home power.
The economic question is, "do I have to have tens of thousands of dollars of batteries to make this work, or will the batteries be cost effective and available for consumer use?"
What think ye?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
If this type of technology were to really take off, it would quickly obsolete the need for traditional gas stations. Virtually any business that requires at least 5-10 minutes of your time and has their own parking could install charging meters. Assuming these batteries don't easily take on a memory for partial charging, widespread use of charging stations could mean you top off every time you park your vehicle if you want. Parking garages, parking meters, grocery stores, malls, etc. Besides long trips, I don't even think most consumers would feel constrained by only a 150 mile range if that were true.
OK, if you have a 1 amp/hr battery that you want to charge in 5 minutes you have to provide
at least 12 amps of charging current (14 gauge wire). A laptop with a 5 amp/hr battery would require 60 Amps to
charge (That's 6 gauge wire needed!).
So, why not go all the way embed them all over along roads and streets? Do away with batteries entirely, except for very short stretches? All-terrain vehicles and others that need to drive in dirt roads could be hybrids.
The remaining question is: is it pronounced skeeb, skihb, skyb, seeb, sib, sighb, or throatwarbler mangrove?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I think what would make these super for cars is that they would appear able to handle any regenerative braking load placed on them. I don't believe you can say that about the current cells in use.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Lets say that one drive a vehicle 10,000 miles a year and gets 25 mpg. So that is 400 gallons of gas a year or about $1200 a year. Now lets say that the cost of the electricity is only $200 so a savings of $1,000 a year. Ten years of use than would be $10,000. So if the automobile is only $10,000 more than a gasoline car than there would be no monetary incentive to purchase one. The cost of a used automobile would make the comparison even more difficult for the electric automobile. How much money would one have at the end of 10 years if one had $10,000 and invested it at 6%, and one withdrew $1,000 a year. It would be around $5,000. There are other cost I am sure as an electric car would not need coolant or oil. I think $100 a year would take care of that. It is going to take a lot more to get people to buy an electric automobile. I would think that gasoline would have to go to $10 a gallon to make people buy one and than the gasoline powered automobiles would be almost given away to get rid of them so still a lot of people would drive them till they fell apart.
ditch stock in Shell, exxon, ...
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Let's see, 150 Wh/mi * 175 miles = 26250Wh.
26250Wh filled in 5 minutes, 26250Wh / (5 min /60 (min/hr)) = 315000W. This number is pretty impressive. It's at the scale of a Mini hydro.
Assume 1% of energy become heat inside the battery during the charging, that will be a 3150W heater in your battery.
Do you smell something smoking?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
If I could replace my 80Kg of domestic batteries with their effective 1440 watt hours of discharge for long life, with 80kg of these giving 4000 WH, I would be able to run twice as long with the same real safety margin, and I would get twice the life. (10 years rather than 5 for lightly discharged lead acid.) I would also be able to replace my alternator with one of twice the capacity, which would have two benefits; I would only have to run the engine for half as long for the same charge, and the engine would be under heavier load (most marine engines die from running too long at low load, not overload.)
Given the current installed cost of a marine generator, if these things meet their promise boat owners will be fighting one another for them.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
According to this whitepaper, typical desktop PSU efficiency is 60-70%. While it makes sense that laptop transformers would operate at a little bit higher efficiency, I think it's safe to assume they're in the same ballpark. So let's call laptop transformers about 80% efficient. Now that 500 watts required to charge the battery is going to need 625 going into the transformer, with 125 watts of waste heat.
But now let's consider the efficiency of the battery itself - at nominal charge speed for lithium ion batteries they get an efficiency of about 90% and at 5 times nominal they get an efficiency of 85% (see this paper. If this battery's profile is anything like a lithium ion battery, let's say it gets 90% efficiency, then we'll need 555 watts going into the battery, and thus about 700 watts going into the transformer, with 150 watts of waste heat from the transformer and 50 watts of waste from the battery. These are all ballpark figures and my math may be questionable... but the takeaway is still there: dealing with the waste heat from this charging process will be a MAJOR issue.
http://www.break.com/index/car-battery-hack.html
Here's some energy density specifications for various Li rechargable batteries -- about 150-200 WHr/kg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Specifications_and_design So we should conclude that it's a no-show at 50 WHr/kg for the mobile market OTOH, a primary advantage of the new technology is safety, at least according to what's presented in this video http://dodevice.com/toshiba-scib-wont-explode-neither-catch-fire-video/ It takes quite a crushing without getting close to combustion temperatures.
"So Can I Blowup?"
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I can see the Super Explosion and Super Class Suit Action head lines...
----
http://www.internet.gen.tr
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Fast charging means fast discharging (internal resistance limits both). Fast discharging means more "vent with flame" events (or worse).
And people thought Li-ion was temperamental...
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
At 50 Wh/kg they're barely competing with lead-acid batteries, and competing quite poorly with Nickel-metal batteries, which are near 100 Wh/kg
In many situations half the range is an easy trade for a 5-minute charge. Imagine an all-electric that 'just' recharges whenever you park somewhere. Standard fare at restaurants, grocery stores, and shopping centers. Maybe a bluetooth transponder handles the billing for you, maybe it's in a post-Fusion age when free-power is like free-WiFi today.
I'm not disagreeing with you that it may be inferior for today's usage model, but most people are just used to a model, not wed to it.
Heck, a long distance trip isn't even a problem so long as the battery outlasts your bladder.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...does it hold 1.21 Jigawatts?
Why not also make standard battery form factors as well? Double-A, Triple-A, 9V, C, D, etc..
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't think you'll be able to recharge cars at just any business in 10 minutes.
:).
Petrol/gasoline has 34Mj/litre.
Assuming your high tech car only needs the equivalent of 30 litres (conservatively assuming greater efficiencies) for a full charge, that means _each_ charging station will have to provide 30 * 34 megajoules in 600 seconds = 1.7 megawatts ( about 15,500 amps at 110V).
Still better to do rapid bulk energy transfers with hydrocarbons.
The main benefit of the batteries for cars if they work as advertised is the durability. I'm not going to buy a car where I have to spend $$$$$ to change the batteries every 3 years - it's not economical or even environmentally friendly to do so,
The other possible benefit of such batteries in a hybrid/electric car is that regenerative braking can occur over a wider range of decelerations with less energy being wasted as heat. Since the batteries can take higher charge currents you don't have to dump as much excess energy for rapid braking. This makes the car more efficient. You could still use capacitors to do that, but this gives the engineers more options to think of
These have about 50Wh/kg compared to around 150Wh/kg for lithium Ions. If they could get that up by a factor of 10 to 500Wh/kg they would make it practical to make an electric car.
Time to trot out this old horse again.
It turns out that gasoline is amazingly good as a fuel. When you pump it into your car, it's relatively safe. Safe enough that greasemonkeys with little-to-no education or training, hell, even the general public, can do it without much risk of explosion. But the flow rate and energy density of gasoline is such that you're moving about 3 MW of power during the fueling session.
That's the output of an electrical substation. This is not toy levels of power. If you were to try to do that with electricity, you'd need to have the equivalent of 2000 15A home circuits (think two thousand 1500 W hair blowers). If you had a 99.9% energy transfer efficiency (we think of efficient power supplies to be at the 80-85% level, so 99.9% is insanely good), that means 0.1% of 3 MW, or 3 kW of heat would need to be dissipated. Most of the energy loss would happen at the station-to-car contacts, with much of the rest in the cables. Let's be conservative and say only 1/3 of the loss is at the contacts, that's 1kW. 1kW for 5-10 minutes into anything that isn't big or actively cooled or both would get hot. Very, very hot. (Your CPU probably dissipates something in the range of 1/10th this much power.) You couldn't put your hand on it to make or break the contact, for example.
Also, the necessary levels of current will produce substantial electric and magnetic fields. Sure, cables can be well designed and shielded with both magnetic and electrical shielding, but remember that this needs to be something that a person can hold and lift and apply to their car, somehow, so weight is a consideration, too. Personally, I don't like the idea of standing next to electrical substations for any longer than necessary -- having my hand on a cable that is moving 3 MW is something I want to seriously avoid. This is not toy levels of power. Making and breaking contacts at 3 MW is non-trivial. So how about doing it inductively? I'm not standing anywhere near those fields. People are shy about being near their operating microwave ovens. That's (usually) 600 W of E/B fields that are pretty well shielded. We're talking about 4 orders of magnitude more power during refilling.
There are two realistic options. (1) Extend charging time by an order of magnitude or two. This precludes the filling-station model that we already have immense infrastructure for. (2) Instead of recharging, swap batteries for a fresh set which can be recharged at the station at a more leisurely (and less dangerous) pace.
The fundamental problem here is that gasoline is a really good fuel. It has a very high specific energy density (energy per unit volume), allowing us to become accustomed to and dependent upon the idea that refilling is a relatively quick event. Until we can change that perception, refilling all-electric cars is going to be a very difficult engineering task that borders on impossibility. So five-to-ten minute recharge times for these new batteries isn't that relevant for all-electric cars.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Are these batteries explosion resistant ie can you drive a nail though a cell and have it fail in a safe manner like the cells by A123 or will they explode like a firework like the trash sony sells? This is needed of they are to be used in an electric car.
is there some technical reason why my AA batteries cannot be lithium-ion? or am i just getting ripped off?
Yes, but that presupposes the use of the current delivery mechanism as the prototype for refueling (recharging). Why make that assumption? Its a new machine with new requirements. Why not simply permit the vehicle to drive up over a set of contacts that spring up (or some such), make electrical contact in a completely mechanized manner, wait while the batteries are recharged, and then drive away again. A new delivery system for a new vehicle. Humans don't have to handle or come into contact with it at all. Even better, the whole operation could be transacted from the comfort of the driver's seat. No need to even get out of the car on a frosty cold morning.
(BTW-- when this gets implemented, I get 10%)