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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."
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?
What about storage density?? That's the big question.
Storage density is not as relevant, when you can recharge in 5 minutes.
If you're traveling somewhere you won't be able to recharge, then use an older, higher capacity battery. Otherwise, who cares if you're recharging every 2 hours (or whatever) if it only takes 5 minutes to do so?
good luck lugging around the power cord you'll need to charge these things
it won't be that small travel charger and 5A cord
these things will need power cords roughly the size of the ones you use to connect to a generator or dryer (100A+) to move that many joules of energy that quickly without melting the cord itself. And the AC/DC transformer won't be a little travel wart either.
in other words, don't hold your breath
So I have to stop every 2 hours for 5 minutes of charging? That's going to be a fun cross-country drive.
But the PP point is that these are going to be applied to hybrid vehicles. It would do us no good to have to stop every 2 hours of driving to charge for 5 mins. Your case works well for conventional Li-on battery uses. Their point is about proposed rapid charging for future uses. In their case, yeah, storage makes a large difference
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Automotive companies have repeatedly stated that in order to "meet expectations" a car needs to travel roughly 300 miles per "fueling" and the "fueling" needs to take 5-10 minutes at most.
I think you hit the nail on the head - if they can get a charge down to under 10 minutes and the range up to 200+ miles, it will be quite popular.
Personally, I'd like to see some sort of inductive charger for batteries like this that I can use for a laptop. Rather than cabling everything up, you just rest your laptop on the mat within range for 10 minutes, and you're good to go.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
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.
So the random laptop battery I have handy is rated 10.8V, 4.8Ah -- 52Wh. 5 minutes for 80% charge (from 10% to 90%, you're unlikely to let it go all the way to zero) is just shy of 500 watts. Your average wall outlet is easily capable of that (12A at 115V is a nice, conservative estimate). The power brick to handle that won't be huge -- think about a 500W computer power supply, and then remember that this will be noticeably smaller and more efficient because it only has to provide one output voltage instead of the mess your average computer wants. It'll need some cooling (even at a mildly aggressive but reasonable 95% efficiency, that's 25W of waste heat), but the fan will still be reasonable.
At first glance it would appear that the cable from power brick to laptop would be huge and awkward, but that can be solved fairly easily by having the connection be more like a docking station cradle. That would also let the charger supply additional airflow for the battery with a larger fan that you'd find on the laptop itself -- the battery will get rather warm during this process, and battery heating is probably one of the limiting factors on charge rates for something like this.
On long cross country trips, my partner and I switch drivers every two hours or so. And usually take the time to open up a new juice box or water, etc. Doesn't sound that inconvenient to me.
And let's do some math, shall we? Gasoline prices of $3/gal, with a car that gets 30 mpg (average consumer vehicle on the road is just under 20, thanks to old cars, SUVs, RVs, guzzling pickups, etc). That's ten cents per mile. An electric car with a range of 175mi that gets about 150Wh/mi (about average for the crop that's about to hit the market) capacity costs about 1.5 cents per mile. At 175mi, average speed of 65mph, that's 5 minutes of fuelling every 2.7 hours. Let's say 7 minutes for the overhead. This means just over 4 minutes of every hour driven is spent fuelling; gasoline cars have to fuel too, so let's say 3 additional minutes per hour is spent fuelling with an electric. During that hour of driving, covering 65 miles, the gasoline powered car cost $6.50, while the electric car cost $1. Net savings, $5.50. In short, you're saving $5.50 for 3 minutes of delay, which equates to the equivalent of saving of $110 per hour of extra time spent fuelling.
And you wouldn't choose this why?
Besides, I just love the look of the next gen crop of electrics. My favorite is the Aptera. I agree with one reporter's description: it looks like "Batman's girlfriend's car". And last they published specs, they hadn't seemed to have settled on a specific battery manufacturer yet. Which, to me, says there's a fair shot that these Toshiba batteries (or some of the other fast charging batteries soon hitting the market) may, if not in their first gen vehicles, land in their next gen vehicles.
That last paragraph contained spoilers, so if you don't want spoilers go back and don't have read it.
No, they'll come home from work and plug in immediately, when the load on the electrical grid is highest (at least during the summer)
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.
Except that Lithium Ion batteries don't actually contain metallic lithium. They contain lithium ions -- ie, the lithium is already oxidized. That's true for both the charged and discharged state. Some other metal (cobalt traditionally, I think iron and a couple others are used in newer experimental chemistries) is being oxidized and reduced. Wikipedia has more about the relevant electrochemistry.
Non-rechargable lithium cells (most 3V coin type cells) have metallic lithium. The rechargable chemistries don't, though -- hence the name lithium ion.
Use a charging station at the airport. You take the battery out of the laptop and insert it into the slot. The charging station could handle all that.
Remind us all how many manufacturers are making these batteries again - oh yeah just Toshiba. I'm sure it's quite easy to accommodate the few shapes and sizes they'll make.
If you factor in oil company subsidies, cost to clean up pollution, impact of the oil industry on the areas in which oil is pumped, oil spills, etc... gas probably SHOULD cost $10 a gallon, but we're only charging ourselves 1/3 as much and leaving the rest of the costs to our children in the form of a damaged planet and unstable political world.
That being said, not destroying our planet is starting to matter to a larger number of people who are willing to take on the extra cost. I know I'd pay disproportionately more for an extremely efficient automobile. Combine these batteries with some of the new cheaper solar panels on a roof, and I could drive free indefinitely with only the carbon footprint of the original manufacturing.
E pluribus unum