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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?
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
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.