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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
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.
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?
So I have to stop every 2 hours for 5 minutes of charging? That's going to be a fun cross-country drive.
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.
Hmm, what kind of device are you using that puts batteries next to your crotch?...
WAIT A MINUTE!
Boys, we have a woman posted among us! Oh, dear Slashdot...
BookDetective.net - book search engine and ranker I donate my skills to.
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.
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
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.
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 ).
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.
Honey, is this you? ;-)
(By GF also thinks that I am sexist pig and has no sense of humour
Lighten up, bud, go watch some MWC episodes.
BookDetective.net - book search engine and ranker I donate my skills to.
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.
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."
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