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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?
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.
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
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 can't ever imagine myself saying "I think I'll have a beer, watch the game, and let the battery in my computer blow up."
Well, it could explode in the pocket of someone who is about to kill you. I don't think that would be the most inopportune time.
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.
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 ).
Not exactly.
TFA says it can take 50 amps. It is a lithium cell, therefore 3.6 volts.
That is 1.6 amps at 120volts. Not a big deal (and yes, I didn't account for conversion losses so say 2 amps max at 120v). Now this is for your cell phone or PDA.
So, while your wall wart will grow some and will probably end up close to the unit being charged instead of being plugged into the wall, the power cord is fine and you won't be blowing any house breakers.
Now for your laptop at 20volts which is 5 or 6 cells, you will need 8.8 amps at 120v so say 10 amps total. Still not a deal breaker but you may need 18 ga wire in the power supply to wall connection instead of 20 or 22 ga. The thing that gets big here is the wire ga to the unit itself. Now THAT could be a problem so we will probably not see a full 50 amps into the unit itself. The physical space for the leads inside the cell phone, computer, etc, get a bit large.
I get it now. If you disagree with the majority on