Toshiba Battery Charges In 10 Minutes

Slatterz writes "Toshiba has unveiled a battery prototype that offers a 90 percent charge capacity in just 10 minutes. The Super Charge Ion Battery (SCIB) is capable of handling 5,000 to 6,000 recharge cycles, compared to the typical 500 offered by standard lithium-ion batteries. The new battery is composed of a durable material that offers a high level of thermal stability and prevents overheating."

Comments

90% = Bad Marketing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wouldn't Toshiba just under-rate the batteries- effectively making 90% = 100%?

I mean, just from a marketing standpoint, if you can say your battery charges to 100% of it's /rated/ capacity in 10 minutes, that sounds a heck of a lot better then having it charge to 90% of it's /rated/ capacity in 10 minutes.

-AC

Re:90% = Bad Marketing?

[neapolitan]

Probably because then you would then ultimately charge the battery to 111% of its rated capacity, which would make people frightened.

Also, when measuring charge/discharge cycles, the rated capacity would be used, not the 111% rated capacity. I think that being straightforward is better, so I have very little problem with Toshiba's description.

Re:90% = Bad Marketing?

[lysergic.acid]

oh i dunno, maybe honesty has something to do with it? not everyone is obsessed with advertising/marketing double-speak.

besides, why intentionally take 10% off of your advertised battery capacity? i think most consumers would be able to do the math and see that the competitor's 10 min. 90% charge is exactly the same as your 10 min. 100% charge--except the competitor's battery has 111% the capacity of your battery. that could be an extra 2 hrs. of music or games.

on a somewhat related note, a came across an interesting article while researching Li-ion batteries on wikipedia. apparently some Li-ion batteries are capable of being _fully_ charged in 10 minutes. so maybe this isn't as big of a breakthrough as it initially seemed?

Re:90% = Bad Marketing?

[Sandbags]

The reason 90% is a target for batteries has to do with the input energy required to achive the charge. The higher the existing charge, the more resistance created trying to increase it further. Some of you math nuts out there can help me out and give me the exact equasion, which I have not had enough coffee yet to recall, but there is a scientific reason why we do not simply charge directly to 100%.

1st, charging to 100% vs 90% takes more than 10% more energy. Quite a bit more actually, and is wasteful.

2nd, charging to 100% at the current used to get to 90% fast would cause imense heat.

3rd, the idea here is the fast charge can be done for cars quickly (90 seconds) using extremely high high amperage cables (3 phase 400 amp 22 volt). Houses don't have these typically, but a filling station on a main road could have access to this kind of voltage from the street's main high volt line, and could also have overhead cable supports to assist drivers hefting the thick cable required to safely provide that energy.

At home, a 120 AMP circuit would likely be used, and take 2-3 hours to bring your car to the same 90% charge, but at that rate, likely going all the way to 100% would not be an issue. On a generic household 220volt line, charging would be 7-10 hours.

They specify 90%, because when filling up on the go, you would not want to pay for the excessive cost of that last 10% (20-30% more electricity), nor would you want to wait the extra 10-20 minutes needed to achieve the top off. It's inefficient on 2 counts. They specifiy this to ensure drivers of electric cars on these SCiB (AKA Litium Titranium) batteries know that the max 60 mile range of their car is at 100%, and that quick fill-ups might only get 55 or so.

Of course, Chrysler is talking about new cards with 300 mile electric ranges coming out. I'm assuming this is with onboard gas backup engines, like the Volt, but their information was unclear, and I imagine a caravan does have enough under floor space and undercarrige space to hold 4-5 times the batteris of a Prius...

R&D in the US

[oldhack]

I really wish more such news came out of American industries...

Sorry to play nationalist card here. Anyway, it is what it's cracked up to be, kudos to Toshiba.

Why 90%

[damn_registrars]

What is the purpose of giving us the time to charge to 90%? Is there something about the final 10% that takes longer to charge than the rest of the battery?

Or are they charging while running - and perhaps not able to get all the way to 100%? The article was lousy (to be generous) and doesn't say what it would take to reach 100%.

Re:Why 90%

[Spoke]

If you think of a battery as a bucket where the battery charge is indicated by the amount of water in the bucket.

Now imagine that you are trying to fill that bucket as fast as possible, which means using a firehose, and that spilling any water means damaging the bucket.

Getting the bucket close to full without making a mess is a lot easier than getting it 100% full which means you need to slow the fill down to trickle to make sure you don't over flow or splash water everywhere.

Charging the last 10% of battery capacity is difficult because the battery does not readily accept a charge as it's nearly full. This means to get the last 10% of capacity you need to slow down the charge rate, which means that in this case, it may only take 10 minutes to get to 90% full, but it may take another 30-60 minutes to charge up that last 10% without damaging the battery.

Re:a better link

[lysergic.acid]

SCiB batteries can endure 5,000 to 6,000 recharge cycles, compared to around 500 cycles for standard lithium-ion batteries, according to a Toshiba executive manning the company's booth at the Ceatec exhibition in Chiba, Japan. At the show, Toshiba showed a prototype SCiB battery installed in a Dynabook laptop. The laptop was matched

only 500 cycles, really? that seems a little low. do they mean that after 500 charges the battery begins to decrease in capacity, or that the battery will start to fail completely after 500 charges? because that seems really really low to me.

i mean, most rechargeable batteries today are Li-ion batteries, right? i just wanna know how many recharges i have left on my PSP.

does it help if you make sure to plug the battery back into the charger before it's out of charge? what can you do or not do to help preserve the capacity and life-span of a li-ion battery?

We do

[WindBourne]

but W and the neo-cons KILLED the majority of our long term research and throw most of it towards coming up with hi-tech close term solutions for the DOD. In essence, they shutdown a lot of long-term multi-discipline research in our universities and various companies like GE, IBM, Lucent, etc and channeled it into a number of companies (GM, L-MART, Rathyeon, Halliburton, etc).

Re:a better link

[retchdog]

I think it's pretty close - at a rough educated guess, I'd say that after 500 cycles without disciplined use (see below), you'll be around 30% of factory capacity. (I'm assuming a cycle every 1.5 days)

Supposedly keeping the battery between 30% to 70% charge is helpful; there are utilities for this for laptops, don't know about PSP. Running it all the way down is very bad, and when I got lazy about it, my battery life did plummet (though it may have just "aged" independently, it seems connected).

High temperature is bad too, but there's not much you can do about this usually, especially with a PSP. However, it's worth saying that my thinkpad X-series battery (which is at the edge of the laptop, at the hinge) is faring a lot better than my iBook battery which was planted right atop the circuits. :-/

Re:Oh Cool!

[Jesus_666]

Actually, the incendiary Apple batteries are manufactured by Sony as well.

Re:a better link

[lysergic.acid]

hrm... well i guess it's a good thing that i've only let my battery die once or twice since i got it. with replacement batteries costing $40~50 a piece, i'll have to be more attentive about my charge state.

i seem to remember seeing several different stories on /. about "revolutionary" new battery techs, but i still haven't seen any alternatives to traditional li-ion batteries being sold at commercial retailers. IMHO lithium-titanate batteries look promising. manufacturers are claiming that these new lithium batteries can recharge in under 10 minutes--and that's for use in electric vehicles. this New Scientist article reports that mobile devices using lithium-titanate can recharge in 6 minutes, and each battery is capable of going through 20,000 charge cycles.

i'm guessing this technology is probably still too expensive to bring to market. it'll probably only be used in electric vehicles or other such applications which require much more durability and longer life-spans than traditional Li-ion batteries currently provide.

Re:a better link

[Timbotronic]

I'm increasingly sceptical of EEStor. They've just signed another "worldwide exclusive" deal with a tiny company called LightEVs for all 2 and 3 wheel vehicles. The deal they did previously with Zenn covers all small to midsized cars so they've now conceeded a big chunk of their margin to a couple of nobodies. You've got to wonder - how are these companies adding value? What's their track record? Why hasn't EEStor made deals with more established manufacturers? A single working prototype which has the performance they claim would have the majors beating the door down. I hope I'm wrong about EEStor, but it doesn't look good.

Re:a better link

[shmlco]

Those are 500 FULL cycles. Use 33% of the battery one day, recharge, 33% of the battery the next day, recharge, and 33% of the battery the next day, and recharge, and you'll bascially have used one full cycle.

Re:Of interest...

[Yvanhoe]

So you say we need to have bigger leads between the power supply and the laptop ? This is not such a big deal...

Re:a better link

[Lonewolf666]

Looks great for "micro-hybrid" cars that use only a small battery for recovering braking energy and a boost on accelerating. In these applications, you need a lot of power density. Or simply as a starter battery (good bye lead-acid).

For plug-in hybrids or electric only cars, LiPO4 is also interesting:
somewhat higher energy density, and the lower power density is not a problem due to the larger battery. An example of a system that seems to be commercially available:
http://www.valence.com/products/epoch_overview.html

Re:a better link

[marsu_k]

Supposedly keeping the battery between 30% to 70% charge is helpful; there are utilities for this for laptops, don't know about PSP.

Somewhat offtopic, but I've been wondering about this: my main laptop is currently also my main desktop. As such, while I run it off the battery every now and then, it's plugged in most of the time. Does this have a negative effect on the battery life? Should I use the battery more often?

Re:a better link

[cerberusss]

It's definitely not ideal. If you keep it in your laptop, it's going to be much warmer than room temperature (because the laptop is warm) and fully charged.

Basically that's really bad storage. See here:

Wikipedia on Li-ion battery life

To summarize the above page, it's best to store a battery a bit less than half-charged, and not above room temperature. So to preserve your battery when you really need it, take it out.

Re:a better link

[electrictroy]

>>>Use 33% of the battery one day, recharge, 33% of the battery the next day, recharge, and 33% of the battery the next day, and recharge, and you'll bascially have used one full cycle.

Nope. You see, batteries are a lot like dogs. If you overfeed your dog, he won't live long. If you underfeed you dog, that too can shorten his life. If you alternate between stuffing your dog full of food, and then not feeding him for a whole week until he's skin 7b ones, that too can damage him due to the stress. But if you feed your dog moderate amounts of food, on a regular basis, he'll live a happy long life.

Your battery is the same way. As long as you keep it in the "comfort zone" of 40-90% charge, it will last a long, long time. If you overcharge it or undercharge it, then you're putting stress on the battery, and that causes permanent damage. The damage slowly accumulates until the battery's internal design short-circuits & dies.

Back to your example:

Since you treated your battery gently, only discharging it to ~60% charge, you avoided stressing it. So effectively that counts as 0.1 cycles subtracted from its life, not a full cycle. This method of always keeping batteries between 40-90% is also used in Toyota & Honda hybrid cars to extend their NiMH battery life to 300,000 miles. (If they discharged the battery completely, then the lifespan would only be 50,000 miles, as is the case with their EV cars.)

Final thought:

I prefer NiMH to Lithium Ion. NiMH batteries are a lot like NiCad batteries - they keep going and going and going. I have NiCad batteries that are over twenty years old, and yet still continue powering my devices. Unfortunately LiIon batteries only last 4-5 years; I don't like batteries with builtin death dates.