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

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?

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: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

[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