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Long In Development, Toshiba 'SCiB' Battery Debuts
relliker notes Toshiba's announcement of the SCiB, a battery we have been following for years. (As usual, use NoScript to avoid the incredibly annoying timed begging popup on Gizmag's site.) Here is Toshiba's SCiB site. The battery's specs claim 6,000+ charge/deep-discharge cycles with minor capacity loss, safe rapid charging to 90% in 5 minutes, and enhanced safety regarding overheating or shorting out. It could make its way into electric vehicles before long.
Toyota? Or Toshiba?
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Volt#Battery), the driver can only use 8.8kWh of the full capacity, to maximise the lifetime of the battery. Given that the lifetime of these batteries is the main draw, you might be able to get away with 90 SCiB-model batteries for a comparable capacity. Incidentally, that works out to about 180kg, comparable to the Volt's 170kg Li-ion pack, which is still an improvement given that Li-ion are one of the best battery types for energy/weight ratio. So it'
kdawson epic fail (again). You'd be best mailing timothy (the only actual "editor") to ask for a correction.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The electric motor beats the combustion engine in every way: Simpler, more reliable, much more efficient, more powerful, smoother and leveler output of power over a wider range of RPMs, quieter, smaller, lighter weight, and much less expensive. The big reason we don't use them everywhere is lack of a way to store sufficient energy that is 1) cheap, 2) lightweight, 3) quickly refillable, 4) durable, 5) not bulky. The humble gas tank is far better than the batteries, fuel cells, ultra capacitors, and other things (like flywheels?) that we have now. Solve these problems and bring the battery to the point where it is at least competitive with the gas tank even if still a little inferior, and powering cars with gasoline will be history so fast that the oil companies won't know what hit them.
Overhyped breakthroughs that really aren't are legion. But often it really does happen. 2009 was the year of the LCD. I'm still astonished at how quickly the CRT vanished last year. Over the last decade, the incandescent light bulb was pushed into niche applications as compact fluorescents took over But seems they won't reign long with LEDs steadily improving. The 1980s was huge, with the shift from vinyl records to CDs, the microwave oven, and the PC. The 1990s was even bigger with the Internet and the gigantic leaps in hard drive capacity. Doesn't seem there will be a year of the Linux desktop, more like a decade.
But this change seems very likely to be real. We've had electric motors on the sidelines for more than a century, and we know they work great. We've also had batteries a long time, so maybe we should be more cautious and skeptical about breakthroughs. But what we haven't had all that long are all these new battery materials such as lithium-ion. So I think that even if Toshiba's advance is less than it sounds, many others are working hard on the same problems, and we'll see huge improvements soon. Like LCDs were 5 years ago, batteries are on the cusp, and it really won't take much more to make the battery + electric motor combination better, much better, than combustion engine + gas tank. I'd be hesitant to buy a new car with a combustion engine. Might be obsolete very quickly, the way CRTs went last year. Combustion engine powered cars still have a few years, perhaps, the only question is how many?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You could maybe come up with a design that uses batteries like this for hard accelleration, climbing, and startup, when drain is high - and use the base-load batteries for other times, meanwhile shifting charge from the base-load back to the high-drain ones while driving normally. Such a design would get better use out of both battery types.
Just a thought, but depending on the size, what if they were interchangeable?
If that were the case, you could roll in to a refitted petrol station to exchange your battery, and the system can manage with the grid when it juices the batteries up.
If you had enough batteries in rotation, you could even charge them during low usage periods, but you would still be able to rapidly charge in times of high demand.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
If this takes off your at home charge station will probably be a larger battery bank which gets topped off overnight rather than direct power from the grid.
Everyone plugging their charger into their vehicle and then starting to do cooking, laundry etc. after work is going to create some horrid spot prices for power in the late afternoon.
having 5 minute recharge was needed to get away from the battery-swapping trick, as that has the nasty side-effect of giving you a battery which may or may not be as good as your old one, with scrapping of old ones being the responsability of the power-stations (which wont ever scrap one, if they can rent it out for a few bucks)
People, what a bunch of bastards
At least he gave us something useful.
People modded him up to show appreciation. I'm guessing far fewer readers will appreciate whining.
You are welcome on my lawn.
when it gets to -30 in your jeans pocket/coat pocket, you probably have bigger problems then your cell-phone battery..
People, what a bunch of bastards
If this takes off your car will trickle-charge to 100% directly off the grid overnight the vast majority of the time, when power demand is at its lowest. You get home, you plug it in, and if you know you are going back out soon you push a "charge the car now, I know it'll cost me more" button and it'll draw whatever it can get to load up the batteries as quickly as possible.
Most of the time, you'd plug it in and the charger would start itself at 10PM or whenever you get better rates, and it would know it had 6 hours or whatever to charge the batteries, so it would use a more efficient charging method.
The 5-minute charge will only be used at charging stations for long drives, which will probably be located where gas stations are today - in more industrial areas where more power is available. They'll probably charge up capacitors or batteries or use some similar technology to level out the load where possible.
A 5-minute charge is hugely convenient for long trips. But for most users, the car would rarely be charged that way.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Live in Wisconsin with real winters, and I would guess the number of times my cell phone would be used at -30C (-22F) would be less than once per winter on average. Who's whipping their phone out outside on a nice -30 day? Everybody's focused on getting inside.
Furthermore, the ability to charge at something like 10 times its nominal discharge rate means that it can actually absorb most of the energy of braking, much like a capacitor. That will make the battery pack last much longer under normal driving conditions (but not highway driving).
dom