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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.
SCIB = Super Charge Ion Battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery
If I had to bet, I'd say it's "22".
Toyota? Or Toshiba?
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Is Toyota really involved or do all Japanese companies look the same to you?
My original post's title did not have the company name in it :)
A 2kg battery pack is 24V for 4.2Ah. That's ~100wh
To match the Chevy Volt's 16Kwh You'd need around 160 of these. That's for a tiny 40mile range. These aren't going to be the main power source of a car any time soon
Catch is 6000 charge/deep-discharge and rapid charge in 5 minutes.
Though my girlfriend is not impressed with those figures.
hilarious
According to Wikipedia, the disadvantage compared to Lithium Ion batteries is that they store less energy in a given space/weight, which is why this tech may not extend to small devices such as laptops.
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According to this page they state "SCiBTM is a well-balanced battery that combines high power output and large capacity with power density almost equal to that of capacitors":
http://www.scib.jp/en/product/detail.htm
Also on this page, they state 96 watts per kilogram (12 volt x 8 amp):
http://www.scib.jp/en/product/spec.htm
Only 96 watts per kg? That's not close to a capacitor which is about 1000-10000 watts per kg. Maybe I'm missing something but what gives?
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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"
Sorry, only works till -30 Celsius. So it may be a problem in countries that experience a real winter.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Less voltage per cell than ordinary lithium-ion, lower capacity than ordinary lithium-ion, and the fact that supplying enough volt-amps to fast-charge a car-sized battery pack remains decidedly non-trivial.
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Charging the suckers for one thing...
If you think a few windmills can screw up the electrical grid, imagine a couple of hundred thousand electric cars hopping on the grid to charge...
I sure as hell wouldnt want to be in charge of the grid *cringe* even with timed charging functionality in the cars.
Not that it is a problem yet.. most households lack the fusing to allow such large loads.. not something I expect to change fast as it requires a lot of expensive upgrades
The problem isn't the battery technology, it's the fact that laptop batteries are pretty much put through hell. Complete charge-discharge cycles (Tesla doesn't charge the battery above 85% or allow it to go below 10%), and they have no form of cooling (Tesla uses the vehicle's air conditioning system to keep the batteries at a nice temperature).
Do all that, and the battery will last much longer. But that's generally not practical for a laptop. Allowing room for cooling will result in either a bigger battery pack or less capacity, as will limiting the charge band.
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Pretty soon, except those without their own garage.
When you can charge up enough for ~2-3hours driving in ~15 minutes with an hour or so between possible recharges, this will be fine for long distance driving.
If you drive less than 2-3 hours to work (actual moving, so traffic jams don't count) and have your own garage, it's good NOW.
If you don't have your own garage, then unless you drive off specifically to recharge, they still don't work.
Unless there's a way to get your home electric power to the car on the main street without someone jacking in to your tarrif, or most workplaces have a work recharge station, those without garages are going to be in a pickle.
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.
AFAIK most of these still use the "traditional" LiCoO2 cathodes. Good energy density but known for degrading even without being used. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Shelf_life.
Personally, I would prefer a more long-lifed battery type, even at the expense of having to lug around a bit more wight for the same capacity. LiFePO4 batteries are said to be pretty durable. There is a list of materials at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Cathodes.
*notices Li(LiaNixMnyCoz)O2 and starts searching for more information*
C - the footgun of programming languages
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
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
say a car would need 30kw to maintain motorway speed (say 50, for ease of calculation), and ranges 200 miles, that means you need 120 KW/h of stored energy, pack 90% of that in five minutes, and you end up with roughly 1.3 Gigawatt of drain sustained over 5 minutes...
IT'S OVER 1.21 GIGAWAT!! (yeah i know, i got my meme's mixed)
That would be 30 kW (not kw), 120 kWh (not KW/h), 1.3 MW (not GW) ;-)
So no, it's not over 1.21 gigawatt, just a factor 997 lower...
Yeah, you'd better not lick your iPhone 4 that day. May be hard for some people.
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Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
It never reaches -30 here, and we get systems and cars which overheat much more easily in summer so we're due for some tech which favors hotter places. (Solar panels don't count, even here they're not economical)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
The spinel structure of LTO has a three dimensional network for lithium-ion conductivity and allows fast charge and discharge. The problem with lithium titanate anodes (Li4Ti5O12, LTO) compared to carbon anodes is the higher potential (0.2 V for carbon, 1.5 V for LTO) leading to lower voltage for the battery and lower energy density.
The upside of the high potential is that LTO is within the stability window of all the usual organic electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries. This means the electrolyte doesn't decompose on the surface of the anode during use and leads to a much higher cycle life. Toshiba is advertising 6000 cycles for this SCiB battery, a typical lithium-ion battery with the C/LiCoO2 chemistry only lasts 1000 or so. LTO is also safer as there is no danger of metallic lithium dendrites forming on the surface at such high potentials.
The low energy density and voltage mean that LTO is never going to replace carbon in applications such as laptops or mobile phones where energy density is much more important than power density. I would also imagine C/LiFePO4 batteries will be much more successfull in electrical vehicles. LTO is probably well suited for hybrid cars, however, since those require high power density and high cycle life. The cathode in SCiB is still LiCoO2 as I understand it and that might mean safety, environmental and price issues. LiFePO4 cathode would solve those but then the voltage and energy density would be even lower.
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.
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That's a problem with ICE engines as well. The coolant tends to freeze during cold snaps. Easy to work around, though -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater
I imagine similar solutions can be developed for cars that use these batteries.
You need 1.3MW - the comment above was three orders of magnitude off, the guy, on a techie website, forgot that there's a "mega" between "kilo" and "giga"!
Anyway, your car can trickle charge overnight (although you'd still need an updated power feed), or you can go into a "gas" station to get faster charges. These places aren't going to go away, and they will update their offerings as required.
Because you can charge in 5 minutes, doesn't mean you have to charge in 5 minutes. The fuel station can have local battery storage that evens out the load on the grid, and the charge time can be upped for a more reasonable charge rate. You can also have trickle chargers in parking spaces that deliver the energy at a much slower rate. A "charge while you shop" or "charge while you dine" sort of deal.
But the biggest benefit of a fast recharge will be recovering energy from regenerative braking. Currently regenerative braking has limits placed on it, because so much energy is created so quickly and then there is no place to put it. The current battery technology can't absorb the charge quickly enough. This technology will help relieve that particular bottleneck.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Like (US) Kansas? -22f is a common temperature in late dec early jan.
Common? In the coldest place in Kansas for which I have weather data handy, it gets to -1.4F or lower fewer than 36 hours per year, on average.
1. The Tesla Roadster has to go nearly 85mph to consume 30kW to maintain speed. At 50mph, it takes about 12kW. The Roadster is approximately equally efficient as the Leaf and Volt; it has a small cross section but a much higher drag coefficient.
2. A general number used to represent highway consumption for a typical efficient EV is 250Wh/mi. 200 miles range * 250Wh/mi = 50kWh. 90% of 50kWh in 5 minutes is 540kW. Aerovironment makes an 800kW charger. Now to be fair, most rapid charging systems don't exceed the lower hundreds of kilowatts, and some of the lower end ones (like Nissan is installing for the Leaf) are in the tens of kilowatts. The rough cutoff point for what is considered "rapid" charging and what is not is around 40kW.
3. Notice how dramatically different of numbers you got, despite your using 120kWh instead of 50kWh? You had a three orders of magnitude math error.
4. To go ahead and pre-empt it: No, you don't want to have everyone drawing hundreds of kilowatts straight from the grid. That would be a big grid destabilization and require massive hookups. The typical approach for such high power charging involves battery buffers, sized to ensure that you can statistically guarantee a given percent availability (99.99% or whatnot). And to pre-empt *that*: No, they're not prohibitively expensive. Neither are the chargers, although you do need (very roughly) the sort of utilization rates found at gas stations to justify their cost (a station of rapid chargers sharing a common buffer costs about the same as a gas station with a similar number of pumps). The chargers have the advantage of less maintenance, no need to take "fuel deliveries", and a dramatically cheaper "fuel". They have the disadvantage of lower throughput and the possibility of lower consumer price acceptance (since they're used to charging for so cheaply at home). You can also only support fewer stations from the same number of vehicles, since most charging is done slowly at home or at work.
5. To preempt something really stupid that gets mentioned every time: no, you don't rapid charge at home. Why would you need to be able to charge in 5 minutes at home? Can do you that with your gas car? Rapid charging is only needed for long trips.
6. Yes, 10 or 15 minute charges (a more realistic target for rapid charging of EVs, and ones that some EVs like the BYD F3DM and the Subaru Stella support) are slower than filling up a gasoline car. But not as much as you might think. The actual filling of the tank only takes about two minutes or so (depends on the pump, but there are legal limits to the maximum flow rate). But there's a lot of overhead to *every* type of fillup -- finding an offramp, slowing down, driving from the turnoff to the station, turning in, pulling up to a pump, turning the car off, unbuckling, getting out your money, getting out, taking off the gas cap, connecting the vehicle, selecting the fuel type, selecting the payment method, starting filling, stopping filling, reattaching the gas cap, hanging up the pump, paying, taking the receipt, getting back in, putting your seatbelt back on, and all of the driving/decel steps in reverse, plus a lot of little random things. I timed it for a while and found that the whole process sets me back an average of about 9 minutes. So going from a 2 minute fill to a 10 minute fill isn't a 5x increase in time; it's only a 2x increase in time. And fillup time consumes the tiniest fraction of your total trip time. If you combine fillups with your normal breaks (food, bathroom, rest, etc), which you're supposed to take every two hours or so anyway, there's no difference in distance you can travel per day with rapid charging versus gasoline.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.