Experimental Batteries Charge In Minutes

Zothecula writes "Of all the criticisms of electric vehicles, probably the most commonly-heard is that their batteries take too long to recharge – after all, limited range wouldn't be such a big deal if the cars could be juiced up while out and about, in just a few minutes. Well, while no one is promising anything, new batteries developed at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign do indeed look like they might be a step very much in the right direction. They are said to offer all the advantages of capacitors and batteries, in one unit."

Comments

Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[elrous0]

Considering the hassle I had just getting a 220-volt outlet to power my dryer installed at my house, I'd hate to think what the electrician is going to say when I tell him I want an outlet that can deliver enough power to drive my car 100 miles--and deliver it in just a few minutes. Poor bastard is going to have a heart attack.

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Nothing resembling modern standard industrial wiring will handle that. On the other hand, you could have a flywheel or another type of battery bank (a very broad, shallow one, if you catch my drift - lots of cells) in your house that charged only at night or from altpower and which charged your car whenever you liked. Sounds expensive to me, too. Flywheels are probably the logical choice. You bury them to prevent runaways in the case of failure. You float them on maglev bearings to make them efficient. The power company should be putting them underneath substations but there's room for them in a residential context as well. It's being done now but not enough IMO (and MO is worth every penny you've paid...)

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[slim]

Don't you realise your crackpot flywheel plan could slow down the planet's rotation until we all FRY!?!

Think of the children.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Nameisyoung007]

Dr. Emmett Brown: [running out of the room] 1.21 gigawatts? 1.21 gigawatts? Great Scott!

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Tim C]

MMmmm, fried children...

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[jkeelsnc]

The answer is NO, definitely not. 220V would not be good for rapid charging. But why do you need to recharge at home that fast in the first place? Now, out at rapid charging stations where you can stop and recharge in a few minutes they will likely have 440V circuits that can deliver that kind of current. If you have a 200 mile battery you will probably be able to recharge at home in 4 hours (on 220V) anyway which should be enough after you get home from work to charge up for the next day. If you are at a place where you need a quick charge then stop at the quick charge station. Adding the kind of infrastructure it would take to have 440V circuits in every house plus substations and distribution network for every house to handle that much power for rapid charging is unreasonable except for at targeted locations that have quick charge stations. Even then I like the idea of the other poster of using fly wheel storage systems (where a flywheel spins on magnetic bearings) for quick charge stations. A station could have have several of the flywheel systems that are running at all times (large ones). So that as people charge quickly it slows down the flywheels a bit but then when no one is charging (maybe over night or middle of the day etc) then the flywheels speed up again and are ready for more quick charging at the station. Also it would allow for even higher voltages and currents than a 440V infrastructure can provide and make it less expensive to provide a power connection to a station.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[hey!]

Wise man say: what goes around, comes around. The point is to give that angular momentum back. Nobody will be the wiser, except the guys at the naval observatory. When was the last time anyone thought of *them*, I ask you. First we take away their clubhouse so Dick Cheney can live there (well, OK, Nelson Rockefeller was the first), then we play bloody hell with the ephemeris.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[drinkypoo]

Don't you realise your crackpot flywheel plan could slow down the planet's rotation until we all FRY!?!

Duh, everyone knows that you can solve that problem with counter-rotating flywheels.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[hey!]

Well, let's suppose the batteries are cheap enough to put in your car. Clearly they can handle a lot of current, in fact I'll bet they can discharge at high rates as well as charge. So what you do is you install a similar battery in your house and trickle charge it. At the "gas station" you'd have a massive flywheel that stores energy off the grid. That's how the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT does it. Some of the experiments they do would knock out the power grid if you tried the get the current spike they require directly from the power lines.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[MightyYar]

I apologize in advance for my lack of electrical knowledge. But would anything resembling modern standard household wiring even be able to handle that?

Older houses are often wired for 60 Amps, and they don't stand a chance.

Some newer houses with big AC units go as high as 200 Amps. More typical I think is 100 Amps. The Nissan Leaf has a 24 kW-h pack. To "quick charge" that in an hour with 100% efficiency would require 24kW (duh). At 240 V that is 24kW / 240V = 100 Amps. So a newish house could do it if it had a separate 100 A 240V feed just for charging the car. I figure that would set you back about $3000, so it's not out of the question. :)

More likely, you'd pull up to a charging station that has a big industrial feed at a higher voltage so that you don't need a copper wire the size of your arm.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[robot256]

We worked all this out the last time a battery article came up. You can slow-charge at home, or fast charge at filling stations. Filling stations will install banks of capacitors that recharge in, say, 15-30 minutes from a dedicated high-power line. You drive in, dump a capacitor into your car, and go. It will take a good bit of work to get those power drops at every gas station, though, and capacitors are expensive. But then you don't have to worry about filling the fuel tanks or anything.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[pz]

We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.

80kWh / 5-10 minutes ~= 1000-500kW.

Hmm. That's roughly the power draw of a small electric passenger train (e.g. an old subway train).

Rescaling, the figures become 0.5 to 1.0 MW. That's a highly non-trivial amount of power to transfer electrically (ignoring the massive electromagnetic fields that level of power transfer creates). Not something that's going to be done in the home.

Recall, a consumer-grade hair drier is in the 1.0 to 1.5 kW range. We're talking about operating about a thousand of those at the same time for 5-10 minutes. Personally, I don't want to be anywhere near that. Moreover, even if it's wildly efficient at 99% transfer to the batteries, that's 0.01 x 1 MW = 10 KW of loss that needs to be dissipated. I am not familiar with materials found in the home that can provide safe, reliable, tamper-proof thermal isolation from grasping a cable / connector package that is glowing hot.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

That number is wrong, because it calculates the energy in the gas that goes into gasoline cars. 80 kWh/100 km is 1,287 watt*hours/mile, five times higher than the average EV highway energy rate of 250 watt*hours/mile - electric cars are 5 times more efficient at using energy than gas cars. At low speed (city driving), a EV consumes around 150-160 watt*hours/mile, similar to the Japanese rail system, which gets 150 watt*hours/passenger-mile.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Low Ranked Craig]

The example you cite is not for an electric car. Using the Tesla Roadster as an example. 53 kWh for full charge == 300km == .1767kWh/km. Where I live electricity is about 11 cents/kWh. .11*53 == $5.30 == $1.76 per 100km. On the other hand gasoline cost almost $4 a gallon ($1.05/l) my car gets about 25MPG (9.4l/100km) So. if my math is correct, electricity will cost $1.76/100km and gasoline will cost $9.87/100km.

What is an acceptable charge time? To charge in 10 hours would require drawing 5,300 watts for 10 hours, or 24 amps over 220v, which is probably acceptable for home charging. For commercial charging let's say 10 minutes. You'd need 53,000W for an hour, so you'd need 318,000W for 10 minutes, or 50 amps @ 6,300V, or 100 amps @ 3,200V, or 200 amps @ 1,600V. That's moving a lot of energy very quickly, but I think it could be set up to work safely assuming you had access to that kind of power.

maybe someone can check my math. I've only had one cup of coffee so far.

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[lgw]

Just the heat released by that power transfer (at any believable efficiency) would be immense. The magnetic field would be impressive as well: wad your car into a tight ball, and then melt it.

Just trickle-charge a normal car battery pack, then swap the battery packs when you get home (a bit of powered mechanical aid would be needed, of course). Do I have to think of everything?

Re:Wow, what will THAT outlet look like?

[Rei]

What are you trying to prove, except for the fact that you pay absurd rates for electricity, several times more than most Americans pay?

I pay 8.5 cents per kWh for each incremental kWh.

The US national average for residential electricity, all buys together, is now up to 11.04 cents per kWh. That's residential; commercial and especially industrial are even cheaper (industrial is 6.59 cents per kilowatt hour).

Sorry to have to tell you that you're getting ripped off.

And...

[Quiet_Desperation]

Six months from now no one will remember these, along with all the other "revolutions" in battery tech.

Me? Cynical? Not nearly enough, actually.

Aluminum-air

[McGregorMortis]

That's one of the interesting properties of the aluminum-air battery. The aluminum plates can be replaced quickly and easily. Just pop out the spent plate, drop in a new one, and off you go.

The reaction products (aluminum oxide) can also be captured and recycled into new aluminum.

A nifty idea, but there are assorted problems that have to be solved before it can be practical.

That's great, but...

[JustAnotherIdiot]

...what's the average lifespan for these batteries?

Re:Just put inductors in the roads

[slim]

Don't cross the road if you have a pacemaker.

sell & install them in pairs

[way2trivial]

Counter rotating pairs, same as helicopters!

then you just have to track failed units to make sure & maintain the 1/1 ratio necessary to keep the earths magnetic field from dissipating!

Electric Vehicle Range VS Hybrid Cost

[sjbe]

The PROBLEM with electric cars today isn't really the range, it's the price.

No the problem is range more than cost. I could afford to buy a Nissan Leaf but I would still need to either buy or rent another vehicle for longer trips. It's not remotely unusual for me to drive more than 150 miles in a single day. Not every day but often enough - at least 2X per week. (I drive about 30-40K miles/year) Current electric cars are really cool but they are only usable within a fairly short radius (30-60 miles). Now they have other charms (quiet, efficient, etc) which I definitely like but range is a BIG problem if you actually drive a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'd be first in line for a electric car that fit my needs but their battery packs just have a log ways to go yet. Absent some major advances in batteries and/or battery replacement technology, I just don't see electric cars being more than niche products. I'd buy a Tesla Roadster but only as a second vehicle.

The problem with HYBRIDS is cost. My daily driver is a pickup and the only hybrid pickup I'm aware of (Chevy Silverado) costs $20,000 more than my current ride with similar features. All for only 4-5mpg improvement. Even with tax breaks that's just way too expensive. I think hybrids are the future of automobiles but economies of scale need to kick in and bring the cost down.