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Nanodot-Based Smartphone Battery Recharges In 30 Seconds
Zothecula (1870348) writes "At Microsoft's Think Next symposium in Tel Aviv, Israeli startup StoreDot has demonstrated the prototype of a nanodot-based smartphone battery it claims can fully charge in just under 30 seconds. With the company having plans for mass production, this technology could change the way we interact with portable electronics, and perhaps even help realize the dream of a fast-charging electric car."
I think I'll wait for some miniaturisation...
TFA states that they would need to substantially improve current capabilities for a car-size battery. Not that it doesn't make it cool, but at the same time, it's a bit presumptive to assume this will be the basis of car batteries given existing capabilities. Good luck to them, though!
I'm not sure charge speed is so important for cars, I'd imagine that reducing the battery weight and size would be more important.. having twice or three times the capacity in the same space would be much more important than charging fast, especially considering how much power you'd have to put through a cable/connector to charge EV batteries in under an hour (as an example)..
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
So, will I have to buy a new one every 6months or will I just have to buy some nanodot gel at inkjet prices to top it up every once in a while?
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Woohoo!
We've finally solved all our problems with batteries! Yep, this is definitely the one, boy am I excited.
So, 30s for phone battery. Assuming it is 1Ah (1000mAh) 3.7V battery, we are looking at about 4Wh of energy. Over 30 seconds charge, this gives an average current of 120A at 3.6V or 450W current flow..
http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...
See, they are already charging at a rate of 120kW at the supercharger. That's 250x faster than charging that cellphone in 30s.
Handling large amount of current is dangerous for other reasons. Things like explosions due to corroded parts melting, can be an issue in systems that are not monitored appropriately.
A Tesla S has an 85kWh battery. To charge that in 30 seconds requires 10,200,000 watts of power - approximately the full electrical service to a decent size skyscraper. That's 42,500 amps at 240V, the full maximum power available to over 212 modern homes and a totally impractical amount of current to handle with any reasonable electrical equipment. So while fast-charging batteries are great and a necessary step forward in technology, the universal adoption of electric cars will require not just upgrading our infrastructure, but a complete rethinking and redevelopment of the electrical grid using not-yet-imagined technologies.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
phone headsets
TV remotes
battery powered candles
General IOT devices
At 2.5W, you won't be charging this battery in mere seconds with a standard USB connection. Anyone else notice the rather large connector the demonstrator plugged in to charge it? You'd have to have a charger capable of supplying several amps to charge it that fast. Assuming it's a 3.6V nominal battery at 2000mAh, that's 7.2WH. For a typical 2.5W USB connection, you'd still take 2.88 hours to charge your phone (longer if you take inefficiencies into account). Also, can a mini- or micro-USB connector's power pins handle several amps without getting burned? Don't get me wrong, I'm not discounting the possibilities of this development, but I am saying the demonstration was a bit misleading, and that there are problems that would have to be worked out before it'd be practical for a phone battery.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
... discharge time is another. How long does the battery last? TFA (typically for stupid tech articles) omits this detail.
Let's see, a 4,700mAh 5V battery has a capacity of 23.5 VAh or 84.6kJ. To charge that in 30s, you'll need a 2.82kW charger output. So whether it's feasible or not probably depends on what jurisdiction you're in - a British 240V 13A socket will give you 3.12kW, so as long as your losses are below 10% you'll just get it. An Australian 240V 10A socket will give you 2.4kW, so allowing for 90% efficiency of the charger you'll get about 40s to charge. A US 110V 15A socket will give you 1.65kW, requiring about 57s at 90% efficiency to deliver a full charge.
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If a 2000 ma/hr (2 amp/hr) battery supplies 2 amps for a full hour then we need to put the same amount of current in reverse to fully charge it. So a 2 amp charger can charge a (dead) 2A/hr battery in 1 hour. To do it in 30 seconds we need a heck of a lot more current. So a little math reveals that to charge it in a minute we would need 2A*60min = 120A/min charge current. And for 30 seconds we would need 240 Amps. Though I bet most people won't be charging stone dead batteries.
30 amps could charge a dead battery in 4 minutes. And the power supply wouldn't be that large, though it would have to be table top and have some heavy gauge cables coming out of it. Another issue is a new charge connector would be needed to handle the current. We might have to go back to charge cradles with large contacts.
(Correct me if I'm wrong) 30 seconds charging time for a 3000MaH Battery capacity would implies a 120 Amp DC current
Waow!
Am I the only one skeptical of whether this is real or not? What they describe doesn't make a lot of sense to me:
On one side it acts like a supercapacitor (with very fast charging), and on the other is like a lithium electrode (with slow discharge). The electrolyte is modified with our nanodots in order to make the multifunction electrode more effective.
So is it a battery or a capacitor? Maybe I'm just woefully ignorant of how lithium batteries work, but I was under the impression that it was the surface area of the electrodes and the activity of the electrolyte that govern the internal resistance, and hence the charge rate. Capacitance has nothing to do with it, unless you are charging up a capacitive "buffer" that drains into the chemical battery more slowly afterward, but that seems kind of pointless.
Pulling out buzzwords like "environmentally friendly" materials and nanodot "self-assembly" doesn't really help your plausibility, either. Anybody can make a box with banana jacks and an app with a timer in it.
correction: 360Amp (!)
Once electric cars become prevalent, the charging time doesn't really matter for the supply and HV distribution side of the grid - each car sucks either 10.2MW for 30s or 10.2kW for a bit over eight hours (30,000s). Once there are enough that the spikes in charging smooth out, the demand increase is the same whichever charging rate you use. The only problem really comes at the edge of the grid, with the connection to individual houses currently being sized about three orders of magnitude wrong for this use. At this point, it's probably not too unreasonable to ask homeowners to pay to have their grid connection upgraded to give them the privilege of a 30-second charge for their car.
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It's irrelevant if they do this anyway, because if you had a 100kWh car battery that could charge in 5 minutes, the voltage and current requirements would be so enormous to make it impractical, because you'd have to deliver 1.2MW to charge the battery in that time. At 11000 volts you'd still require a current of about 110 amps, so not only very high current, but very high voltage.
One of Britain's largest single generating plants is the Sizewell B PWR nuclear generator, rated at 1200MW. It would take just 1000 such cars all wanting to charge at once to completely use all the capacity of this entire large nuclear power station. How many cars are currently filling up with petrol in Suffolk (the county where SIzewell B is situated) right at this second? Probably well over 1000.
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IANAEE (I am not an Electrical Engineer), but couldn't you just locate some capacitors close to the charging location? Charge them up slowly over time, then quickly discharge them when a car needs juice, that way you're not putting the load on the grid all at once. It probably wouldn't work if you were to set them up like gas/petrol stations, since you wouldn't have much time between discharges to recharge the capacitors, but for home use, it seems (to someone such as myself who knows next to nothing on the subject and is quite open to being corrected) like it might be feasible.
As I read that quickly, I got excited and then realized I was reading it wrong and you did not state that you'd need to deliver 1.21 gigawatts.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Capacitors
Only not explicitly explained.
In short - it lasts the same as the battery of that capacity lasts today.
'In essence, we have developed a new generation of electrodes with new materials â" we call it MFE â" Multi Function Electrode," StoreDot CEO Doron Myersdorf told Gizmag. "On one side it acts like a supercapacitor (with very fast charging), and on the other is like a lithium electrode (with slow discharge). The electrolyte is modified with our nanodots in order to make the multifunction electrode more effective."
It's basically a supercapacitor on top of a battery.
You charge the capacitor quickly, it discharges into the battery slowly, and because the capacitor is actually a part of the electrode the loss is minimal.
On top of that, not having to discharge the capacitor into the battery all at once, it can discharge into the battery slowly, without heating it up, increasing the battery's life-cycle.
Discharge time is not the issue. Like others have already mentioned - we're gonna need new (thicker) cables and connectors to charge that fast.
And we just got the reversible USB.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
2000mAh = 2Amps/hr Then it is charged in 30 sec? Thats 1/120th of an hr so charge current = 2x120 or 240 Amps!
That is equivalent to approx 2 house power services. That ammont of current is carried on what looks like
lamp zip cord on dual banana plugs good for ~ 10 -15 amps on a good day.
Sorry something just aint right. Maybe the demo is not the 2000mAhr model?
It would still work (capacitors/batteries) in the sense that it would smooth the grid loading - you would charge during low times so that you could service at high times.
Of course, that requires enough storage for buffering - which would be probably 50-60% of the total capacity charged in a day. Well, that and cables too big to handle - even at 400V, you're still talking thousands of amps - and cable diameters measured in inches.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Not to mention the fact that you are assuming perfectly lossless charging. If the charging process is 90% efficient (an optimistic number), then you need 11.3 MW to charge that car, with the battery pack dissipating 1.13 MW of waste heat during the process. That won't do much good for the interior of the car or its occupants.
Unless someone invents room temperature superconductors for electrical transmission lines, it will be impossible to replace our modern fleet with all-electric vehicles. Even if a refueling station could offer "swap out" batteries, it would still draw about 708 kW from the grid on a continuous basis trickle-charging the batteries, just to refuel 200 cars a day (and that's assuming lossless charging).
Electric cars are best suited for overnight charging from the grid, while the Tesla fast-charging stations are only practical because so few people use them. If everyone in the country bought a Tesla, the shortcomings of the electric power grid for electrical vehicles would quickly become evident.
The gas stations would have to have their own substations and high voltage service to do 30 second electric car charges. And a typical gas station has about 8 pumps. So 80MW to charge 8 cars in 30 seconds is going to be a killer unless you run a 120kV ~400A service to the gas station. Overhead lines would be a no go in many areas and underground lines are super expensive to lay. All that for a gas station.
A single 10.2 MW "pump" would require 430A @ 13.8kV. Or run 69kV to the pump and have an 86A circuit.
A bit more practical would be to aim for 5 minute charges. People can just chill in their cars and wait for them to charge in a few minutes, offer them free wifi while they wait. That would require 1.02MW per pump so a station of 8 pumps at full load would draw about 69A at 69kV which is a bit more practical. Of course they would still need a sizeable substation to step the voltage down to 480V or 600V 3 phase for the chargers. And then each pump would need a 1000-1200A breaker and multiple large cables. Imagine the cooling necessary for the switching bank in each of those pumps, they would be enormous. A better idea would be to build service stations on top of a pit filled with the substation and chargers. Liquid cool everything and a simple pump looking terminal up top with the charge cable would be the only thing visible. The footprint would also stay the same and cooling towers be located on the roof of the service stations shelter canopy. Or large ducts could be built to circulate air through the stations electric pit. The only concern would be flooding but that would be solved in the planning stages.
And then think about how large a 1.02MW charger cable would have to be. From a quick google the tesla batteries are 375 volts. So to pump 1.02MW @ 375V you have a charge current of 2720 Amps. The thickest cables for building service are 2000 MCM which is about the thickness of a baseball bat and needs to be bent with a hydraulic bender. Using special high temp jackets and such they are only rated to 1800A. They would have to make thinner flexible liquid cooled charger cables or invest in superconductors to make them practical. That or instead of a cable an arm that can be easily positioned via a spring or motor assist with heavy copper bus bars inside or liquid cooled conductors. It would look like an industrial robot arm and even grandma could maneuver it.
you'd have to deliver 1.2MW to charge the battery in that time.
Megawatt industrial motors and pumps are common. A home charger could not do deliver this much power, but a charging station along a freeway could. If you are at home, it is unlikely that you need a super fast charge anyway.
How many cars are currently filling up with petrol in Suffolk
Wrong comparison. How many of those cars need to be filled in 30 seconds? As we switch to electric vehicles, >95% of the charging will be done over several hours while parked at home or work. Those chargers will also have enough intelligence to suspend charging if there is a sudden price spike because of unexpected demand from the charging stations out by the freeway.
IANAEE (I am not an Electrical Engineer), but couldn't you just locate some capacitors close to the charging location? Charge them up slowly over time, then quickly discharge them when a car needs juice, that way you're not putting the load on the grid all at once.
There's usually a queue at my local gas station.
No sig today...
Well, utility generation would have to increase if everyone switched over to electric cars regardless of the method of charging. If, as you say, Suffolk county has 1000 motorists filling up all day long (assume 5 min each), then it may be that by the time everyone is driving electric cars they'll need another power plant. Whether you have a different car charging every 5 min for 8 hours, or all the cars charging at the same time for 8 hours it's still the same amount of power. That kind of constant demand is probably less of a problem than they might expect to first encounter with a few sporadic rapid chargers though. The first electric charge stations may require some kind of battery bank to level out usage spikes. But by the time you're charging a constant stream of electric cars, the battery bank gets you less and less and you just need a bigger pipe from the utility.
It's irrelevant if they do this anyway, because if you had a 100kWh car battery that could charge in 5 minutes, the voltage and current requirements would be so enormous to make it impractical, because you'd have to deliver 1.2MW to charge the battery in that time. At 11000 volts you'd still require a current of about 110 amps, so not only very high current, but very high voltage.
Don't forget that if the process is even 10% inefficient then that's a 120kW heater underneath your car. Winding the windows down while you're charging probably won't be enough cooling to keep the passengers alive.
No sig today...
We'll just replace all those gas stations with induction charging stations at intersections, easily installed after we have all electrical below ground(because in the long run it's more cost effective). Your car will then request little bursts of charging to maintain a level you specify and you'll get billed automatically.
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I'm no electrical engineer but the big stumbling block I'm seeing pointed out in a lot of comments is that a bunch of cars trying to pull this much juice off the grid all at once would exceed the capacity of any electrical plant. The same seems to be pointed out for why this wouldn't work for phones, but my question is why would they have to pull all this juice at once? Why couldn't you plug in a device that slowly pulls energy off the grid to charge its own battery then when you plug in your phone ZAP supercharges it? So a "gas" station would pull energy from the grid all day to slowly recharge its batteries then every time a car plugs in it charges them and then goes back to pulling energy slowly and refilling itself. I know that it becomes a battery limitation issue (especially when you upgrade the scale to car size) but couldn't that work?
Very fast charge (on the order of 1-2 mins for current battery sizes) would make "gas stations" viable for electric cars.
I think the magic tipping point number is probably somewhere around 10-15 minutes. Maybe 20 at the outside. I doesn't have to be shorter than gasoline pumps but it needs to be relatively close in duration to get enough juice to go something like 200 miles or thereabouts. Technically challenging but based on observed technology progression I think it will happen before terribly long - perhaps 10 years.
IANAEE (I am not an Electrical Engineer), but couldn't you just locate some capacitors close to the charging location? Charge them up slowly over time, then quickly discharge them when a car needs juice, that way you're not putting the load on the grid all at once.
There's usually a queue at my local gas station.
If you had quoted just one more sentence, you'd have seen that I said it wouldn't work for gas stations.
Most people don't run their electric cars down to zero though, they top up at home and at work. The only time someone would want to do a full charge in five minutes is when making a long journey when they absolutely can't afford to stop for say 30 or 50 minutes and must get 100% capacity in order to drive for another four hours solid.
Realistically the current 30 minutes for 180 miles range or 50 minutes for a full 300 mile range charge that Tesla offers is more than adequate for most people. As EVs get more popular you will start to see car parks and motorway services being fitted with solar panels and charging points in every space so people can top up. There will still be fast charge points, but most people won't need them and will prefer a slower but free/low cost charge. I imagine most pay car parks will offer free solar energy since they get paid to generate it, and in the long run when that stops it will still be basically free after the relatively tiny (compared to building a large car park) installation cost.
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Electric vehicles will have match that capability at some point or they are going to be forever stuck in the niche of toys and glorified shopping carts.
They probably don't need to match the speed of refueling with gasoline but they need to get close. I figure something in the 10-20 minute range for around 200 miles of range is probably about where it will get competitive.
There is the option of having a towable generator for longer trips to extend range for long trips. Think of it as hybrid on demand. Not the most elegant of solutions but might be a useful stopgap measure while electric vehicle charging tech develops.
How many cars are currently filling up with petrol in Suffolk (the county where SIzewell B is situated) right at this second?
Yes, this is the point that all the electric car makers either miss or ignore.
Petrol has a massive energy density (party due to being able to use air as a "free" oxidiser). In simple energy terms it "contains" about 33M Joules per litre - or 2GJ in a standard tankful. Try to transfer 2GJ of energy into an electric car's battery in the time it takes to fill your tank and you realise just how convenient a liquid fuel is.
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That's not entirely correct. Most people will still charge at home during the night. Super-fast charging is probably going to be used only for long-distance travel.
That's not horrible... just 1200 lightbulbs. You could protect the occupants with some space shuttle tiles or any ablative impregnated carbon shielding you might have sitting around the house.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
So put a big, obvious indicator on the charging station that shows a color-coded load level. After a while, EV owners will come to understand it at least enough to know that a high reading means their car will charge slower.
If consumers can figure out those little pinch-the-ends-to-read charge indicators in some batteries, and what a regular traffic signal means at an intersection, they can figure out "green means fast, red means slow" at the charge station and charge up or go elsewhere accordingly.
Stations can even display their capacity reading on their main sign under the price, if they're proud of it anyway.
Realistically the current 30 minutes for 180 miles range or 50 minutes for a full 300 mile range charge that Tesla offers is more than adequate for most people.
I think it is close but they probably need to cut the 30 minute time in half before people will be ok with it. 30 minutes is a pretty long time to stand around your car waiting for it to charge. It's fine if you are stopping for a long break but I don't really need to stop for a half hour or more every 3 hours of driving. My current car can go from Detroit to Cleveland and about halfway back on a single tank and if I need to stop it is a 5-10 minute deal. A Telsa could usually make the trip one way (barely) but if I needed to stop for fuel I'd add a half hour minimum to the trip. Not bad but not quite competitive yet either.
50 minutes for a full 300 mile range charge that Tesla offers
How close you'll get to the maximum claimed range depends on how you are driving and the weather. With sloppy cold weather and fast driving you might only see 200 miles of range. I spoke with a Tesla owner and he indicated that driving like crazy in cold sloppy weather with everything running (heater etc) you might see a range of around 180 miles on their biggest battery pack (which he had).
You forgot the obvious solution since a service station doesn't need to handle a lot of cars at once. Namely have the service station hold its own set of batteries. These batteries can be "slow charged" based upon the available power. Then when a car pulls up needing a fast charge, the station batteries can do the job. Yes, this will cause an extra layer of inefficiency, but it should be quite doable.
Whomever said that wasn't thinking. Or thinking honestly.
It's just as sane the idea of a gas station only ordering gas - in gallon cartons - when a car drives in. Or a bar only sending for a glass of beer at a time when a patron arrives.
There are some really tried and true methods of accumulating and delivering high charges. Modern steampunk (and no, I don't necessarily mean actual steam - though that, too, could be done). I don't imagine the average /.er will fall for that sort of mentecapt trolling.
Even with a queue, an individual gas hose isn't in use 100% of the time. There's the time you take to pull up, get out of your car, connect the hose, disconnect the hose, pay, and drive off. Even if capacitors supported a 1 minute charge every 3 minutes, that'd probably be enough.
Personally, I think a 30 second or 1 minute target is unnecessary. It takes longer than that to refuel a regular car anyhow. Five or ten minutes is probably fine, and charging 85 kWh in 10 minutes can be done with ~500 kW. That's high, but a heck of a lot less insane than the multi-megawatt charging people are talking about here. Current high-speed chargers are hitting 120 to 135 kW today.
Tesla's plan is to have large amounts of grid storage on-site, powered mostly by solar (by building roofs over the charge stations). Tesla claims that they should be a net-positive in terms of grid power (that they produce more power than they consume). I'm skeptical that would work once they get popular, but it does still offset a chunk of the power draw, and the grid storage on-site smooths out the surges in demand.
Power cables typically use stranded conductors specifically to avoid this problem. Drop your time requirement to five minutes (half a megawatt) and use the kind of power conductors that normal people use and you've got something practical.
Current charge stations (with their existing cabling) are expected to be able to do up to 150 kW. Worst case, you use two charge cables per car, and going from 150 kW to 250 kW is suddenly not such a big leap.
Second - does anybody here think the auto manufacturers of the world (except for Tesla, of course) will risk it?
Third - can any nation currently afford the infrastructure needed to make this work?
Fourth - current electricity prices are a result of the cost of current infrastructure (think: supply and demand). When electrical requirements jump by a factor of twenty, does anybody here think electricity production will remain as (relatively) cheap as it is?
Fifth - how long until the electricity generating companies realize how much power we've transferred to them from the fossil fuel companies? How long until they decide to use that power?
Sixth - why does everybody assume that electricity is non-polluting? Certain forms can be - but there just isn't enough wind/solar/geothermal/hydroelectric capacity to support this, and last time I checked nuclear/coal/natural gas powered plants pollute. Perhaps it's more manageable than having each individual automobile spewing out pollutants, but given how many of 'em we'll need . . . somebody go crunch the numbers, it's too early for me.
Seventh - how long until some user mishandles the charging process, causing an electrical fire or an electrocution? The first time the automation refuses to complete a recharging operation even for programmed safety reasons, how long until Joe Sixpack tries to take matters into his own hands?
Eighth - how much damage will these things cause when the aformentioned Joe Sixpack manages to short out a charging station?
Ninth - when one if these is severely compromised in an automobile accident, what is the toxicity/environmental impact of having this stuff scattered about? I know they've cut the heavy metal toxicity, but now we're talking about biomass, aren't we?
Tenth - this is proprietary technology. D'you suppose the owners of this technology won't try to squeeze every last drop of money out of this, keeping prices and affordability from becoming incentives for adoption?
Eleventh - my fingers are getting tired. Somebody take over - my fingers are getting tired.
That depends heavily on your driving style. If you can drive for 4-6 hours on a charge then most people will probably want to stop for food/restrooms more often than they need to for recharging. As long as you can recharge in less time than it takes you to eat and use the facilities it'll be a non-issue for most people. Of course it'll undermine the "gas up and grab some fast-food to eat on the road" behavior, but frankly that's probably a good thing for most people's stress and health levels, I imagine very few people would actually mind after the first few trips.
And of course there's no reason you couldn't pop a fuel cell or generator in the trunk or a small trailer for extended non-stop trips.
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If we wanted to solve the charging fast problem, couldn't we just make battery swapping easy in phones? You'd leave a battery on the charger and when you get home, you swap the batteries in like 5-10 seconds.
God spoke to me
A Tesla S has an 85kWh battery. To charge that in 30 seconds requires 10,200,000 watts of power - approximately the full electrical service to a decent size skyscraper. That's 42,500 amps at 240V, the full maximum power available to over 212 modern homes and a totally impractical amount of current to handle with any reasonable electrical equipment. So while fast-charging batteries are great and a necessary step forward in technology, the universal adoption of electric cars will require not just upgrading our infrastructure, but a complete rethinking and redevelopment of the electrical grid using not-yet-imagined technologies.
It could also be a grid engineer's best friend. You just have to change the way you think about it - the cars would be a *massive* local storage resource. The VAST majority of people are just going to be plugging their cars in overnight at home, and starting with a full "tank" every morning. I could imagine a system where, once electric cars are ubiquitous, most parking lots and cars would be designed so that when you park, your car just automatically gets hooked into the local grid. You set some parameters on the car for min/max charge levels and buy/sell price limits, and suddenly you don't have to worry so much about demand spikes. Demand goes up, the price/kWh goes up, and once it starts passing the "sell" threshold of the local automobile population, they start discharging into the grid. You just tell the car "keep at least X% charge so I can get home." If I show up nearly empty, and there's 1000 other cars in the lot mostly full, they could charge mine without ever making demands on the grid.
Exactly. I fail to understand how someone can be smart enough to think of the shortcomings of super fast charging without being fast enough to think of the obvious solution of batteries in between the power station and the car charger. Suggests either extreme laziness or some kind of agenda.
I'm going to have to go with 'gas' stations being fitted with capacitors that charge continually, and discharge rapidly each time a car plugs in to it.
Er I meant "without being *smart* enought", not "*fast* enough". In this case I guess I was too fast to hit submit. Or maybe just not smart enough to re-read properly before submitting?
By the way Slashdot's post rate limiting is completely dumb. It's now been 2+ minutes since I submitted my comment and I can't post this correction yet. Hey Slashdot, how about implementing an 'edit post' button! Welcome to the 2000's!
I can wait 10 minutes @ 5550 volts if need be.
...because I don't want to drive off with someone else's $20,000 dud battery...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I am not a EE, but a 10 MW generator is not physically that large. I have seen giant flywheels that store a lot of energy and are spun up by a smaller motor on the other end running continuously (TUM / IPP fusion reactor energy storage near Munich). You could imagine putting something like that in to avoid fouling the power grid with 30 second 10 MW spikes.
I think the problem is letting a human connect these things. Maybe if you automate all the connections, similar to the Tesla battery swap stations? That and lifetime of the electrodes.
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They need to do a bit of work on miniaturisation. That prototype dwarfed the smartphone it was attached to.
I'm sure there was a hue and cry about fires and explosions when people proposed putting wiring in houses back in the day.
I get 12MW to charge a 100kWh battery in 30s. Your nuclear generator would only be able to charge 100 cars simultaneously.
But if you relax the requirements, it isn't quite as bad. It's unlikely anyone is going to fully run down their battery, and I also believe EVs like Teslas don't ever fully charge their batteries either, in fact it appears they recommend not to fully charge it unless you really need the full range, as fully charging it reduces its lifespan faster (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Anyway, let's suppose you just need to recharge 50kWh within 3 minutes, which is a pretty reasonable time to wait (do you ever refuel your gas car in less time?). This brings the power requirement down to only 1MW. Or with 5 minutes, it's down to 600kW. At 440V, that's only 1364A of current. Of course, that is really high, but not astronomically so. Make it 10 minutes (giving people time for a bathroom break and time to buy some snacks at the quik-mart) and you're down to 300kW.
Of course, this all really is a lot of power, and shows just how much energy we're consuming (and pollution we're producing) just so we can move our 100-200 pound bodies around in 2500-6000 pound cages. We'd be much better off if we built SkyTran PRT systems, which can move two people around in fully-automated pods at 100mph using the equivalent of two hairdryers (about 3600W).
Charging a 2 Ah battery in 30 seconds would take 240 amps. You'd need a bloody car battery terminal to carry that kind of current.
Of course it could, it just draws it from my main home UPS. Which, more importantly, would make renewable energy practical since I could conceivably stuff solar power all summer long to my battery cellar and draw from it in those cold, dark winter days. In other words, it would allow delivering baseload power with unreliable (in the short term) sources.
Good batteries would be a true game-changer, and solve both energy crisis and global warming in a single strike.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Fuel cells? Ultracapacitors? Eludium PU238?
Let's see if someone can make a product versus a press release...
Basically they are demonstrating a battery technology that eliminates the battery resistance as a barrier to charging speed. From there it's just about tying it to a practical charger. Sure, in the US you'd need about a minute at 15 amps, but you could just as readily scale that back to a 3 minute charge time at 5 amps, which is totally reasonable. No, this wouldn't be connecting to your USB hub, but if you have the option to charge your battery in 3 minutes or 3 hours, you'll find a wall plug to make it happen.
the latest generation of smart phones.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
no one has ever invented a way to cool car components.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the using inductive charging.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Try reading comments before replying to them.
or store it in capacitors for super fast discharge
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
We already have batterys that can receive far more than the grid can provide. How is a better battery going to help this?
If you try to charge a Tesla Model S-85 at 1C rate you need to provide that 85 kWh or more! This is even pushing our 3-phase 400v grid at 130 amps...
People don't understand how much energy is really in these batterys, nor do they realize how much energy is in gasoline.
To equate to that huge Tesla battery you only need 2 gallons of gasoline. (If your engine could utilize all the chemical energy in it.)
a typical gas station and 'pump' between 2-20 cars. 1000 cars is thus 500 to 50 stations. power demand for electric cars 'fast charging' is going to be difficult, replaceable battery packs and smart grid regulated slow and fast charging fixes the problem. but we aren't going to sell a half billion electric cars.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
When I can have 300 miles range in 5 minutes (which most gasoline cars can do), it will work, Heck let's change that to 10 minutes and it will probably still be ok. The problems with fast charging: it reduces battery life for one, and even if that gets fixed somehow, that's a lot of energy in a short amount of time being driven into the battery (battery heats up, heats the car, as mentionned in a previous post.)
What about a defective battery? (you know they're gonna cut corners and buy them from China) charge car, batttery explodes killing the driver and passengers...
A hybrid makes more sense, would make even more as a series hybrid with a diesel generator...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
This technology is not required to achieve 30 second recharge. All you need are exchangeable Energy Packs which you pick up from the Service station. The Service station company will recharge those packs either from their own energy sources, or a specialized high-energy charging depot. The Service companies will own the packs and have exchange agreements with other companies.
Recharging your own packs on-the-spot from the grid would require a truly massive energy infrastructure overhaul. The power demand would be epic.
This is the wrong model for electric autos.
Most of the time I will charge at home. if i am doing a > 180 mile journey and need to charge half-way, 30 minutes will give me time for a coffee and a bite to eat. 180 miles is roughly the range before I'd want to take a break anyway, given the current speed limits in most places of between 60 and 70 mph.
above AC here: to clarify - i'm not saying is is directly comparable/preferable to the current situation with gasoline. but the current situation isn't really sustainable. If I could get 180 mile range for 30 minute charges at an acceptable price-point, I'd definitely sign up for it.
Larger capacity without increased charging speed just means even worse turn-around time when you do need a charge. Unless you're planning to swap batteries out?
& to extinguish the flamebait of journalists.
Of course it could, it just draws it from my main home UPS.
Show me a home UPS that delivers anywhere close to megawatt level power.
> How many cars are currently filling up with petrol in Suffolk (the county where SIzewell B is situated) right at this second? Probably well over 1000.
More or less. Suffolk county had a population of 1,493,350 in 2012. The US has a mean of 0,8 motor vehicles per capita, so about 1,200,000 are there. If you need 5 minutes to charge 1000 cars you would only be able to charge once every 100 hours (a bit more than 4 days).
How much heat does a 25% efficient 200kW gasoline engine produce?
You missed his last line: "Good batteries would be a true game-changer, and solve both energy crisis and global warming in a single strike."
his whole thing sound good. However in order to charge a 2,000 mAh battery for 30s you will need to have a source that will deliver 240A of current at a minimum, assuming 100% charging efficiency. I would like to see the wire gauge that can deliver this kind of current without evaporating. The wires that connect the charger and the the wires that are inside the phone leading to the battery will have to be quire thick. Additionally a typical Li-ion battery has nominal voltage of 3V. 240A at 3V means that the power supply to charge the phone should be at least 720 Watt. Again assuming 100%. In reality most likely 1 kW. Current charging power supplies cost within $10 and have typical power of 3 to 10W. The cost of 1 kW 120VAC to 5V DC power supply will be at least $150 to $200.
So the phone itself will be mainly copper wires and the power supply will be weighting 3 to 6lb.
I don't want even to go into calculations about electric car batteries. 30s charge will emit such an Electromagnetic Pulse, that will be equivalent to small nuclear explosion.
I don't know this sounds very fishy.
Tom Brown
it discharges in 30 seconds, too.
You mean jigawatts rights?
Of course not. The only power source capable of generating 1.21 jigawatts of electricity is a bolt of lightning!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The service station maintains sets of pre-charged batteries, so when you pull in, all you do is swap out your batteries and drive away.
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
Now where did I put that dang ablative shielding? Probably in the junk drawer with the spare vials of carbon nanotubes, I always forget to check there first.