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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."
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)..
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Don't forget to count into the bulkiness the size of the inevitable mandatory fire extinguisher.
Ezekiel 23:20
I hear consumer electronics have this funny way of getting smaller (and cheaper) as time goes by. But that's just a rumor.
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.
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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.
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... discharge time is another. How long does the battery last? TFA (typically for stupid tech articles) omits this detail.
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.
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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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.
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.
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Nah, that's just an illusion, you've simply grown up. I remember my brother's dumbbells seemed awfully large to me at one time when I was a kid.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
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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.
So.. that's what you called them, huh?
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.