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."

Comments

Interesting, but they admit low-current capability

[digsbo]

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!

Phones yeah

[3.5 stripes]

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)..

Re:Phones yeah

[Nemyst]

Very fast charge (on the order of 1-2 mins for current battery sizes) would make "gas stations" viable for electric cars. It'd immediately remove the current big stumbling block, which is that once your capacity is depleted you need to wait for a few hours to recharge. Bigger capacity would be nice, but it'd just delay the issue. Fast recharge would let current gas stations convert to electric, allowing us to reuse existing infrastructure and easing the transition between gas and electric.

Re:Phones yeah

[Mr D from 63]

Going to need superconducting charge cables. My mom sure isn't going to be wrestling 00 gauge charge cables into a connector.

>

No problem, we'll just 3D print em'. 3D printing will solve all our problems.

For that matter, why don't we just 3D print a fully charged battery?

Re:Phones yeah

[robot256]

It probably also demonstrates something about how energy profligate that personal motor transportation really is.

Yes it does, especially when you consider that electric vehicles are 80% efficient compared to 20%-efficient gas cars.

Re:Phones yeah

[GameboyRMH]

Overall, high-speed recharge for cars may bring as many or more problems than it solves, especially when the battery-swap alternative allows for load-leveling, for leveraging the ability to purchase at the cheapest or most environmentally friendly times, for eliminating the need for an owner to worry about large battery-replacement costs and potentially even for returning power to the utilities at peak-demand times.

Oh no. Battery swapping carries the greatest number of problems of all electric car charging solutions. It means all cars need to have a standardized battery size, technology, and connector, and even a standardized bay if you want to load them in any hurry. This will slow EV development from a sprint to a crawl as every car will now carry legacy technology that will have to be accounted for.

This will also have big ramifications in car design. Right now, most cars have a bespoke gas tank for their sub-model (a great example I've learned about the hard way is the AE90-series Corolla. 2-door, 4-door, and wagon tanks are different. Carbed and EFI tanks are different. And then there are two EFI tank variants with different ports on top just to make things interesting. So you're looking at 6+ different tanks for a line of cars that would seem to be mostly very similar). Same thing with EVs and battery pack designs. Lots of space will be needed to shoehorn standardized batteries into the cars with a nice accessible swapping bay.

And then after you've gone and kneecapped EV development and made every car look like it's smuggling a bulk-pack of cigarettes through an airport, you might one day receive a dud old battery and get stranded on the side of the road anyway, because each battery will have a unique operating history you don't know about. Mission accomplished!

Re:Very bulky.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Don't forget to count into the bulkiness the size of the inevitable mandatory fire extinguisher.

Re:Very bulky.

[werewolf1031]

I hear consumer electronics have this funny way of getting smaller (and cheaper) as time goes by. But that's just a rumor.

Now it's the grid engineers' problem to solve...

[mpoulton]

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.

Forget fast charging via USB

[kheldan]

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.

Re:Charge time is one thing...

[kheldan]

Actually, it doesn't omit that at all, it states their prototype is 2000mAh. For discharge time, you'd have to know what the power requirements are for the phone they used to demonstrate it, and probably what the discharge curve for the battery looks like.

Re:Interesting, but they admit low-current capabil

[Alioth]

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.

Re:Very bulky.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Re:Interesting, but they admit low-current capabil

[jcochran]

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.