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Battery Breakthrough: Researchers Claim 70% Charge In 2 Minutes, 20-Year Life
New submitter chaosdivine69 writes: According to Scientists at Nanyang Technology University (NTU), they have developed ultra-fast charging batteries that can be recharged up to 70 per cent in only two minutes and have a 20-year lifespan (10,000 charges). The impact of this is potentially a game changer for a lot of industries reliant on lithium ion batteries. In the car industry, for example, consumers would save on costs for battery replacement and manufacturers would save on material construction (the researchers are using a nanotube structure of Titanium dioxide, which is an abundant, cheap, and safe material found in soil). Titanium dioxide is commonly used as a food additive or in sunscreen lotions to absorb harmful ultraviolet rays. It is believed that charging an electric car can be done in as little as 5 minutes, making it comparable to filling up a tank of gasoline.
Is it Tesla?
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...Prof Chen's new cross-linked titanium dioxide nanotube-based electrodes eliminate the need for these additives and can pack more energy into the same amount of space.
Seems like it should be, at the very least, on par with current capacities, if not greater. You are correct though, there does not seem to be a direct statement regarding capacity, making me very suspicious.
Well, it says they've developed "a battery" that can be charged that much that fast. It doesn't say what the capacity of this battery is. I'd guess it's a small research/proof-of-concept battery of cell-phone size or smaller. Later in the article, they talk about charging an electric car in <15 minutes. The Tesla superchargers provide 200kW, enough to charge the Tesla Model S with the 85kWh battery fully in 1 hour, and you can get home chargers that charge at 200V 100A. Surely 4 times the amperage wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility?
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One need only calculate the size of substation needed to deliver the equivalent energy of, say, a 16-pump Costco gas station to see that the fact that a battery can be charged that fast doesn't mean there is any infrastructure anywhere that could support it. The Tesla has an 85kWh battery. In other words, a 70% charge in 2-minutes requires pumping over 1.7 million watts to the car. Think a 2,000-volt supply shoving nearly 900-amps. Per "pump." But that kind of capacity would allow for better capture of regenerative braking energy.
It could be great for things like cordless drills. At ~40-60 Wh the supply would not require more than a standard 120V/15A outlet.
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If only I had a mod point for every Slashdot story claiming a battery breakthrough!
Clearly, they're practicing some sort of black magic if they think they can charge a 60 or 85 kWh battery in 5 minutes. Either that or they have a connection directly to the power plant located just around the corner.
Do you mean a 100kW/hr battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW battery. Idiot.
Neither is there a 100kW/hr battery. Moron.
The 10,000 cycles might be a bigger deal than the fast charging, because an increase in longevity is almost equivalent to a proportional cost reduction (which is the real big deal). For example, the amortized cost of battery-backup for solar or wind goes down by nearly 50% if the battery lasts twice as long. If a car battery is going to last for 20 years, the high upfront cost of an electric car would be largely offset by its high residual value - if nothing else you could sell the battery when the car wore out to be used in another car, or for grid backup etc.
Surely 4 times the amperage wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility?
Not beyond the realm of possibility, no. But requiring not just new wiring into your house, but probably new wiring of an entirely new kind, at higher voltage, with specificallly-designed safety measures in terms of conduit, how it's routed, protection against touching contacts, and so on.
You wouldn't need or want this sort of rapid charging capability at home. Slow charging works just fine at home, it's when you're traveling long distances or running around town for many hours that you need fast charging.
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Do you mean a 100kW/hr battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW battery. Idiot.
Do you mean a 100kWh (or possibly kW*h) battery? There is no such thing as a 100kW/hr battery. And note that I won't call you an idiot, just because you are wrong.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
The GROSS markup on gasoline is around 2%. Once the station pays for pumps, signage, credit card transaction feesn taxes, etc they make no money on gas. The markup on fountain soda is close to 200%. Gas station owners don't care whether you come for gas, for electric charge, or any other reason. They just want you there for four minutes, long enough to buy a coffee or soda.
Logically you do not charge electric vehicles at a "commercial vehicle charging station" but at any regularly used parking point via induction charging. Obviously any commercial car park would build in induction charges and charge more slowly based upon estimated parking time and combine charging costs with parking costs. Employers would naturally subsidise the cost of the employee car parks by offering vehicle charging, over the life of a car park it makes sense. Even shopping malls could add in metered vehicle induction charging to charge vehicles during their stay. Pretty much the plain 'gas station' would die over time, replaced by diners with charging while you eat, mini marts with charging while you shop, basically any type of business that has to pay for car parks looking to subsidise that cost with induction charging fees.
This battery breakthrough by "TU professor Rachid Yazami, the co-inventor of the lithium-graphite anode", points to exactly why mega battery factories are so financially risky at this time, real battery breakthroughs are coming down the line, that will change everything. Tying into the right technology (now is the right time) and making sure your investment can compete for the next say 15 years is critical.
Not just used in cars of course but also to be used in residential properties to really drive renewable energy sources and people in the burbs being able to escape the grid (where battery life and capacity are everything and charging time is not so important). Most people of course will be charging at home most of the time and as long as fuelling points match dining times and battery capacity, fuelling on road would be pretty much as it already is on long trips.
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Moving all of the energy that a 85 kW-hr lithium-ion EV battery can hold into a battery in 2 or 5 minutes would require some truly dangerous amperage,
and some enormous amount of heat could be generated.
Go parallel.
The 85kW battery pack in a Tesla for instance, has a huge bunch of standard lithium ion cells in parallel and in series. Have multiple charger conductors to each charge a section of the entire pack, which reduces the amperage per conductor, but keeps the power input to the whole pack at a maximum.
This is not going to suddenly "change everything". First off, there's so little info here you can't even see through the hype. There's nothing to get an idea of how hard this would be to commercialize, what its energy density would be, or any of tons of other things that make a big difference. And secondly, these are hardly the first lab-scale batteries to have properties like this. Heck, there have even been lithium titanate batteries commercialized before. Crazy charge / discharge times, but they were largely a flop except in niche applications - the cost was way too high and the energy density too low.
There is every week or two some great research breakthrough in battery storage. Most of them you'll never read about. Most of them will never go anywhere. But a few will. And they will slowly, inevitably make their way into the battery technology of tomorrow. Silicon anodes, for example, were once among those crazy lab future battery techs. Now they're in commercial cells. People never stop to think about how little the batteries in their phones have gotten in an area of increasing computing power, larger screens, greater demands on lifespan, etc. Energy density continues its inevitable march.... in the background. But the odds that any one tech that you read about is going to carry the industry is very small. And these things take half a decade to go from the lab to stores.
You people make me envy the deaf and the blind!
Seems a lot of comments are focusing on how to actually do that 5-minute charge. Hardly anybody seems to have thought about the other aspects, especially the ultra-long life. If the batteries can last 20 years/10,000 charges/what ever, it seems to me this is a really good thing. I'd be just fine with a 1-hour charge, or even an overnight charge. Top off when I can, good to go.