Huawei Battery Upgrade Means Dramatically Faster Charging For Mobile Devices

Computerworld reports a welcome development for everyone with battery powered portable electronics, which might just have applications further afield, too (like electric cars): Huawei has developed a battery based on conventional lithium-ion chemistry but tweaked with the addition of graphite atoms bonded to the anode. From the article: That change means faster charging but not at the expense of usage life or a sacrifice in the amount of energy that can be stored in each battery, [the company] said. It was developed by Huawei research and development subsidiary Watt Lab and the company showed off two prototypes in videos posted online. One of the two batteries has a capacity of 3,000mAh (milliampere hours) -- about equivalent to the batteries in modern smartphones -- and can be charged to 48 percent of capacity in five minutes. The second has a much smaller capacity of 600mAh but reaches 68 percent of capacity in just two minutes.

Comments

Re:Batteries "dramatically faster, more charge etc

[viperidaenz]

They do get better
I have a 4850mAh lithium battery in my RC car that can discharge a peak of 630A and 315A continuously. That's 100% to 0% in less than a minute.

Re:Batteries "dramatically faster, more charge etc

[AK Marc]

http://www.oppo.com/en/technol... Faster charging doesn't make it into consumer products? 30 minutes for 75% charge. Though I find it charges faster than that (about twice as fast), but they don't advertise the best case, they advertise the worst case, so they'll always meet it.

The problems with heat were there, but were evidently solved well enough to sell it. And in over a year of use, the battery is holding up much better than my Galaxy S3 did after a year. Though I noticed a drop in standby time after one of the Android updates, but I even reverted to verify it was the update, not age that caused it to drop to standby under 48 hours.

Current: that nearly 20A

[DrYak]

you just need to plug it somewhere in a coffee shop, work, ... to get to 50% charge in just 5 minutes, which is usually {..} enough until the evening to then charge it fully.

Which is also a whoping 18 amps down the cable (or 6C in charger parlance). Which (due to RI^2) is quite some thermal loss, and require large cables.

Which is also 90W, as much as a heavy laptop charger (definitely *NOT* the kind of mini charger that your Asus eeePC/etc. uses. Think more the kind of heavy huge brick that Lenovo packs with its bigger Wxx-series laptops [=100W], or the biggest of the Dell laptop charger [=90W] sold with some of their docks)

For the "50% in 5 minutes" charging to work, you would need:

- to move from the 5V used by regular USB to higher voltage in order to reduce (due to P = UI) the current to something that doesn't require the same size of cabling as an electric oven or a domestic electric car charger (= 15A to 25A appliances).
USB-C could support "USD Power Delivery" which asks for 20V support when charging 100W - thus only 5A current.
So you need to move everyone to USB-C before starting this. (Good luck. See how people are eager when they need to re-buy every single other cable and dock that they have)

- massively improve charger technology so the charger isn't 3x bigger that the phone it self. (is not coming anyway soon)
or design special charger that can sustain 100W for 5minutes and then limit their output for a certain time to avoid burning (seems to be the only realistic option)
or have all the coffee shop deploy a network of 20V / 100W standardised chargers (good luck with that. See how long it took until trains started to equip their coaches with mains current for laptops. And how not every coffee shop is filled with 5V USB ports every where).

But you will definitely NOT quickcharge your phone with a miniature wall wart that looks no bigger than a standard mains plug.

You could in a pinch use your laptop/chromebook USB-C powerbrick to quick charge your phone. But that means that you have a backpack with your laptop in it. At which point it would be easier to plug the phone to the laptop itself, and have it slow charge to 100% over the charge port. That's if you don't also have a powerbank in said backpack.

So although it's a nice idea, it will take some time and effort until it works smoothly, due to the shear amount of energy.

----

Coincidentally, 5minutes is *ALSO* the 50% charge time you would get if the technology gets ported to the cells used by Tesla in it's car.
(well not that surprising given that basically it's your "phone to 50% in 5m" situation only massively parallelized as Telsa batteries are just huge array of the same simple lithium cell).
(But that would require Tesla Supercharger able to pump 810kWh instead of the actual 135kWh. Yup, almost a megawhat to quick charge your car. And don't even start to think about the kind of cabling and/or voltage needed to push that power.)