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.

Pedantic but...

[FrankSchwab]

Even though it's in the original FA, I wouldn't expect a competent editor here to let "graphite atoms" by. Sheesh.

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.

I just want to charge at the current specs

[thegarbz]

Wake me when vendors actually agree on a common way of drawing the required power from the USB chargers. Sure there's a standard published but when will vendors actually follow the current standard, or in the case of Apple follow any standard at all.

Re:I just want to charge at the current specs

[tlhIngan]

Part right. The spec allows the delivery of max 1.5A by detection of shorted D+/D- lines. (the iDevices don't comply with this). The spec does not allow at all for measuring resistances despite the fact that Sony, Apple, Samsung, etc all implement this in their chargers. But quite critically at least some of them (Samsung) correctly implement enumeration of the charger to determine the maximum current draw, as per the standard.

And the reason is, guess what? Shorting D+/D- says UP TO 1.5A.

Which means really, you can't draw that much anyways because if the user plugs you into a device that only provides 500mA, guess what? You can only draw that.

Which is why I don't see why the USB folks didn't take a page from Apple and use their spec, because shoring D+/D- says absolutely nothing about how much current you can draw. And I've seen rather ... explosive ... results from devices that tried to draw 1.5A from a charger incapable of doing so.

At one point, it was 500mA. At another point, it was 800mA. Now it's 1.5A.

As a spec, it sucks - it means I can't tell how much current I can draw. And there's way too many made-in-china crap with a USB port that makes it risky to assume you can draw 1.5A from them. If you say the user must use the same charger with the device, that eliminates the whole reason to standardize.

At least the Apple spec tells you electrically. And there are many devices where it says "2A" on the plate but the resistors say 500mA.

I'm drunk and I'm gonna rant about "mAh"

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Fucksakes. Amp-hours is NOT a unit of energy capacity. It is meaningless without being told the nominal voltage. Ok, so if it's a single (series of) lithium cells it's gonna be 3.7V, but why be ambiguous? The unit we're after Watt-hours, right? Do you pay your electricity bill by fucking Amp-hours? Of course not, that's nonsense.

When you see the shiny new Anker portable battery pack on amazon rated at 20000mAh for charging your fondle-slab so you can keep burning through the next 10,000 losers on tindr while you wait for the bus, maybe you're aware your device is charged on 5V and you might think you're getting 100Wh for your money. But you ain't, are ya? No, they mean 3.7V x 20Ah = 74Wh.

Ok just one more beer and we can forget about this ugly outburst.

Re:I'm drunk and I'm gonna rant about "mAh"

[radarskiy]

"It is meaningless without being told the nominal voltage. "

The nominal voltage at the terminals is itself pretty meaningless. It varies widely with the current being drawn, the charge remaining in the battery, etc.

What is pretty stable is the measure of how much charge is in the battery. Note that an ampere is charge per time so that the product of current and time is literally charge. The integral of current drawn over time is much less variable with respect to other conditions, so it really is most meaningful to measure a battery by amp-hours.

Amp-hours is what the battery is actually delivering, not watt-hours.

Re:Weird numbers...

[hcs_$reboot]

Even thought it could take some more time to complete the charge from 49 to 100%, what's really great is when your smartphone is agonizing at 1~2%, you just need to plug it somewhere in a coffee shop, work, ... to get to 50% charge in just 5 minutes, which is usually - depending on what phone you have - enough until the evening to then charge it fully.

Re:3000mAh vs. 600mAh

[MyAlternateID]

Look at the times though....both of those phones were charged to ~50% in five minutes. That's some fast charging. (Why didn't they report the time to a total charge? I don't know).

It's standard marketing procedure to recognize a weak point and pretend like it doesn't exist, being careful never to voluntarily mention it. I don't know if that's what happened here, but Huawei is a corporation with a Marketing department, and this is such a widespread practice as to be my default assumption unless compelling independent evidence to the contrary is presented.

Re:Batteries "dramatically faster, more charge etc

[hackertourist]

Have you been asleep? Around 1990, a rechargable AA battery had 500 mAh capacity, took 14 hours to charge and had memory effect issues (NiCd, remember?). These days AA means 2500 mAh NiMH rechargable in under 1 hour. Li-ion is even better but generally not available in AA (cell chemistry means a much higher voltage per cell).
So that's 2 entirely new battery chemistries and a 5-fold increase in capacity.

Also, you may not want to read about early research, but I do. If you want nothing but product announcements, go read manufacturer press releases instead of coming to Slashdot.

Let me know when it comes from a safer company.

[sethstorm]

Given Huawei's checkered history with corporate espionage (such as their complete theft of Nortel) and ties to the Chinese government, I'll wait for a better company.

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.)

Units

[DrYak]

when your charger only outputs 1Ah

Maybe you should stop buying $1 chargers that can't even get their units right.

No, no. The parent was right. 1A*h*.

The 1$ charger is able to maintain 500mAh for 2 hours, after which point it breaks. And explodes. And puts your dog on fire in the process. You should really not buy 1$ no-name electronics from shady chinese manufacturer.