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Toshiba Introduces Fast-Charging Lithium-Ion Battery
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Rod Rod said:
I think you are underestimating what kind of an impact this tech will have on hybrids. Forget about horsepower. Think gas mileage. The Prius runs on pure EV when its under 47 (Could be 45) MPH. When the battery gets low the gas engine kicks in the recharge the battery. The less time it takes to charge the more miles you are going to get off a gallon. So think 60 real MPG not to mention the decrease in emissions. I think the Prius already qualifies for SULEV status. This tech could very well push it VERY close to PZEV status. All I can say is I hope to god Toyota fast tracks this tech into the Prius. I was looking at getting a Prius this fall. I may wait a year or two now that this is on the horizon. It really is that big of a deal.
There is a physics issue here...
That is, there will be massive amounts of electricity being transferred to the battery in a very short period of time. This will require *LARGE* transformers, and generate tons of heat, depending on the size of the battery.
Good for cars because it means that the battery will perform well compared to lead acid and in-city driving, and for use in things like hybrids. Good for industrial use for things like invertors when runninf off of the grid.
Ok for small batteries like Cell Phones with charging stands.
Absolutely horrible for Ipods and Laptops. Where you have moderately large batteries next to people. This will melt the plastic, burn hands etc...
But fear not, fuel cells are on the way!
That is, there will be massive amounts of electricity being transferred to the battery in a very short period of time. This will require *LARGE* transformers, and generate tons of heat, depending on the size of the battery.
Good for cars because it means that the battery will perform well compared to lead acid and in-city driving, and for use in things like hybrids. Good for industrial use for things like invertors when runninf off of the grid.
Ok for small batteries like Cell Phones with charging stands.
Absolutely horrible for Ipods and Laptops. Where you have moderately large batteries next to people. This will melt the plastic, burn hands etc...
But fear not, fuel cells are on the way!
I think Toshiba might be liscensing or maybe even bought these guys- http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/23/1312232&tid=126
You won't have to worry about blowing out anything. Most elements at the nano-scale have very different properties, these guys simply applied it to battery tech. Basicly todays batteries use a lot of charge to fill up a battery. Why? there isn't that much surface area between the anode charging the battery and the battery material. With this they basicly take lithium titanium oxide and "bubble" the anode so that you give more surface area. With more surface area they can impart more of the charge to the battery, thus charging faster- and since it uses the same amount of charge before, you won't having to fry your PSU or any other charge elements. Another thing with the surface area increase is this will lower the stress on the battery mechanisms- thus making the battery last for sometime longer. With nanotech it was sort of a "why haven't we tried this" moment, but just imagine what will happen when this tech gets more robust.
(Sorry if I got some terms wrong- been studying all day)
You won't have to worry about blowing out anything. Most elements at the nano-scale have very different properties, these guys simply applied it to battery tech. Basicly todays batteries use a lot of charge to fill up a battery. Why? there isn't that much surface area between the anode charging the battery and the battery material. With this they basicly take lithium titanium oxide and "bubble" the anode so that you give more surface area. With more surface area they can impart more of the charge to the battery, thus charging faster- and since it uses the same amount of charge before, you won't having to fry your PSU or any other charge elements. Another thing with the surface area increase is this will lower the stress on the battery mechanisms- thus making the battery last for sometime longer. With nanotech it was sort of a "why haven't we tried this" moment, but just imagine what will happen when this tech gets more robust.
(Sorry if I got some terms wrong- been studying all day)
A major breakthrough in recharging speed would make a practical difference and change user behavior. If you could stop at any convenient outlet and recharge your portable devices while you wait (e.g., 1 minute), you wouldn't need to have batteries that last for an entire "outing".
As things are now, I wouldn't recharge my camera or iPod battery at somebody else's house or at a store or restaurant I happened into, even if there was an outlet accessible. But if it was a matter of seconds to recharge, I wouldn't think twice about it.
As things are now, I wouldn't recharge my camera or iPod battery at somebody else's house or at a store or restaurant I happened into, even if there was an outlet accessible. But if it was a matter of seconds to recharge, I wouldn't think twice about it.
PowerBook batteries have roughly 50watt-hour capacities. A standard house circuit can supply about 1200 watts maximum. Theoretically you could charge up in two and a half minutes. Practically, it would take more like five minutes. Nevertheless, wonderful. Imagine getting an 80% charge in five minutes or so between flights.
This will not have much effect on the gas mileage of hybrid cards. Regardless of how fast you charge the batteries it still takes the same amount of energy to push the car. From an engineering standpoint, it might help them engineer the car by reducing some restrictions on the battery's ability to absorb energy. Still a very good thing.
This will not have much effect on the gas mileage of hybrid cards. Regardless of how fast you charge the batteries it still takes the same amount of energy to push the car. From an engineering standpoint, it might help them engineer the car by reducing some restrictions on the battery's ability to absorb energy. Still a very good thing.
I've only heard one mention of the heat problem with this new technology. Battery charging produces heat- the faster you do it, the more heat you produce. This might be okay for larger batteries that aren't surrounded by, say . . . hard drives and logic boards. Also, what kind of batteries are they using in current hybrids and full electic cars? Last I heard it wasn't Lithium Ion, so I must ask the question, "why not?" Is it a matter of resistance to deterioration, slower charging, or total capacity? Weight?
My personal opinion is that the better we make batteries, the more and more of them that will end up in land fills. We need to move away from this sort of technology if you ask me. Of course I don't know what works better, but there has to be something.
Z
My personal opinion is that the better we make batteries, the more and more of them that will end up in land fills. We need to move away from this sort of technology if you ask me. Of course I don't know what works better, but there has to be something.
Z
There is no doubt that a Lithium-Ion battery with that kind of charge rate is impressive by I feel there are better battery technology on the horizon. Poly-Lithium cells can discharge at a high rate for a very long time with huge storage. (>8000mAh) Crutial for the processers of the future. copy and paste into google: CYLINDRICAL TYPE LITHIUM BATTERIES its PDF that shows performance characteristics of Poly-Lithium cells.
The Prius isPZEV. Just checked one out again today, there's still a 7 month wait on them. It runs on pure EV under 42 mph.SiliconAddict said:
Gas mileage should increase 10-30x, since it's already using an advanced battery.
-OA
zachj said:
I believe, could be wrong, that hybrids use Ni-MH because of charging issues in extreme weather along with battery costs. Rechargeable Li-ion cost more. I could be wrong on those comments though. I thought I ran across those facts on my investigation of hybrid electric vehicles. Once my current car is paid off and I save up a bit Im so getting a Prius.
Over Achiever said:
You're right. Its a SULEV II classification. I think I was looking at the previous model on fueleconomy.gov My bad.
PS- Stop making me drool damn it!
bit density said:
There is no physics issue here, heat won't be generated if work isn't done. How much power is consumed consumed with a low resistance circuit only has to do with the wiring. If the wires are short, and high grade, then almost no heat or power will be lost. Think of it this way, normal wiring for things like the power cable for your computer is rated at like 10A for 120V which means 120V/10A=12Ohm, which is a ridiculously low resistance.
Further more, lets just say that whatever device is out there is gonna use 1 kilowatt-hour battery (this is purposefully huge) then thats 3,600,000Joules of energy, now since power has units of energy over time, then over a min (3600000J/60s) we get an amazing 60,000Watts (remember this is a huge number batteries usually have miliwatt-hours batteries, or .000001 kilowatt-hours) But electrical power is also voltage times current, so assuming 120V we get out 500Amps. And at say, 6V we get a whopping 10000Amps!! But wait, thats for recharging a battery that would be the equivalent of 541 AA (1850mAh) batteries. Recharging them would be 6,660Joules, 111Watts, 120V corresponds to .925Amps, and 6V goes 18.5Amps. Obviously having higher voltage will help, and transformers can do that, but I don't think 20Amps is really gonna blow up in your face or blow and circuits. Because even at 20Amps, that wire I was talking about is only gonna eat (I^2/R) 33Watts, which isn't really that much heat to dissipate.
Oh and my guess on the recharging mechanism, maybe charge up a reasonably large capacitor slowly, then discharge it quickly into the battery when the battery is connected to recharge.
Give some thought....
Just a couple of thoughts on this.
This is one of those moments when the world changes.
To those that suggest that a battery recharging in 60 seconds is going to blow up - it's just a off the cuff comment that is baseless. Seek to understand what's being presented here. This type of new news is incredible, it'll ultimately change the world. With electronics being consumed more and more by the general public, with the need for an alternative fuel source for auto's and for industrial applications, this will change verything.
But I'm guessing that seeing the fella's from Toshiba are pioneering engineers and all - I'd bet they never considered safety or durability in their designs at all. Probably just whipped it together real quick and rushed forward with an announcement just to be cool. Blowing up in our hands..... ya..... we're years away from seeing this in our iPods or Notebooks..... they'll use this for auto's and industrial applications for a while and gradually impliment them to the normal public consumers like you and I and I would guess that it'll be refined to the point of safety by then. This is great...
Just a couple of thoughts on this.
This is one of those moments when the world changes.
To those that suggest that a battery recharging in 60 seconds is going to blow up - it's just a off the cuff comment that is baseless. Seek to understand what's being presented here. This type of new news is incredible, it'll ultimately change the world. With electronics being consumed more and more by the general public, with the need for an alternative fuel source for auto's and for industrial applications, this will change verything.
But I'm guessing that seeing the fella's from Toshiba are pioneering engineers and all - I'd bet they never considered safety or durability in their designs at all. Probably just whipped it together real quick and rushed forward with an announcement just to be cool. Blowing up in our hands..... ya..... we're years away from seeing this in our iPods or Notebooks..... they'll use this for auto's and industrial applications for a while and gradually impliment them to the normal public consumers like you and I and I would guess that it'll be refined to the point of safety by then. This is great...
hahahha
yeah i can see the guy that gets the Airport Electricity Bill going ... ok... some of these power outlets have got to go....
Analog Kid said:
yeah i can see the guy that gets the Airport Electricity Bill going ... ok... some of these power outlets have got to go....
I guess I was just estimating one aspect. Fuel economy is important but it's not the primary concern for most car buyers. Large scale hybrid adoption will happen when the general public doesn't perceive big performance and cost penalties. The Honda Accord Hybrid is a good present-day example of what I think it'll take. It accelerates better than the conventional Honda Accord V6.SiliconAddict said:
HOLY S@#%!
This is amazing. I can't wait until this hits the marketplace, it will change everything. This almost seems too good to be true... there has gotta be some catch. Will these sell for the low low price of $5000?
This is amazing. I can't wait until this hits the marketplace, it will change everything. This almost seems too good to be true... there has gotta be some catch. Will these sell for the low low price of $5000?
What about solar recharging?!
I don't know much of anything about electrical engineering, but having said that, it seems to me that if you could more effeciently turn incoming power in to stored power it'd be a boon for solar recharging. You could put your ipod in the sun for an hour (instead of the 1 minute it takes when pluged in or the many many hours current solar ipod rechargers take) and it would be able to fully store all the incoming solar radiation that's able to be converted by the solar panels.
I don't know much of anything about electrical engineering, but having said that, it seems to me that if you could more effeciently turn incoming power in to stored power it'd be a boon for solar recharging. You could put your ipod in the sun for an hour (instead of the 1 minute it takes when pluged in or the many many hours current solar ipod rechargers take) and it would be able to fully store all the incoming solar radiation that's able to be converted by the solar panels.
zachj said:
In a perfect world recharging a battery would not generate heat. However, there are losses where the electric power put into the battery is lost due to resistive losses. This will change depending on the chemistry involved. This can be very tricky. I heard of a small company that invented a better charger for lead acid batteries. By charging with specially formatted pulses they could charge the batteries faster with less heat produced. In order for this to charge quickly Toshiba must have figured out some way to not generate heat as that causes problems with the battery. The chemical paste heats up and dries up and stops working.
It sounds like they created a huge surface area which would lower the resistance. Anytime there was something slowing down the transport of ions in one area another area would be available to take over.
There are some alternatives to batteries, though none as well developed.
In some cases we use large capacitors to store power. This is common in some electronics. A large capacitor can backup CMOS memory for quite a while in case power fails. Some small companies are working on super capacitors that could store much more power than batteries. Energy stored in a capacitor goes as C*V**2. Making a capacitor with 10 times the capacity stores 10 times the energy. Making a capacitor work at 10 times higher voltage will store 100 times as much energy.
There are also efforts to develop high speed flywheels for storing energy. Probably not applicable to laptops.
Heat is just another form of energy given off due to inefficiencies. If they've made the process more efficient, isn't it possible that the energy that would have be released as heat is actually doing what it's really supposed to do (being stored in the battery) instead? If so, no heat problem.zachj said:
Wow. Assuming that this is as good as they're saying, then Toshiba is about to become a very, very rich company unless the technology is effectively and quickly copied by other battery makers without copyright infringement. They will be the sole company selling what is, in effect, the magic bullet of portable electronics. WOW.
One thing that's important to note is that these batteries likely won't heat up much more than a standard Li-Ion battery when charging; I'm assuming that the main reason that they are capable of charging so quickly is that, as pointed out here, they have incredibly low internal resistance. As such, more of the power that goes into them while charging actually goes into the battery rather than becoming heat. If they wasted as much energy as a current-type battery, they would generate so much heat while charging that they'd melt (the little cell they describe, for example, would require about 100W for that one-minute fast charge; the percentage on top of that wasted as heat must be pretty low).
And, taking that efficent charging into account, charging rapidly won't generally be an issue for anything but a car. As has already been pointed out, even the average iBook/PowerBook battery doesn't hold much more than 50 Watt hours; that translates into theoretically 2400W for that one-minute supercharge, and scaling down slightly to the 1200-1500W that most home power can supply on a standard circuit, you could still charge in 3-5 minutes, depending on the efficiency of the components.
An iPod battery, about 1000mAh at 3.6V holds about 3.5 Watt-hours; 80% charge in 1 minute would take 170W of continuous DC power to do that; even leaving for inefficiencies of the AC-DC adapter and internal battery resistance you could easily supply that on household current
One thing that's important to note is that these batteries likely won't heat up much more than a standard Li-Ion battery when charging; I'm assuming that the main reason that they are capable of charging so quickly is that, as pointed out here, they have incredibly low internal resistance. As such, more of the power that goes into them while charging actually goes into the battery rather than becoming heat. If they wasted as much energy as a current-type battery, they would generate so much heat while charging that they'd melt (the little cell they describe, for example, would require about 100W for that one-minute fast charge; the percentage on top of that wasted as heat must be pretty low).
And, taking that efficent charging into account, charging rapidly won't generally be an issue for anything but a car. As has already been pointed out, even the average iBook/PowerBook battery doesn't hold much more than 50 Watt hours; that translates into theoretically 2400W for that one-minute supercharge, and scaling down slightly to the 1200-1500W that most home power can supply on a standard circuit, you could still charge in 3-5 minutes, depending on the efficiency of the components.
An iPod battery, about 1000mAh at 3.6V holds about 3.5 Watt-hours; 80% charge in 1 minute would take 170W of continuous DC power to do that; even leaving for inefficiencies of the AC-DC adapter and internal battery resistance you could easily supply that on household current