Toshiba Introduces Fast-Charging Lithium-Ion Battery

[Yamson]

Heat doesn't make a good energy source...

all this talk of too much heat being released... why not look on the bright side.
why dont we make a tiny powerplant inside each computer, just above the G5, the battery, and any other mass heat producing components, and capture the heat to turn into more energy? like a car's turbo charger for a computer. (think different)

It is VERY inefficient to change heat into electricity. Otherwise we would be using the world's deserts as power plants during the summer! Generally a very large temperature gradient would be required, say a few hundred degrees. Take a look at this: http://www.hi-z.com/websit03.htm. This is a solid state device that can change heat directly to electricity, but requires about a 200°C temperature gradient for maximum efficiency (typical consumer computers have far less than that). It maxes out at about 14W at only 1.6V (drawing about 8A). Even if a computer had this large of a temperature gradient, this isn't a whole lot of extra energy to put back into the power supply considering the cost of the system.

Way to Think Different, though.

 

[parrothead]

OMG, is it April 1 in japan already?

A very good point. I sure hope this news is not an April Fools joke, because there are so many good things that could come out of this.

 

[acj]

Sadly, this won't work well for laptops

The Power suply to provide that much DC current would be huge! The limitation is not the outlet or circuit. Have you ever seen a big PC notebook power brick? Those only output 130 watts max! This would charge a powerbook battery in about 30 minutes. to charge it in 3 minutes would require TEN times the power, and a power brick that weighed as much as the laptop or more!

This technology is really great for small and large uses, but not medium. For Cell phones, the tiny battery could be charged in a few minutes with a reasonable amount of power, and thus a reasonably sized power suply. For cars, a much smaller (and thus cheaper) battery could be used than the current Ni-Mh solution. The battery in a toyota Prius is almost always at between 40-60% charge. All the capacity is not used for 99% of driving. The only reason it has that extra capacity is so it can handle large amounts of current to provide useful regenerative breaking adequate power to drive the wheels. These lithium batteries have at least twice the power density, and since only 20% of the current capacity is used, a battery of this technology could be just 10% of the size and still be effective.

 

[buggybear]

Fools day..

To my knowledge about these technologies, this is part of April 1st... I'm wondering why it took so long for someone to suggest that..

 

[srobert]

If it's an april fool's joke... then the instigator has a poor sense of humor. Not that I would be offended in any way if it turned out to be a joke but it's far from being "Ah-Ah-funny" material. Come on, you can come up with better stuff than that!

Well technically the only reason a battery doesn't discharge almost instantaneously is because the battery has internal resistance, so when you short it it takes time. A battery is essentially just a capacitor which is just two metal plates separated by a distance. When you place a voltage difference across it current doesn't actually flow, but it acts just like it is until so many electrons gather on one of the plates that it is essentially full up. This usually happens really fast if there is not much resistance. So what toshiba did was make some sort of lithium lattice that is extremely easy to "fill up" with extra electrons. I would predict that if the battery is that quick to charge, then it is probably extremely low Thevinin resistance, and would probably discharge very quickly if shorted.

Got it... Magic. ;-)

 

[acj]

Fool

If it's a joke, I feel pretty stupid. However, it was announced on March 29. Also, it does seem posible. Small NiCad batteries can charge fully in 45 seconds.

 

[dangerousdave]

Toshiba Introduces Fast-Charging Lithium-Ion Battery

If this is for real then investing in nanotechnology has proved worthwhile - but investing in producers of lithium may be the next best option - much less lithium is produced each year than lead - if this technology is taken up for use in electric vehicle batteries then demand will easily exceed mining capacity in the medium term... especially when China / India start to make use of this material in their burgening industrial / consumer production - think what has happened to the price of crude oil or steel recently...

Still I doubt people should worry about disposal in landfills - these batteries are certainly going to be too expensive not to recycle.

 

[idkew]

I sure can. I would like to see the iPod just power the screen without backlight for 300 hours.

it does. ipod sleep=cell phone inactive.

the ipod is never really off, it is always working, calculating time, looking for events to alarm...

 

[savar]

How does a battery charge this fast? Can anyone explain how this could be achieved? I mean this is not just a small improvement. This is a major leap. It is completely mind boggling.

If any of us could explain this in detail, it would have been invented a long time ago. For those who didn't read the article, it sounds like the major innovation here is nanotech...some kind of nanoparticles that absorb charge very quickly. I don't know much about batteries, but they also mention an organic electrolyte, which might also be a new innovation.

For those of you worrying about current draw, I have two comments: 1) Toshiba is not a flash-in-the-pan dot com. They have brilliant engineers and a good record. 2) You only will need a few amps to charge the battery this fast. I'm not an EE, but it can't possibly be more than 10 amps. Don't anticipate brownouts in your house just because you dock your cellphone. On the other hand, docking stations and chargers will have to be re-designed to carry the larger current, but this is trivial.


This is one of the most important inventions of this decade. Not only is it absurdly fast (and presumably just the ground floor of nanotech batteries) it also has a significantly higher energy density than typical LiOn batteries.

 

[savar]

I think Toshiba might be liscensing or maybe even bought these guys- http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/23/1312232&tid=126

I think you're right. When I saw the original thread on this last night, I went to Toshiba's web site (thinking it was a April Fools hoax). Toshiba not only didn't have a press release that I could I find, but when I went to their LiOn products page, there was a message saying that they don't produce LiOn anymore. See the old thread for links...

Now that Toshiba has a PR up, I'm sure its legit but it still doesn't explain how they engineered a new LiOn tech with no factories to produce it.

Even if they did buy out Altair's technology, that's only 50 days to a prototype. That sounds suspiciously fast to me, unless they just slapped a Toshiba logo on an Altair battery.

 

[HAViK]

it does. ipod sleep=cell phone inactive.

the ipod is never really off, it is always working, calculating time, looking for events to alarm...

Errr... ok, but we want SCREEN ON, possibly playing music this entire time, they should pull energy off of the spinning of the hard drive to recharge this new battery.

Wait, can't you just have one of these super efficient batteries do a process for what... a 'minute?' that recharges the other battery, and have a system utilizing two of these new efficient batteries pretty much just giving one another a hand when they need it? Voila, everlasting battery cell thingy. Seems viable to me.

 

[DaveGee]

If it's a joke, I feel pretty stupid. However, it was announced on March 29. Also, it does seem posible. Small NiCad batteries can charge fully in 45 seconds.

acj,

Have no fear... this isn't an April Fools joke!

First as you aready stated, it was published on March 29th - and no matter where you live it wasn't April 1st anywhere on this planet (even the .jp hosted PR is dated the 29th - see link below).

Second public companies traded on the stock exchange DON'T make April Fools jokes when it comes to anything that could even REMOTELY effect the company stock and/or stockholders. The SEC tends to frown about stuff like that.

Third here's the PR found on the official Toshiba web site Linky. (since I'm sure someone was gonna ask)

I'm not saying that the PR doesn't contain a fair bit of hyperbole and is probably missing some of the dirty details that will make this something less STUPENDOUS than we are all thinking right now - then again this is nothing new either!

All in all I'm still quite excited about the announcement and I'm just cautiously waiting for that reality shoe to drop (that devil called the details).

Dave

 

[savar]

There are no hard-and-fast rules, but in general, one circuit will power outlets or lights in 2-3 rooms, not including high-draw rooms such as the kitchen and bathrooms. The average-sized house has 14-22 circuits, including 240-volt circuits for items such as a range, a clothes dryer and an electric furnace, if applicable.

In my house (built in the 70's in Atlanta, GA), there are around 20 circuit. Each room or pair of rooms has separate circuits for the outlets and light sockets. (We have recessed ceiling lights through the house.) There is, of course, a 240 volt circut for the oven.

I assumed all houses were wired this way.

 

[mms]

I'll believe it when I see it. Toshiba can come up with all the amazing claims they want, but until they actually bring this into production, it does us do good. We might never see this technology if it's unpractical, and I'm afraid we're all getting worked up over something that we're not going to end up seeing.

 

[Techobo]

That would be amazing for my powerbook... I hate how long it takes to charge...

 

[abhi_beckert]

Errr... ok, but we want SCREEN ON, possibly playing music this entire time, they should pull energy off of the spinning of the hard drive to recharge this new battery.

Because it takes more energy to spin the hard drive than you can generate from it spinning.

Wait, can't you just have one of these super efficient batteries do a process for what... a 'minute?' that recharges the other battery, and have a system utilizing two of these new efficient batteries pretty much just giving one another a hand when they need it? Voila, everlasting battery cell thingy. Seems viable to me.

See above...

 

[abhi_beckert]

I sure can. I would like to see the iPod just power the screen without backlight for 300 hours.

I've only got a cheap phone, but my phone gets less talk time than my iPod gets play time, and my phone has a far bulkier battery.

 

[The Man]

Well, Varta has a 15 minute AA & AAA charger

Varta has a NiMH AA & AAA charger called 15 Minute Charge & Go. So I guess the Toshiba battery is nothing really new. The Varta system also probably charges to 80% in a couple of minutes and then takes the rest of the time to charge to full capacity. Really neat technology.