Toshibas new battery tech

[Tesla2Go]

I'm copying here a post from the blog comments which I found VERY interesting:

#

Robert wrote on August 19th, 2006 at 2:08 am

Have you thought about partneting with Toshiba? They invented their new LI-ION Particle Cell Battery. This can change to Full in just under 2 mintues. With thousands of these instead of the normal batteries, this would make the car perfect for the future. Has this been a tought or is the technology still too new?

Toshiba has developed a Lithium-Ion battery capable of being charged to 80 per cent of its full capacity in under 60 seconds. Filling it up takes just "a few more minutes", the company boasted today.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/29/toshiba_li-ion_battery/

Toshiba announced this in March 2005. Any news after that? Why haven't we seen these batteries yet for phones and laptops? Seems the perfect thing to diminish recharge time.

 

[danny]

whoa
that is ridiculous
i wish i had that on my ipod(and my car)

 

[danny]

Priveate message me tesla, that question, and i'll ask that question to tesla in an interview hopefully

 

[Tesla2Go]

Or these ones:

A123Systems Unveils Lithium-Ion Battery Technology that Delivers Unprecedented Levels of Power, Safety and Life

Nanotech-Enabled Batteries Deliver up to 10X Longer Cycle Life, 5X Power Gains and 5-Minute Charge Time; Company Discloses Multi-Year Deal with Black & Decker to provide battery for its DEWALT brand of Power Tools

http://www.a123systems.com/html/news/articles/051102_news.html

It seems they wouldn't need cooling either...

I'm hopeful the battery tech necessary for longer range and much shorter recharge time is not 10-15 years away but 3-5 years.

 

[WarpedOne]

>> shorter recharge time

Just a reminder. Charge time depends not only on the battery tech but also on the power of your electric connection.

Don't know about you, but I have on 12kW connection (220V, two 30Amps line). To fill 50kWh of charge (current tesla bat-pack) with that connection it takes 50kWh / 12kW = 4 hours. Want to shorten that 10 times to 24 minutes? You need 10times more powerfull connection - 120kW. How many homes has that?

 

[tonybelding]

But you don't usually need to recharge that fast when you're at home. Super-fast recharge would mainly be useful when you are on the road and don't want to wait around 3.5 hours before continuing your trip.

I could imagine some kind of service station with high-current chargers, and maybe something like flywheel storage to balance the load. It could keep the flywheel spun up, and when somebody comes to the charger it could rapidly dump that energy into their car.

From the blog comments on Tesla's website, they seem to think the answer is cars with ever-longer range until you can literally drive all day on a charge, then let it charge during the night. You could drive it coast-to-coast, charging your car at each motel while you sleep. Rapid charging would never be necessary. It sounds good, but I wish I could be that optimistic about battery technology. We're a long way from there yet.

 

[jadresak]

But what about the battery problems (cars catching fire)? Dell has just recalled thousands of laptops because they can basically blow-up for no reason (though its sony's fault of course because Dell was using Sony's batteries). So now my laptop has to go back to Dell because I have one of the recalled batteries. Fun. I really hate Dell so much. Hopefully Tesla doesnt make the same mistake with the batteries and hopefully they have better customer service as well because thats another reason why Dell sucks.

 

[danny]

But what about the battery problems (cars catching fire)?  Dell has just recalled thousands of laptops because they can basically blow-up for no reason (though its sony's fault of course because Dell was using Sony's batteries).  So now my laptop has to go back to Dell because I have one of the recalled batteries.  Fun.  I really hate Dell so much.  Hopefully Tesla doesnt make the same mistake with the batteries and hopefully they have better customer service as well because thats another reason why Dell sucks.

JAdre, read this article HERE

 

[WarpedOne]

... but I wish I could be that optimistic about battery technology. We're a long way from there yet.

It seems so, yes. Thats why I'm eagerly awainting supercapacitors to show what they can really do. Charging time would be mainly limited by your connection power, practicaly no refill degradation, no aging problems, instant power on demand, very low losses (current models have about 1% loss per month).

Charging stations for instant refill using flywheels sound cool, very cool 8)

 

[Tesla2Go]

But I thought ultracapacitors are good when you need a sudden powerful boost of electricity but they aren't so good at providing a steady flow?

Why I'm optimistic about battery tech is because the technology is not driven by development of electric cars, it's not the car companies who dictate the needs. Think about it, what made the Li-Ion batteries popular? Laptops and cellular phones...computers have doubled in computing power every year for the last 10 or so years= they need batteries to keep up. And now this technology spreads to other areas. I'm sure within a year we'll see these nanotech batteries appear for laptops. It then seems improbable to me that it will take 10 years before we see them used in electric vehicles.

 

[WarpedOne]

But I thought ultracapacitors are good when you need a sudden powerful boost of electricity but they aren't so good at providing a steady flow?

They can very happily provide steady flow if only they have enough of charge - big enough capacitance.
The current state is that, they are about an order of magnitude behind chemical batteries. This might sound bad, but they have made some giant leaps in last few years. They advanced for quite a few orders of magnitude already - from miliFarads to kiloFarads.

But nanotechnology promises impovements in both fields. We'll see.

 

[Iamtherealwoody]

Has anyone heard about the new Subaru R1e?? Its supposed to charge 90% in 5 minutes!!!!! and a range of 120km to be extended to 200km by production in 2009.  Who says no car company is interested in battery technology, Subaru is teamed up with Tokyo Electric to delvelope an all electric car battery.  Mitsubishi is doing this as well.  Seems like US and Europe auto companies arent thinking about the possible future.


Heres a link to the Subaru R1e
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/08/subaru_joins_ra.php

 

[danny]

But what about the battery problems (cars catching fire)? Dell has just recalled thousands of laptops because they can basically blow-up for no reason (though its sony's fault of course because Dell was using Sony's batteries). So now my laptop has to go back to Dell because I have one of the recalled batteries. Fun. I really hate Dell so much. Hopefully Tesla doesnt make the same mistake with the batteries and hopefully they have better customer service as well because thats another reason why Dell sucks.

i don't have one of the recalled batteries but dell still sucks alot. at least you get a new battery

 

[Joel1]

>> Just a reminder. Charge time depends not only on the battery tech but also on the power of your electric connection.

I think it's safe to assume quick 5 minute charging stations will start to pop up right next to gas stations pretty quickly here. 3.5 hour charge time is fine for when you're at home. 5 min for when you're on the road. Sounds simple. Plus it's not like gas stations aren't aware their days are numbered. This is a easy add on for them. Like a gas truck, these stations will have massive electric connection "bandwidth" if you will.

I'm sure within a year we'll see these nanotech batteries appear for laptops. It then seems improbable to me that it will take 10 years before we see them used in electric vehicles.

I completely agree.

 

[Michael]

Seems to me that if Tesla was able to utilize a battery technology that had minimal, if any, loss of recharge capability; e.g., ultracaps; then we could reduce the average cost per mile of operation to only the cost of the electricity instead of having to include the cost of replacement batteries. Wouldn't this drop the average mileage cost from 20 some cents per mile to around a penny?

 

[savuporo]

A123Systems Unveils Lithium-Ion Battery Technology that Delivers Unprecedented Levels of Power, Safety and Life

Nanotech-Enabled Batteries Deliver up to 10X Longer Cycle Life, 5X Power Gains and 5-Minute Charge Time; Company Discloses Multi-Year Deal with Black & Decker to provide battery for its DEWALT brand of Power Tools

RC enthusiasts over at http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=129 are confirming everywhere that these batteries are capable of being recharged in 15 minutes, with little observed loss in capacity.
If you wanna test it firsthand, get a RC model and battery/charger from http://www.a123racing.com/html/soniccharge.html

Only problem, putting together a 30kWh pack of these will easily bring you to brink of bankrupt ...

 

[vfx]

It does seem that many of our current gasoline stations will end up being high amp "quick charge" stations that will "fill" our future wave of electric cars (with whatever type of battery cars they may have) and/or they will become "Battery depots" where battery (or partial battery) hot swaps happen.

I just want to put it out there that the Tesla's on board navigation system should have all of the staions programmed into them AND be updateable via a tranmitted siganal or mailed chip or disc update.


cheers,


eric

 

[danny]

Has anyone heard about the new Subaru R1e?? Its supposed to charge 90% in 5 minutes!!!!! and a range of 120km to be extended to 200km by production in 2009.  Who says no car company is interested in battery technology, Subaru is teamed up with Tokyo Electric to delvelope an all electric car battery.  Mitsubishi is doing this as well.  Seems like US and Europe auto companies arent thinking about the possible future.


Heres a link to the Subaru R1e
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/08/subaru_joins_ra.php

Perhaps electric cars could help companies like mitsubishi that are struggling right now get back up.

 

[tonybelding]

It does seem that many of our current gasoline stations will end up being high amp "quick charge" stations that will "fill" our future wave of electric cars  (with whatever type of battery cars they may have) and/or they will become "Battery depots" where battery (or partial battery) hot swaps happen.

I'm not sure if the gas station as we now know it has much future.  If the great majority of charging is done at people's homes, in their garages and carports, that doesn't leave a whole lot of business on the road.  Tesla Motors said their long-term goal is a car with 500 miles driving range, which is about all most people want to go in one day's time.  Following that scenario, there could be charging stations in homes and at hotels, motels and campgrounds, and that would just about cover everything.

I'm particularly skeptical about any battery-swapping schemes.  It sounds like a neat idea at first, but the problems associated with bad batteries, worn-out batteries, or just plain fraud would be hard to overcome.  It wouldn't inspire confidence for most people, and confidence will be a big part of getting electric cars accepted.  Also it has been pointed out that making Li-ion batteries hot-swappable isn't quite so easy, since they have liquid cooling systems running through them.

 

[WarpedOne]

... Heres a link to the Subaru R1e http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/08/subaru_joins_ra.php

Yet another punishment car.