WC Archive

How cool! I especially like the five-pointed Pareto diagram on their website.

Extremely cool indeed.

I don't think I'm alone to think that battery development seems critically under-funded compared to fuel cells & co, especially in regard to the impact that advancements in battery technology could bring.

Definitely very cool tech. Can lithium-ion batteries be recycled, refurbished or reused in some ways?

What hasn't been clear to me about the Toshiba battery technology is how much more current is needed to recharge a battery 60 times faster. Is it just that current batteries are just so inefficent at charging, or will they require a much higher power draw if they scale the size of the battery up?

No physicist here, so I can't say. But if these things work as well as claimed then there may be a whole new realm of uses to be dreamt up!

Patrick:  Present-day batteries are slow to charge because they have high internal resistance.  You can drive current against this resistance, but you wind up converting more and more energy to heat rather than storing it; enough heat will physically damage the battery.

Even if you don't run high charging voltages long enough to create damaging temperatures, eventually you reach a point where the applied voltage is high enough to cause other chemical reactions that you don't want; in lead-acid batteries, you stop converting lead sulfate to acid and instead convert water to hydrogen and oxygen gas.  Enough of that in a battery, and the gas pressure forces the electrolyte out and destroys it or you just plain run out of electrolyte.

That said, this battery sounds remarkable.  Imagine a plug-in hybrid car with a 10 kWh battery on board; you pull into a filling/charging station with the battery totally flat.  You put 480 kW into it for all of a minute, and it's 80% charged; 4 more minutes at 30 kW, and it's at 100%.

Electrifying even small segments of freeways would allow cars to run all-electric.  This thing is BIG.

Engineer-Poet's comment made me think. This will be an interesting dilemma for 'filling stations'. If I can 'fill up' (charge) at home, I no longer need to go to a filling station unless I'm on a long distance trip. Result: many fewer visits to filling stations, almost to the point where they may not be profitable. Bottom line, if cars become electric, it'll be interesting to see how the electric distribution system will change.

I would also love to use my eliptical exercise machine to charge the car at night. That would make easier to justify a workout!

That may not make much difference; people already stop at C-stores much more often than they fill up.  If I'm not mistaken, fuel is already such a low-margin business that most stations make their profits from sundries or mechanic's services.

If you can put out 200 watts on your elliptical and keep up with it for an hour a day, you'd get enough energy to move your car about a mile.  If you want to feel virtuous you'd be better off charging the battery on an electric bike. ;-)

I have been wondering about the following for some time, but since I am no physicist nor engineer, this may prove my shallow understanding of the concepts involved:

Since current hybrids rely on regenerative braking to recharge the electric battery, would it be possible to have an electric car with this newly developed battery than can rely on this same regenerative braking technique to recharge the battery, at least for a few hundred miles before needing to be plugged in?

The impossibility of that can be summed up in one phrase:  Law of Conservation of Energy.

If you don't know enough physics to know what that means and what it implies, you've just discovered your homework assignment.

Engineer-Poet's comments are correct, but in Li-ion batteries the problem is not heat generation (because they can be discharged fast). I thought it was lithium ions being plated on the surface of the anode.
What have Toshiba actually done to overcome this problem? Some of their press releases seem to be Jap-lish and get the anode & cathode around the wrong way.

To be fair to Ananse--it is, of course, impossible to keep driving around indefinitely without losing energy. If you weren't expending energy, you wouldn't be moving your car.

That said, if we can do a lot better about efficiency than we have so far--which is what this all amounts to, reclaiming braking energy and storing it in low-resistance batteries as fast as it's reclaimed--it's worth it, and going farther on the same charge is indeed the point. Hundreds of miles sounds like an arbitrary number, and it's fairly ambitious, maybe improbable. But while perpetual motion is impossible, really really efficient motion is a fine goal.

Toshiba's new technology sounds promising but does it live up to that of Altair's? Although Toshiba's battery can recharge 80% in one minute vs. Altair's taking approximately 6 minutes are we missing the point that Toshiba's begins degrading by 1-3% post 1,000 recharge cycles? Altair's design has been tested to 9,000 cycles without degradation and is estimated to be good through 20,000 cycles.

I'm curious that no one has mentioned solar charging of these batteries. One of the biggest drawbacks of solar charging is that the sun is out for just a short or irregular time. Solar panels on the roof of a car would be exposed to a lot of sun and relatively safe from dings and bangs except in rollovers. In this case the solar hybrid car might be a bit closer to being perpetualy in motion as it would be an open system--receiving sunshine when a lot of driving occurs.
Anyone believe that there is a barrier to charging these lithium-ion batteries by solar panels?

Altair is pulling everyone's chain. They don't have battery technology, they're a raw material manufactuere who's made a raw material for the anode. I've never seen so much hype getting published, something must be up in the market.

The big drawback of Altair's technology is it's

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The big drawback of Altair's technology is it's (Whoops they cut me off!)
The big drawback of Altair's technology is it's