Huawei Patents 3,000km Solid-State Battery with 5-Minute Charge | Hacker News Reader

Huawei Patents 3,000km Solid-State Battery with 5-Minute Charge

carnewschina.com

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Well to be fair 3000 kilometers does give it a lot of surface area to radiate off the extra heat from fast charging.

This is approaching energy densities where short to medium haul electric commercial aviation becomes viable.

It's also just great that the USA has decided to cede this entire market to China.

The USA did not cede. They got beaten. Own it

It wasn't much of a fight. We're not oriented towards this type of research and this type of tech. When it comes to software and chip design, we're ok. When it comes to the physical world, we're far behind and we're not keenly interested in catching up.

Oh but you are interested, especially now. You are trying so very hard. That is why you are still throwing cash into the dumpster fire that is Tesla. You got blindsided. You exploited the cheap Chinese labour, thinking they can never be as smart as you. Your designs will forever be Greek to them. And that was your fatal flaw, and will continue to be as long as you refuse to admit your shortcomings.

America is the undisputed King of software. That is subject to change, especially with your tech leaders pushing hard to create a technocracy. You have successfully spooked your greatest ally, Europe into building for themselves and they already have a lot in place. Good for them.

The US is even losing software ground with your own people who trust your less and less (scandal after scandal will do that)

What you are left with is selling your software to the Third World, but that is not very lucrative, obviously.

As far as chips are concerned ,I pessimistically give it 5 years for China to equal you in that space. They will not be buying from you anymore, and they have football fields of the smartest people now, in all major field. And they are united in the fact that you don't want to share your toys, so they will use their number one manufacturing and research capacity to upend you.

I don't know what you see, but what I see is that we are not interested in competing with China. I don't listen to CEOs or politicians. I just look at where real developers and engineers spend their time and where investment is going.

It's not a fight we're up for and not one we can win anyway. It's not because of arrogance, stupidity or laziness. Every empire collapses eventually. China will too one day.

Really smart sounding, until:

> As far as chips are concerned ,I pessimistically give it 5 years for China to equal you in that space.

The US doesn't make chips.

It sounds like this is more motivated by a need for vengeance than a desire to delineate the truth.

The top players in the space (AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm, ...) all design their chips in the US and Europe, using software also written in the west. "Only" the manufacturing is outsourced.

No, not at all. The battery in the article is still 30 times less energy dense by weight as jet fuel. And 10x less by volume. You’ll see synthetic sustainable biofuels and hydrogen way before batteries are in the sky.

Batteries are already in the sky for commercial operation. So they're already viable for very short haul flights by existence proof. New battery tech just makes them more viable.

95%+ of the energy in a battery directly converts to work. A typical jet engine is about 35% efficient. So the gap is smaller than it looks. More like 10X by weight and 3-4X by volume. Electric planes can regeneratively descend so that makes it a little better still.

Still this is why I said short to medium haul not long haul. But that’s more than half of aviation.

Impressive if it works, but I wonder if there's an electricity grid that could support it?

Quick napkin math:

- The Hyundai Ioniq 6 gets 4.2mi/kWh (6.76km/kWh) [0]

- 3000km/6.76 = 443kWh

- 443 kWh in 5 mins = throughput of 2200 kWh, times however many charging stations at a refill stop. As EVs get more prevalent every charger at a station could be in use at the same time.

0 - https://insideevs.com/news/709706/electric-cars-energy-consu...

Capacitors are the exact technology to solve this.

No, energy density is way below Lixx chemistry. Not suitable.

You don't get it, the idea is to but a (super)capacitor bank at the charging station, just between the power network and the electric car. You discharge them fast into the battery and you modulate how fast you recharge them for the next client.

There is already a similar tech for buses in Geneva, Switzerland:

https://www.hitachienergy.com/news-and-events/customer-stori...

The 5 minute charge would be great but as long as i can get the 3000 km range that makes the recharge time a non issue. Planning trips around charging a car every few hundred kilometers is a hassle, but planning around a monthly recharge even if it takes a few hours is no problem.

Can't tell if /s, but if not: that would be a hella short time to fill up a gas tank.

I meant that if i can get the 3000 km i don't particularly care if it takes 5 minutes or 4 hours to charge the car.

> throughput of 2200 kWh

the physical dimension you're looking for is power (kW)

443 kWh / 5 minutes = 443 kWh * (1/12 h) = 5316kW

ah thanks! not sure how I messed that up, but appreciate the correction!

Those numbers. The hydro power plant I visited can charge 34 cars and India has built most of its possible dams.

The demand for energy isn't changing. If you're charging 5 times as much, but only charging 1/5th as often, you aren't taking more from the grid, you're just making demand on the grid more inconsistent.

There are two main ways of handling that randomness.

1. Spread it over a large number of vehicles, and let statistics average out the demand spikes. We're doing this at a significant rate, adding > 1 million EV's to American roads every year. Also, we already have superchargers with 98 stalls. There's going to be little demand difference between 98 350kW chargers vs 32 1MW chargers. 9 350kW vs 3 1MW chargers loads a grid harder, but 98 vs 32 not so much.

2. Batteries. Charging stations are already large enough that many are utilizing batteries to smooth electricity demands.

Superchargers with 98 stalls, today, absolutely cannot handle peak charging of all those stalls at the same time. That’s the equivalent of 34,000 homes turning on at the same time, which is basically a medium size city.

Cannot handle it, and doesn't have to handle it. A Tesla will only pull the full 350kW for 2 minutes in a charging session, and sessions average ~20 minutes. And even when the station is full, there are always stations pulling 0W because they're switching between vehicles et cetera.

But if it did need to handle that level of instantaneous load, it would be straight forward to supply. 98 Tesla's worth of batteries on site could do it. The grid tie is substantially smaller, because the grid tie only has to handle average load, not instantaneous load.

I remember investing in solid state battery stocks and ended up losing a lot of money, good to see that the premise behind them is solid - if this pans out, this will be revolutionary indeed.

I also don't think people will mind waiting a bit longer if it means even getting 1000km or many hundreds of miles.

Looks like you were a bit too early. One thing I've learned is that tech like this always takes longer than people realize. And when I say "like this" I mean something that doesn't fit the contemporary supply chain mold, something that conceptually should work but still needs research to be commercially viable and something that needs to be manufactured at scale to reap the most benefit. It takes a long time for all the pieces to fall into place, even under intense industry and consumer pressure.

Not really feasible for cars. You’d need a 4.8MW charger, 6000 amps at 800V, to charge this battery in five minutes – maybe more, this a conservative estimate ignoring losses and assuming 400kWh capacity.

Tesla’s monstrous EV truck charger puts out 1.2MW, and it’s already wild, as well as an infrastructure problem more than anything else.

I’m betting on battery swapping as the future, we already have it in 3 minutes, next-gen stations are dropping to 90 seconds for a swap. No charger will ever compete with that unless we discover entirely new power transmission tech.

The swap stations can trickle charge, don’t need massive power lines, and can also balance the grid. Batteries are less stressed, can be monitored and (re)cycled safely at scale. Fast cycle times means more capacity = less queues. Once the technology involved is standardized [1] and becomes a commodity there will be almost no downsides.

[1] already happening via Choco/CATL/Nio in China and potentially the EU

Is swapping batteries socially acceptable now?

IIUC, the big problem is that people didn't want to end up with a worse battery than their current one.

With frequent swapping it’s not a big concern. Batteries that become unhealthy are taken out of circulation, so you’re guaranteed a minimum level of performance, and can always swap again.

And of course you can always purchase a Swap Premium membership, to guarantee only batteries which still have > 90% capacity are used for your vehicle!

Wait. You mean I’d have the option to use perfectly fine batteries that would be more available and save money? Sounds pretty good.

Absolutely! For even more savings, why not try out ad-supported CommuterLite package?

Perhaps this will end up being a non-problem if all the cars are owned by car sharing (taxis) operators.

4 MW chargers are currently being rolled out for electric ferries, so I don't see anything impossible about this future tech.

Seems silly for passenger car usage though where you could just use a much smaller battery using the same tech to get plenty of rang and so cut weight and get better efficiency.

Deploying this kind of infrastructure for one-off industrial installations is not the same as, say, 70.000 supercharger locations around the world, never mind the 2.7 million 'normal' power charging points that currently exist and actually serve the majority of EV owners.

Indeed the best use of this tech would be a smaller capacity battery with ±1000km range, though achieving <10m charging time even on that will still be a challenge.

Don't be so unimaginative. It's for flying cars. They can simply top up by hovering over high-voltage transmission lines, extending flexible tentacles downwards, to suck up some juice.

BYD are building a bunch of 1MW chargers in China. That seems fast enough for practical purposes - 250 miles of range in five minutes. I'll normally stop for a coffee every 120 miles or so if driving long distances anyway even if not needing charge/gas.

I'm surprised Carbon Fibre structural batteries have not been adopted by Car manufacturers - could be a game changer I think.

structural batteries that have competitive power densities will require precision 3D manufacturing at the same level as silicone processors, and is altogether theoretical for the forseable future. what we are seeing with huawaei is an example of excess engineering capacity of a large high tech company, much like Honda, when it gets bored, and starts making jets, or robots, or rockets...instead of mini bikes huawei is a bit different in that there big business of phones,routers, and cell infrastucture equipment got largely shut down, and so they are returning serve with a vengance in order to redeem there place as a player in high tech infrastructure industry.

Carbon fibre is incredibly expensive to manufacture. It requires a lot of manual part manipulation and yields can be poor.

BMW made a big bet that batteries would remain expensive and weight would matter for EVs. i3 and i8 were studies in scaling up structural carbon fibre mass production based on that bet that failed pretty badly.

Structural batteries are already a thing. Carbon fibre won't be the housing without a bunch of innovations.

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