New dual carbon battery charges 20x faster than lithium ion batteries
powerjapanplus.com
powerjapanplus.com
I'm glad we've got labs researching battery technology, since I think that's one of the most important areas of research we can develop today. But forgive me if I'm skeptical until I see something show up on the shelves.
Power Japan Plus executives have years of experience overseeing battery manufacturing and supply chain at industry powerhouses like Sumitomo Metal Mining.
The company owns a battery production facility in Okinawa, Japan, where it will begin bench production testing of 18650 Ryden cells later this year. This facility will allow Power Japan Plus to meet demand for specialty energy storage markets such as medical devices and satellites.
Toyota would be the far better choice especially since the CTO of PJP helped design the Prius battery.
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/318498670...
I want fuel cell!!!
Mostly because it is very much needed for a whole lot of things from mobile phones to cars to making solar energy work 24-7, so if someone gets there first they will become immensely wealthy capitalising on a shift of our civilisation.
But yeah, proof of concept is not path to market, press releases are not profits and all that.
I am also sceptical of claims that a new battery is both safer and energy-denser. These two things are not natural allies.
Just like cancer or time travel or any kind of cool & urgent research projects, looking at it through the lens of pop science media on twitter is not ideal.
But.. I still want to hear about it.
Honestly, unlike you, I don't want to hear about it if it's going to turn into vaporware. Should it be published in a peer-reviewed journal? Absolutely. Do I want Apple and Tesla and Samsung looking into it? Definitely. Do I, personally, want to hear about it? Not particularly.
The batteries in phones often outlast the model of the phone.
However, it would be nice to see some numbers rather than just 'better', 'longer', etc.
(I know squat about the satellite battery market; this is generic market wisdom.)
Don't know the specifics for this technology, but the answer is obvious in general.
Because new techologies are first put to use in expensive and demanding sectors, that can pay the top dollar needed for them (since they are not mass-market yet to have economies of scale).
That's why the army, NASA, industry etc had GPS, cellphones, etc before you had one, and the same for most other such technologies.
What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies? You don't see claims like this about CPUs, Monitors, Network Cards, etc... It's always batteries for some reason.
And one of Carbon, Graphene, or Buckyballs always makes an appearance as well in these press releases. It would be nice to see a new material take the stage as the "10x faster to recharge, recyclable, energy dense, environmentally safe" battery technology that will solve all our problems.
Look at it this way: Human endeavor consists of intelligent application of energy to mass. One of the three elements are close to being made trivial! It's very easy to get excited about batteries and renewable energy!
I have no idea about how credible its claims are.
As I have an EV, that's closer to my current scenario of charging (once they put in a charger in the office parking lot) 4 hours and going 90 miles. The tradeoff of reduced distance for superior charge time is...irritating.
Tesla is attempting to solve this by building a massive battery storage capacity into the chargers and then trickle charging these batteries when the charging bays are not in use, so this is by no means a problem that has been solved once and for all.
So you are correct your average distribution feeder probably does not have capacity for a 10 mw service. I guess that's not much of a shock.
Charge profile is not linear in existing batteries. A supercharger is 40mn to 80% and 75mn to 100%.
As far as I've been able to gather (and I have no real special knowledge here and could be way off), the main problem with quick charging is that it heats the batteries a lot, since charging is not a 100% efficient process and any waste energy turns into heat. Heat is bad for batteries, so it could affect their life. However, Teslas have active temperature management for their batteries (both heating and cooling, as required) which should mitigate that.
However, back in the days of NiCad batteries, some formulations could cope with really fast charges - and in fact would behave better and last longer after a very fast charge than they would after a slow charge.
We're talking about shoving 20 amps into a C cell for five minutes here. You needed to carefully monitor the cell temperature - the charging process wouldn't generate much heat until the cell was nearly full, at which point nearly all the energy going in would convert to heat. 20 amps would heat a full C cell up very quickly indeed.
Many people have a mental model of battery charging like a tank of gas or another fluid, in which the first 10% and the last 10% take the same amount of time and effort.
It seems like a better mental model of battery charging would be a pressurized container of a compressible gas: the more you put in, the more it takes to put the next bit in.
My post was a reply to the post that decried nutty battery companies. I just wanted to point out that 20x power density of lithium ion is something that's actually feasible and available today. It, however, isn't all that useful and if you have to sacrifice even a single percent of energy density for it you're better off with lithium-ion batteries.
edit: Here's an image, because it's so awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine%E2%80%93Matthews%E2%80%93M...
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_magnetic_field
Sometimes it's pure scam, of course, but I think that's rare. Mainly it's people who are clue-deficient in some important way. They think it works. Or they think they can get it to work. Or, like many marketing people, they're used to trusting somebody else that it works. It's the tech world's version of the magnetic healing bracelet or the ear candle.
The reason nobody is out selling 20 GHz processors is that nobody really wants them. It'd be nice, sure, but we're all pretty happy with what we have. Our desire for something better isn't strong enough to override our sense for what's realistic.
Sure you can. Double-blind randomised controlled trials.
(p > 0.95)
Maybe it's better expressed as a balance between desire and experience. We have a lot of experience with CPUs, and we've grown accustomed to their speed, so our collective desire is modest. But collective desire for better batteries is very strong, and our experience with them is modest. So it's much easier for somebody to say, "Miracle tech! Give me millions!" And somebody will.
Every car would be electric. Airplanes too. The idea of running a vehicle on gasoline would be as ludicrous as the idea of running them on steam is to us now.
The massive challenges of wind and solar energy would disappear. Transmission and varying supply/demand are trivially solved with storage.
In computing, the massive effort expended in the name of efficiency would become unnecessary. Multitask all the things all the time! You want your phone to spin the CPU 24/7 listening for swear words so it can record hilarious videos automatically? Go for it.
It should be possible in theory to match the energy density of gasoline. You'd need to come up with a battery chemistry which takes in oxygen when it discharges and produces oxygen when it charges. Effectively, reversible combustion (or fuel cells). It's a tough problem but I don't think there's anything that fundamentally prevents it in theory.
Going much beyond it probably requires a nuclear process. You can store energy in certain isotopes by bombarding them with x-rays or gamma rays of a precise frequency. Stored energy can then be released with a similar process. In theory, it's possible to build a battery that uses this approach. In practice... to call it a difficult engineering problem would be a severe understatement.
Fundamentally, non-nuclear energy storage is limited by the strength of chemical bonds. For combustion, you're taking chemical bonds of high potential energy, breaking them apart, and rearranging the atoms into molecules with chemical bonds of lower potential energy. The energy difference is the heat produced by the combustion. The situation is similar in batteries, but in addition to rearranging atoms, free electrons are also liberated or consumed, with the bond energy difference going into that. For something like a mechanical spring, the winding force distorts the chemical bonds without breaking them, treating them like extremely tiny springs, with the same principle of operation as the big one. In all cases, the chemical bond strength determines how much potential energy can be crammed into the system.
For example, Wikipedia claims that flywheel energy storage (a "battery" where you just spin a disc faster to put energy in, and use it to drive something to get energy out) tops out at about 400Wh/kg. Lithium-ion batteries top out around 250Wh/kg, somewhat similar. Gasoline has a vastly better energy density at around 12,000Wh/kg... but gasoline needs to react with oxygen to release that energy! In fact it needs to react in an approximately 4:1 ratio, so the total mass going into the reaction is 5x the mass of the gasoline alone, making for an energy density of about 2400Wh/kg. Still much higher than batteries, but not outlandishly higher. I believe the difference would be because it's much easier to turn strong chemical bonds with a lot of potential energy into heat than it is to turn it into electrical potential.
You can see how reacting with the air gets you a huge advantage when it comes to how much stuff you need to carry around with you to store any given quantity of energy. And you can also sort of see how they all end up hitting the same basic limitations in the end. If you want to go further, you need take advantage of a stronger force with more potential energy, like the strong nuclear force.
(Gravity would be another possibility. If you could store energy by raising and lowering the orbit of a heavy object orbiting close to the Sun, you could get a pretty high energy density. Or if you want to go more exotic, store energy in the rotation of a neutron star or black hole. These approaches, however, pose even more difficulty for adaptation to automobile propulsion than the nuclear option.)
However, there's still plenty of room for improvement within that limit. In particular:
1. The best batteries are still quite a bit below the energy density of gasoline+oxygen.
2. Creating batteries that can use stuff in the air the way gas engines do can let you "cheat" the energy density numbers.
3. There's a lot of room for improvements to how much batteries cost for any given capacity.
4. Similarly, there's a lot of room for improvements in battery longevity, in terms of how many charge cycles it can handle before it loses capacity.
5. Again similarly, there's a lot of room for improvement in charging speed.
I think 3-5 are key. Energy per mass or energy per volume is good enough for many applications now. It's not enough for airplanes yet, but as Tesla has shown, it's good enough for practical cars. The battery pack in a Model S is pretty heavy, but the fact that the rest of the drivetrain is so compact compensates a lot. The result is still heavier than a normal car, but not excessively so. The real limitations for electric cars are high cost (which is why the Tesla costs $70,000 and up, and cheaper electric cars have terrible range), battery replacement after some years of use (really just another dimension of cost), and slow charging speeds (meaning you have to wait 30 minutes or more for a charge, which is fine for normal city driving when you charge at home overnight, but troublesome for people who can't charge at home, or who are on a road trip).
I'm not aware of any fundamental physical limitations at play in those areas yet, and at this point they're probably more important than raw energy density.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Controversy (not clear cut in Wikipedia's mind, but I think their editors are somewhat in denial)
This is a collaboration between an academic research department and a mining conglomerate, with the CTO being the guy who developed the nickel cobalt aluminum cathode for the lithium batteries they use in the Tesla and the Prius. I wouldn't call it nutty.
Organic = made of carbon. At least it meant that originally. Now the consumerized term meets "Carbon."
That said, I hope this works out. New battery tech rarely ever does, though.
"Organic" dictionary definition: "relating to or derived from living matter", i.e. [0]
> They add that the carbon they use is new as well—it's an organic compound grown from cotton fibers
[0] http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
"Reliable – first ever high performance battery that meets consumer lifecycle demand, rated for more than 3,000 charge/discharge cycles."
If you calculate from lithium ion, based on my own experience with my phone and my macbook, a lithium ion battery crosses over into the less acceptable performance after 4-5 years.
If the degradation curves can be compared that would mean you could expect 12-15 years from these batteries. Pretty impressive!
https://www.google.com/patents/US7052802?dq=ininventor:%22Ka...
However this is still vaporware:
"Power Japan Plus will begin benchmark production of 18650 Ryden cells later this year at the company’s production facility in Okinawa, Japan"
Plenty of people have improved battery technologies, the issue has always been scaling up the process in a cheap enough way. If these batteries cost too much then its back to the drawing board.
"A new company called Power Japan Plus (PJP), working with researchers from Kyushu University, has developed a dual carbon battery (patent pending) that may solve many of the problems associated with Li-ion batteries. PJP’s chief technology officer is Dr. Kaname Takeya, who developed the batteries used in the Toyota Prius and the Tesla, so he knows a thing or two about the shortcomings of Li-ion technology."
http://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDesi...
1. http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
The guy goes on to say eventually they'll make them just out of carbon but God knows how the physics will work then. You need some sort of chemical reaction to produce the electrical power along the lines of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Electrochem...
The carbon only bit sounds like management / marketing bs