Boffins triple battery life with metal foam Japanese researchers have developed a new material they estimate can triple the capacity of lithium-ion batteries. The breakthrough comes courtesy of Sumitomo Electric Industries, which has set up a "small-scale production line" at its Osaka Works R&D center to produce the battery-boosting material, which they call "Aluminum- …
You'll be storing more charge, so there's be a corresponding increase in charge time unless you beef up the chargers.
That's not possible if you're using an ordinary domestic 13 Amp socket, so if your vehicle stores twice as much charge it'll take twice as long to get full.
It does change the dynamics of the who e-car thing, though. If your e-car can now store enough power to get you backwards and forwards to work every day for a week before needing to be put on charge for 24 hours instead of needing 4-5 hours every day then that might be more convenient for you.
Certainly, it would be for me as I use my car each week for one long business trip and the rest of the time it sits in the garage, so if I had sufficient range to do the whole trip the car could spend the remainder of the time on charge and would (in fact) be more convenient for me than my current fossil burner as I could cut out the detour to the filling station.
"You'll be storing more charge, so there's be a corresponding increase in charge time unless you beef up the chargers."
I remember seeing a story about a new battery technology that can charge in seconds, supposedly:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7938001.stm
"A new manufacturing method for lithium-ion batteries could lead to smaller, lighter batteries that can be charged in just seconds." ... "The approach only requires simple changes to the production process of a well-known material."
I wonder what ever happened to it, combining the two sounds like a good plan.
A car battery that can recharge in seconds?
If 6 hours at 240V 13 amps is the right amount of charge, then that would be 6 minutes at 13 x 60 amps, or 60 seconds at 13 x 60 x 6 = 4680 Amps. About 1100 kilowatts, or 400 kettles.
Think about what a 4680 Amp plug might look like. Think about a tiny fraction of that current going into resistive heating somewhere it shouldn't. File under cloud cuckoo.
Oh, raise the voltage, I hear? 46 Amps at 25 kilovolts. Yes, that might be manageable on the connector front, but could it ever be made available to Joe Public? File this one under carbonized squirrel.
Seeing as I've had to replace all my lithium-ion batteries in my mini video camera's with AA rechargeable battery packs (using the power jack)
using HYBRIO NiMH low self discharge batteries, this is good news
With lithium-ion i got 45 minutes video time, with 2 AA i get 5 hrs, plus they cost £££'s less
3x the life is a step in the right direction, but i bet the cost of a good lithium-ion or pol will go up
the last time I drive more than 80 miles in a day.
I used to have a nasty commute - 140 miles round trip. However I could have charged at work (or left an e-car at home and used a fossil burner)
Other than that commute - I took a road trip round America, but I hired a car for that...
Erm... Before that???
I know - I manage a bit more than that going to a retreat centre every so often - but I can hire a car for holidays on the savings made from driving battery powered the rest of the year and still have money over to buy the holiday (well I could have done, I tend to cycle rather alot now)
We've basically got a very bumpy surface, and one of the critical features of a capacitor is the thickness of the dialectric layer between two conductors. It might work for an electrolytic capacitor, and it might be usable where the precise capacitance doesn't matter so much, but that last paragraph does seem odd. And the uneven surface could have all sorts of charge distribution effects: it all seems to go in the wrong direction.
"A down-side ... ? Three times the capacity... Three times the weight?" .... Gordon Henderson Posted Wednesday 29th June 2011 08:59 GMT
Three times the capacity also cubes its potential energy, GH, creating novel impacts elsewhere.
That would be more useful than x3 capacity.
Far too many battery packs are down to 50% in a year and useless in 2 years and then cost £70 to replace.
The headline should have been "triple battery capacity"
I'd like a 5 to 6 year life minimum battery.
On a car, x3 capacity is x3 longer to charge. Even existing electric cars need silly charging points or 8 hrs and unsupportable by local substation even if only 1 in 5 bought one. Forget electric cars. Use the electricity to make synthetic liquid fuel if it's so cheap. 600miles range added to tank in minutes.
First off, the tech is experimental: not yet ready for full-scale production. Second, it only makes sense in an environment where the cost of the electricity usage outweighs the cost of extracting more of the regular stuff out of the ground. Right now, the only environment that supports this scenario is a nuclear aircraft carrier. They have power to spare, an insatiable demand for jet fuel, and few places to tap. But mention nuclear anywhere in civvie land, and you'll get a visit from ol' NIMBY.
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Tend to break after a few (dozen/hundred, depnding on abuse) charge cycles because the anodes swell when charged and shrink when discharged (which causes them to fracture or flake.)
Nanowires were touted for a while as the solution for this but I haven't seen them in production yet....
No idea if this new tech is more immune to the phenomenon.
The name is a bit clumsy?
won't people mix it up with Aluminium?
How disapponted would you be if you thought that you had purchased some fine wonder material Aluminum, only to find when you got home that it was plain old Aluminuim... and even worse this ali is full of bleedin holes!
Electrolytics only have one solid plate. The other one *is* the electrolyte. There is an oxide layer on the anode to form the insulator, and manufacturers already try to make the anode as bumpy as possible to increase the surface area.
Now if you can be sure of getting a suitable oxide layer on this porous surface, that it might well work, so long as that doesn't result in local hot-spots where the electrolyte path is long and relatively 'thin'.
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