Rechargable Battery Breakthrough?

[marting]

Toshiba announced a new Lithium cell today with awesome capabilities. Here are a few that caught my attention:

Toshiba Battery PR

Tiny, 600 mah cell with extremely low internal resistance.

1: Can be recharged to 80% capacity in one minute! Can be fully recharged in a few more minutes.

2. Maintains 80% of it's capacity at -40 degrees!

3. Can operate at high temps.

4. Extremely long life with little charge cycle degradation.
-------------------

It this is really true it will revolutionize a great deal as this could be very practical, efficient power transfer and storage.

-m

 

[davefoc]

Thanks for the link marting.

In my past life as an engineer of hand held data collection computers this would have been huge news.

I liked the way they compared the battery with other technologies with their pentagram chart.

Just a little personal note. About ten years ago I was the manager of a project to design a new hand held data collection terminal for Symbol Technologies. The goal was to make it lighter, smaller, and cheaper than existing terminals.

We had pretty much committed to a new battery battery from Molicell as the power source. It was the first rechargeable lithium generally available. We had gone down the design path quite a ways when we got news that the molicell product was being pulled from the market because they had been bursting into flames, not a good feature for batteries. We eventually settled on NI-MH batteries which I think worked out very well, but the lithium clearly would have been better in terms of mass and volume energy density.

I would have liked to have seen current ni-mh technology displayed on their pentagram chart.

 

[El Greco]

It's about time we have better batteries. I have already complained about what I perceive to be a relative stagnance in this field of technology.

 

[Orangutan]

For some cool pictures take a look at this recent newscientist article:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7081

O.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Wow, better than my 15 minutes rechargable NiMH? Good to know!

 

[Ziggurat]

I would have liked to have seen current ni-mh technology displayed on their pentagram chart.

I could be wrong, but my impression has been that lithium ion batteries are a lot better than Ni-mh batteries in every respect but cost, but that the later get used a lot because they match traditional non-rechargeable battery voltages fairly well (legacy applications) while lithium ion batteries do not. Pretty much every application I've seen where the battery is designed for the device (cell phones, laptops, and even a lot of cameras) seems to use lithium ion batteries now.

 

[kedo1981]

I just read one of Heinlein’s novels from the 40s (Door into Summer) one of the main themes of the book was “when it’s time for railroads, no one can stop railroads from being developed”.

Meaning I guess that all technology has it’s time, you can do a Leonardo and come up with some great ideas about flight but no matter how hard you try you will not build an airplane.

For one, I think that this kind of battery tech is the edge of one of those “TIMES”

 

[Just thinking]

One thing I didn't see mentioned, is that whether there is an adverse effect on trying to recharge the battery before it is fully discharged -- in other words, does it have a recharge capacity memory? Other rechargable batteries have this problem.

Sometimes it is nice to have a fully charged battery available before you fully discharge it. One does not always wait for their car to be on its last ounce of gas before filling up.