Most of the time these battery tech announcements will mention capacity and recharge. They are typically very silent on discharge rate and this announcement is no exception. Discharge rate is an important feature for high load applications like cars. Given that this is still lithium ion I would expect good things but it would be nice to see some high discharge data.
I was under the impression that discharge rate scaled fairly reliably with recharge rate. Is that not the case?
Not that I've seen. Charging rates usually scale with capacity. Discharge rates vary greatly.
For the record, there are a lot of experimental battery technologies out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Variations_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-sulfur_battery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowire_battery Just... one of these will probably catch on, yes, and that's awesome, but we've come up with so many different ideas that at this point, demonstrating a high-capacity lithium bat…
And the promised capacity increase is always 10x, neither more nor less.
I still don't understand why people think this will do anything for electric cars. The bottleneck is how long it takes to charge your car. If you have a 60KW/hr pack, you can only charge it so fast with a 110v/20amp jack (for the sake of pie in the sky projections assume 50% charging efficiency between charger and battery). Period the end. you could always do 220v/30amps, or 208v/30amps/3phase. or 440v/1000amps. the…
Most homes have 220v devices that people use safely every day without electrocuting themselves. If your really concerned about how fast they charge just run a second line and wow it's charging twice as fast. On top of that decent charging stations are well over 90% efficient much worse than that and they start dumping a lot of heat which harms the battery. 3 * 220v/50amps * 90% efficiency will fill that 60KW/hr pack…
You don't say? they have washing machines that they plug and unplug every single day? 2 lines, why didn't I think of that. Brilliant! It's so cheap to build a 3-phase charger at 400V at 32 amps so you can charge a 20kWh pack in 2 hours (60kWh in 6!). Everyone should do it. It makes perfect economic sense! It's exactly like gas. Everytime I want to fill up my car, I sit at the pump for 6 hours. But this battery tech will change all that. Yes, now that we have better longer-lasting batteries, it won't take so long to fill up. Nevermind that there is an ENORMOUS demand for batteries, that these are at least a decade away from production, and thusly economies of scale are already reached. But sure, continue to tell me the same old bullshit. eventually someone will believe it, and we'll all start living in the future.
What is the safety of this battery? At 10x power we are looking at potential explosion for eletric cars instead of raging fire for gas cars... Does it work in 30 below zero?
As just a lay commenter on ycombinator, I can point out that they're just changing the anode atomic structure. They're not changing the Lithium salt. So your concerns about safety are fine - this should only be as safe as any other Lithium-ion or Lithium-polymer battery.
>this should only be as safe as any other Lithium-ion or Lithium-polymer battery.
That's pretty short-sighted Mike. First, a 10x battery boost would mean you don't have to recharge the car fully over a week. This is also a boon for battery swapping stations which are bein built in Israel and other places.
lol. it's like you're trying to troll me. #5,612,606.
That's pretty short-sighted Mike. First, a 10x battery boost would mean you don't have to recharge the car fully over a week. This is also a boon for battery swapping stations which are bein built in Israel and other places.
lol. it's like you're trying to troll me. #5,612,606.
well i'm also talking about how the battery swap stations being built in israel and other places, are being built by Better Place. Which in turn was started by Shai Agassi, who was never approached by my former company about being an investor in this technology. and consequently has to operate outside of zones that issue/respect patents.
While this could change the game for electric cars (Edit: as others have already been discussing), it would also be an amazing advance for cell phones and computers. Imagine a cell phone that had a lighter battery but still lasted through a week of use between charges. Or an incredibly thin and light battery (and a correspondingly thin and light phone) that still lasted a couple of days. Or a notebook that didn't nee…
But can you imagine trying to find the charging cable for your Kindle after a year?
If they keep it to a standard mini-USB cable, it won't be too bad.
I was under the impression that discharge rate scaled fairly reliably with recharge rate. Is that not the case?
Not that I've seen. Charging rates usually scale with capacity. Discharge rates vary greatly.
Generally given a battery chemistry and manufacturing technology, the charge rates and discharge rates are given in units of "C" which means it allows 1A charge/discharge per Ah capacity of the battery. For instance, the lipoly batteries I got for my combat robot last year were 20C discharge, and 1C charge, and had a capacity of 1800mAh. This means I can discharge at 36A, charge at 1.8A. While true, the charge rate doesn't scale with discharge rates directly, for a given chemistry, it does.
While this could change the game for electric cars (Edit: as others have already been discussing), it would also be an amazing advance for cell phones and computers. Imagine a cell phone that had a lighter battery but still lasted through a week of use between charges. Or an incredibly thin and light battery (and a correspondingly thin and light phone) that still lasted a couple of days. Or a notebook that didn't nee…
But can you imagine trying to find the charging cable for your Kindle after a year?
Bah, at that rate you could just buy a new kindle ;)