7 ms·

New dual carbon battery charges 20x faster than lithium ion batteries

149 points by tudborg 12y ago

ghshephard 12y ago
This is one of those daytime fantasies we all have while daydreaming. Except, even when I'm really fantasizing, I never actually dream of things as ludicrous as this press release talks about. 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.
- alisnic 12y ago
  Imagine these batteries in Teslas, that will mean a full charge in about ~10 minutes, which could potentially make all gasoline cars lame.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    This. We have electric engines pinned down. All that's missing from unlimited application of energy is better batteries and better power generation. 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!
    - baq 12y ago
      this is not that simple. the article claims that density is similar to lithium batteries, but it doesn't say what kind of density is it. the fact that it charges 20x as much may mean naught if it holds 1/20 energy per kg or per liter.
      - barrkel 12y ago
        Direct quote from the article: This unique battery offers energy density comparable to a lithium ion battery I have no idea about how credible its claims are.
      - StavrosK 12y ago
        What do you mean "what kind of density"? "Similar to lithium batteries" means just that, if you have a lithium battery of a certain size, this will hold an amount of energy similar to that.
        Tuna-Fish 12y ago
        Energy density can be given in terms of mass or in terms of volume. In general, if a source of a new interesting battery technology does not describe which one they mean in a comparison, you can assume the worst, that is, that they are comparable to lithium-ion in joules/m^3 (at which lithium ion isn't actually that good).
        marvin 12y ago
        A 30% difference would still be classified as "similar", but this would still be a big deal since batteries are just borderline capable to provide electric cars with sufficient charge to be acceptable for most people. A battery that's 30% worse than the best current batteries would be unusable.
        selectodude 12y ago
        A car that could charge in 5 minutes and go 200 miles would be as useful to me as my current car. It's a start.
        ctdonath 12y ago
        He's referring more to a car that could charge in 5 minutes and go 60 miles. 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.
  - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
    Except that you also have to move the electricity into the car, which is actually the limiting factor in Teslas today, not the batteries. So this wouldn't really help at all.
    - danmaz74 12y ago
      Source?
      - marvin 12y ago
        Just read up on any existing quick-charging technology. Tesla's superchargers are the world's highest-capacity quick charging at 130kW, 2x the nearest competitor (CHAdeMO). And this still requires ~one hour to give the battery a full charge. Let's say you want to be able to charge in six minutes. That would mean something on the order of 1.3MW of electric power. So let's say you have a small-ish refueling station like a contemporary gas station, with eight charging spots. To power these, you need to pull ten megawatts from somewhere. The current power grid isn't dimensioned for this kind of demand, especially since the demand is very transient. 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.
        snowwindwaves 12y ago
        Distribution level voltage is anywhere from 4kv to 25 kv. Say it's 12. Typical partridge or linnet distribution conductor might do 200 A. P=sqrt(3)IV cos theta = 1.73 * 200 * 12000 * 0.9 = 3.7 mw. 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.
        CapitalistCartr 12y ago
        In the United States the normal distribution voltage, prior to being stepped down for consumer use, 7.6kv phase to ground, 13.2 phase to phase. So yes, you're pretty close, except the 13.2 kv would be 3-phase. For heavy industrial use, 4.4 kv is common for actual end user equipment, but above that would be some pretty serious equipment for an end user. Larger transmission lines operate anywhere from 60kv on up to 1.1 million volts, so lots of power is possible, as long as you don't mind the brownouts.
  - loceng 12y ago
    AFAIK it currently takes ~20 minutes to half-charge a Tesla. 20x would mean charging fully in ~2 minutes - nearly as fast as the automatic option for replacing depleted batteries with fully charged ones.
    - masklinn 12y ago
      > 20x would mean charging fully in ~2 minutes Charge profile is not linear in existing batteries. A supercharger is 40mn to 80% and 75mn to 100%.
      - loceng 12y ago
        Ah, good to know - thank you.
      - danielweber 12y ago
        How does a quick-charge affect the longevity of the batteries?
        mikeash 12y ago
        I don't believe it's known yet. Battery longevity seems to involve a lot of trial and error, and there isn't much data. 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.
        mnw21cam 12y ago
        Not sure for LiIon batteries. 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.
  - cLeEOGPw 12y ago
    Except that it doesn't take 10 minutes to fill a gas tank and you can go 1000 km with full, unlike Tesla.
- BillyMaize 12y ago
  It's probably the fact that a huge leap in battery technology would make huge changes in both electric cars as well as being able to store solar power (and therefore allowing people to live off the grid). Faster computer hardware wouldn't have nearly the effect and I'm sure these companies want the biggest hype possible.
- Tuna-Fish 12y ago
  Getting 10 times more power density than lithium-ion isn't hard. It's also not very interesting, as we have enough power density already. Now we need more energy density.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Number of occurrences: "power density": 0 "energy density": 1
    - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
      "charges 20 times faster", which is also found in the title, is a statement about power density. 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.
  - mnw21cam 12y ago
    Indeed. And if you don't have enough power density to (for instance) absorb energy from regenerative braking and then accelerate out of a corner, you just add a large capacitor with a massive power density (but a low energy density).
- cLeEOGPw 12y ago
  What about magnetic batteries that always slowly charges from Earth's magnetic field.
  - ema 12y ago
    The earth's magnetic field is several orders of magnitude to weak for that. Look at how you can control a compass with a fridge magnet.
  - outworlder 12y ago
    Assuming that it were orders of magnitude stronger, how could that possibly work, physically speaking? I see no way, unless the field was changing (rotating?) or the battery were moving to begin with.
    - kaybe 12y ago
      Well, it is.. on geological timescales. And with sudden flips at that. The record is in the orientation of suitable partices at the divergent plate boundaries ('frozen' like that when the lava cooled), which also is an indicator for ocean floor spreading and plate tectonics. It's pretty awesome, actually. But as the sibling comment says, in addition to being slow it's far too weak as well. edit: Here's an image, because it's so awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine%E2%80%93Matthews%E2%80%93Morley_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine%E2%80%93Matthews%E2%80%93M...
    - vanderZwan 12y ago
      It could exploit the earth's motion through the interplanetary magnetic field[0] to charge your batteries... reeeeeeaaaally... sloooooowly. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_magnetic_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_magnetic_field
    - cLeEOGPw 12y ago
      That was a joke example of battery I made up that sounds believable enough to generate traffic from sites like this...
- wpietri 12y ago
  My theory: if you want something bad enough, somebody will come along and sell you something. It won't work, but they'll still sell it to you. 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.
  - iliis 12y ago
    Good point! Altough bad example with the CPU: I do want a 20 GHz one and so do a lot of others. But I can see if it works as advertised very quickly whereas you cannot really absolutely with ultimate certainty prove that this bracelet doesn't work...
    - M2Ys4U 12y ago
      >you cannot really absolutely with ultimate certainty prove that this bracelet doesn't work... Sure you can. Double-blind randomised controlled trials.
      - mnw21cam 12y ago
        >Sure you can. Double-blind randomised controlled trials. (p > 0.95)
    - wpietri 12y ago
      Interesting. You can test a battery's capacity, too, so I don't think that's exactly it. I also don't think the collective desire for faster CPUs is all that strong; look at how few people bother going to the lengths of, say, overclocking and watercooling, let alone more exotic approaches. 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.
- lectrick 12y ago
  Because affordable, fast, dense, safe electrical energy storage is pretty much the biggest obstacle to moving many technologies forward.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    It is interesting to consider what could be done if somehow a battery were invented that could, say, store 1GWh of energy in a $1 rechargeable cell the size of a AA battery with 99.9% in/out efficiency and no danger of catastrophic failure. 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.
    - lectrick 12y ago
      Well, I think there is a physics limit there, and gasoline happens to be VERY energy-dense (unfortunately for us trying to get away from depending on that property of it), but yes, that is fun to speculate on
      - mikeash 12y ago
        Yes, my battery is pretty clearly beyond physics. 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.
- Someone 12y ago
  Not always: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Controversy 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)
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies? 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.
andersthue 12y ago
Only two press releases, made on the same day.
- throwwit 12y ago
  Better article with a youtube vid... http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182500-dual-carbon-batteries-is-this-finally-the-breakthrough-weve-been-promised-for-so-long http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182500-dual-carbon-batter... . I'm particularly happy if this leads to less mining of Lithium.
  - danmaz74 12y ago
    From the picture [1] it looks like they still use Lithium inside the battery (Li+) 1. http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery.html http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
    - chli 12y ago
      What about the 'A-' ? I think they invented some new element ! ;)
      - tim333 12y ago
        Apparently A- means anion and is a generic term for assorted anions. Shame it's not a new element. That would be cool.
    - tim333 12y ago
      Yeah in the video they mention Li+ ions. So I guess it's still a lithium battery but a different variation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJwZ9uEpJOo&feature=youtu.be&t=2m55s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJwZ9uEpJOo&feature=youtu.be... 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#Electrochemistry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Electrochem... The carbon only bit sounds like management / marketing bs
twelvechairs 12y ago
lithium batteries are also special because of their light weight. This says it has an 'energy density' which is 'comparable' (density by mass or volume?). Vague enough for me to infer it can't compete on weight.
- jakozaur 12y ago
  Yeah the energy density is the most important factor. If it's not competitive there will be some niche market for fast recharging, but lithium is good enough in many use cases.
danmaz74 12y ago
Bit better article: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery.html http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
nextw33k 12y ago
I'd love to see advancement in battery technology, I am surprised its never the established manufactures coming up with such innovations. 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.
thescrewdriver 12y ago
Over 3,000 charge/discharge cycles... "Reliable – first ever high performance battery that meets consumer lifecycle demand, rated for more than 3,000 charge/discharge cycles."
- tinco 12y ago
  If you assume a normal cell phone user charges his phone at night, and it will work the whole day, it means around 8 years of use. 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!
stcredzero 12y ago
world’s first and only organic carbon material 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.
- jebus989 12y ago
  "Organic" as in organic chemistry is to do with compounds containing carbon. "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.html http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
  - JackFr 12y ago
    I assumed they meant the batteries were created without hormones, antibiotics or GMO's.
- zodiac 12y ago
  Actually there's such a thing as inorganic carbon, eg in carbon dioxide.
IanDrake 12y ago
Some of this inventor's existing patents: https://www.google.com/patents/US7052802?dq=ininventor:%22Kaname+Takeya%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hZZ8U5f2M8WDqgbv9IKICg&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAg https://www.google.com/patents/US7052802?dq=ininventor:%22Ka...
nathanb 12y ago
It seems like I see headlines every few months that a lab somewhere has created a paper-thin battery made out of unicorn horn which charges instantaneously when exposed to the sun and will run for a thousand years without recharging, and then it turns out to only work at absolute zero or to become unstable when three of them exist in the same area code or to emit radiation that kills anything smaller than a muskrat on contact. 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.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  This looks as though it is escaping from the lab. 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. http://powerjapanplus.com/battery/market.html http://powerjapanplus.com/battery/market.html
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  This one looks a little more promising. It will probably still take at least 3 years to see it in niche products on the market, though. But if I were Elon Musk, I'd keep a very close eye on this one, and if their claims are real, and won't take too long to appear on the market, I'd even buy them, and try to put the technology faster on the market.
  - threeseed 12y ago
    Tesla is bleeding money and only sells in a handful of countries. They need to sort themselves out before thinking of acquiring companies. Toyota would be the far better choice especially since the CTO of PJP helped design the Prius battery.
    - 12y ago
savrajsingh 12y ago
Note that the battery still contains Lithium.
SeanLuke 12y ago
People have adequately discussed why charging time isn't a particularly significant concern in batteries right now. My concern about these batteries is different: so far as I can tell, they're up to ten times heavier than lithium ion. That's a killer issue for cars. Literature in support of carbon lead claims that this is offset but the cooling and electronics needed for lithium, but I strongly doubt this.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  These aren't carbon/lead. You are talking about a completely different battery technology.
  - SeanLuke 12y ago
    aaaand I am an idiot. Saw a whole bunch of carbon anode lead stories yesterday with similar claims.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Easy to do given the amount of battery stories at the moment, this one is pretty intriguing though. "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/ElectronicsDesignArticles/ArticleID/7611/Dual-Carbon-Batteries-Powerful-Safe-Reliable-and-Cheap.aspx http://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDesi...
ommunist 12y ago
Looks like it is actually carbon-lithium. Kudoz to danmaz74. It does not stop to fancy me - why do we all need this stuff? When Philips introduced thin Li-ion batteries, moldable to any shape 10 years ago, it took about a year or two for the industry to accept this innovation. Japanese inventors will probably license production to a larger producer. But if organic cotton only has its unique properties if grown on Okinawa, there will be no mass-production, I am afraid.

149 points by tudborg 12y ago

This is one of those daytime fantasies we all have while daydreaming. Except, even when I'm really fantasizing, I never actually dream of things as ludicrous as this press release talks about. 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.

alisnic 12y ago
Imagine these batteries in Teslas, that will mean a full charge in about ~10 minutes, which could potentially make all gasoline cars lame.
- tormeh 12y ago
  This. We have electric engines pinned down. All that's missing from unlimited application of energy is better batteries and better power generation. 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!
  - baq 12y ago
    this is not that simple. the article claims that density is similar to lithium batteries, but it doesn't say what kind of density is it. the fact that it charges 20x as much may mean naught if it holds 1/20 energy per kg or per liter.
    - barrkel 12y ago
      Direct quote from the article: This unique battery offers energy density comparable to a lithium ion battery I have no idea about how credible its claims are.
    - StavrosK 12y ago
      What do you mean "what kind of density"? "Similar to lithium batteries" means just that, if you have a lithium battery of a certain size, this will hold an amount of energy similar to that.
      - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
        Energy density can be given in terms of mass or in terms of volume. In general, if a source of a new interesting battery technology does not describe which one they mean in a comparison, you can assume the worst, that is, that they are comparable to lithium-ion in joules/m^3 (at which lithium ion isn't actually that good).
      - marvin 12y ago
        A 30% difference would still be classified as "similar", but this would still be a big deal since batteries are just borderline capable to provide electric cars with sufficient charge to be acceptable for most people. A battery that's 30% worse than the best current batteries would be unusable.
        selectodude 12y ago
        A car that could charge in 5 minutes and go 200 miles would be as useful to me as my current car. It's a start.
        ctdonath 12y ago
        He's referring more to a car that could charge in 5 minutes and go 60 miles. 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.
- Tuna-Fish 12y ago
  Except that you also have to move the electricity into the car, which is actually the limiting factor in Teslas today, not the batteries. So this wouldn't really help at all.
  - danmaz74 12y ago
    Source?
    - marvin 12y ago
      Just read up on any existing quick-charging technology. Tesla's superchargers are the world's highest-capacity quick charging at 130kW, 2x the nearest competitor (CHAdeMO). And this still requires ~one hour to give the battery a full charge. Let's say you want to be able to charge in six minutes. That would mean something on the order of 1.3MW of electric power. So let's say you have a small-ish refueling station like a contemporary gas station, with eight charging spots. To power these, you need to pull ten megawatts from somewhere. The current power grid isn't dimensioned for this kind of demand, especially since the demand is very transient. 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.
      - snowwindwaves 12y ago
        Distribution level voltage is anywhere from 4kv to 25 kv. Say it's 12. Typical partridge or linnet distribution conductor might do 200 A. P=sqrt(3)IV cos theta = 1.73 * 200 * 12000 * 0.9 = 3.7 mw. 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.
        CapitalistCartr 12y ago
        In the United States the normal distribution voltage, prior to being stepped down for consumer use, 7.6kv phase to ground, 13.2 phase to phase. So yes, you're pretty close, except the 13.2 kv would be 3-phase. For heavy industrial use, 4.4 kv is common for actual end user equipment, but above that would be some pretty serious equipment for an end user. Larger transmission lines operate anywhere from 60kv on up to 1.1 million volts, so lots of power is possible, as long as you don't mind the brownouts.
- loceng 12y ago
  AFAIK it currently takes ~20 minutes to half-charge a Tesla. 20x would mean charging fully in ~2 minutes - nearly as fast as the automatic option for replacing depleted batteries with fully charged ones.
  - masklinn 12y ago
    > 20x would mean charging fully in ~2 minutes Charge profile is not linear in existing batteries. A supercharger is 40mn to 80% and 75mn to 100%.
    - loceng 12y ago
      Ah, good to know - thank you.
    - danielweber 12y ago
      How does a quick-charge affect the longevity of the batteries?
      - mikeash 12y ago
        I don't believe it's known yet. Battery longevity seems to involve a lot of trial and error, and there isn't much data. 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.
      - mnw21cam 12y ago
        Not sure for LiIon batteries. 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.
- cLeEOGPw 12y ago
  Except that it doesn't take 10 minutes to fill a gas tank and you can go 1000 km with full, unlike Tesla.
BillyMaize 12y ago
It's probably the fact that a huge leap in battery technology would make huge changes in both electric cars as well as being able to store solar power (and therefore allowing people to live off the grid). Faster computer hardware wouldn't have nearly the effect and I'm sure these companies want the biggest hype possible.
Tuna-Fish 12y ago
Getting 10 times more power density than lithium-ion isn't hard. It's also not very interesting, as we have enough power density already. Now we need more energy density.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  Number of occurrences: "power density": 0 "energy density": 1
  - Tuna-Fish 12y ago
    "charges 20 times faster", which is also found in the title, is a statement about power density. 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.
- mnw21cam 12y ago
  Indeed. And if you don't have enough power density to (for instance) absorb energy from regenerative braking and then accelerate out of a corner, you just add a large capacitor with a massive power density (but a low energy density).
cLeEOGPw 12y ago
What about magnetic batteries that always slowly charges from Earth's magnetic field.
- ema 12y ago
  The earth's magnetic field is several orders of magnitude to weak for that. Look at how you can control a compass with a fridge magnet.
- outworlder 12y ago
  Assuming that it were orders of magnitude stronger, how could that possibly work, physically speaking? I see no way, unless the field was changing (rotating?) or the battery were moving to begin with.
  - kaybe 12y ago
    Well, it is.. on geological timescales. And with sudden flips at that. The record is in the orientation of suitable partices at the divergent plate boundaries ('frozen' like that when the lava cooled), which also is an indicator for ocean floor spreading and plate tectonics. It's pretty awesome, actually. But as the sibling comment says, in addition to being slow it's far too weak as well. edit: Here's an image, because it's so awesome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine%E2%80%93Matthews%E2%80%93Morley_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine%E2%80%93Matthews%E2%80%93M...
  - vanderZwan 12y ago
    It could exploit the earth's motion through the interplanetary magnetic field[0] to charge your batteries... reeeeeeaaaally... sloooooowly. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_magnetic_field http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_magnetic_field
  - cLeEOGPw 12y ago
    That was a joke example of battery I made up that sounds believable enough to generate traffic from sites like this...
wpietri 12y ago
My theory: if you want something bad enough, somebody will come along and sell you something. It won't work, but they'll still sell it to you. 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.
- iliis 12y ago
  Good point! Altough bad example with the CPU: I do want a 20 GHz one and so do a lot of others. But I can see if it works as advertised very quickly whereas you cannot really absolutely with ultimate certainty prove that this bracelet doesn't work...
  - M2Ys4U 12y ago
    >you cannot really absolutely with ultimate certainty prove that this bracelet doesn't work... Sure you can. Double-blind randomised controlled trials.
    - mnw21cam 12y ago
      >Sure you can. Double-blind randomised controlled trials. (p > 0.95)
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Interesting. You can test a battery's capacity, too, so I don't think that's exactly it. I also don't think the collective desire for faster CPUs is all that strong; look at how few people bother going to the lengths of, say, overclocking and watercooling, let alone more exotic approaches. 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.
lectrick 12y ago
Because affordable, fast, dense, safe electrical energy storage is pretty much the biggest obstacle to moving many technologies forward.
- mikeash 12y ago
  It is interesting to consider what could be done if somehow a battery were invented that could, say, store 1GWh of energy in a $1 rechargeable cell the size of a AA battery with 99.9% in/out efficiency and no danger of catastrophic failure. 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.
  - lectrick 12y ago
    Well, I think there is a physics limit there, and gasoline happens to be VERY energy-dense (unfortunately for us trying to get away from depending on that property of it), but yes, that is fun to speculate on
    - mikeash 12y ago
      Yes, my battery is pretty clearly beyond physics. 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.
Someone 12y ago
Not always: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Controversy 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)
lotsofmangos 12y ago
What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies? 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.

andersthue 12y ago

Only two press releases, made on the same day.

throwwit 12y ago
Better article with a youtube vid... http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182500-dual-carbon-batteries-is-this-finally-the-breakthrough-weve-been-promised-for-so-long http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182500-dual-carbon-batter... . I'm particularly happy if this leads to less mining of Lithium.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  From the picture [1] it looks like they still use Lithium inside the battery (Li+) 1. http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery.html http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
  - chli 12y ago
    What about the 'A-' ? I think they invented some new element ! ;)
    - tim333 12y ago
      Apparently A- means anion and is a generic term for assorted anions. Shame it's not a new element. That would be cool.
  - tim333 12y ago
    Yeah in the video they mention Li+ ions. So I guess it's still a lithium battery but a different variation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJwZ9uEpJOo&feature=youtu.be&t=2m55s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJwZ9uEpJOo&feature=youtu.be... 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#Electrochemistry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Electrochem... The carbon only bit sounds like management / marketing bs

twelvechairs 12y ago

lithium batteries are also special because of their light weight. This says it has an 'energy density' which is 'comparable' (density by mass or volume?). Vague enough for me to infer it can't compete on weight.

jakozaur 12y ago
Yeah the energy density is the most important factor. If it's not competitive there will be some niche market for fast recharging, but lithium is good enough in many use cases.

danmaz74 12y ago

Bit better article: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery.html http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...

nextw33k 12y ago

I'd love to see advancement in battery technology, I am surprised its never the established manufactures coming up with such innovations. 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.

thescrewdriver 12y ago

Over 3,000 charge/discharge cycles... "Reliable – first ever high performance battery that meets consumer lifecycle demand, rated for more than 3,000 charge/discharge cycles."

tinco 12y ago
If you assume a normal cell phone user charges his phone at night, and it will work the whole day, it means around 8 years of use. 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!

stcredzero 12y ago

world’s first and only organic carbon material 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.

jebus989 12y ago
"Organic" as in organic chemistry is to do with compounds containing carbon. "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.html http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...
- JackFr 12y ago
  I assumed they meant the batteries were created without hormones, antibiotics or GMO's.
zodiac 12y ago
Actually there's such a thing as inorganic carbon, eg in carbon dioxide.

IanDrake 12y ago

Some of this inventor's existing patents: https://www.google.com/patents/US7052802?dq=ininventor:%22Kaname+Takeya%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hZZ8U5f2M8WDqgbv9IKICg&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAg https://www.google.com/patents/US7052802?dq=ininventor:%22Ka...

nathanb 12y ago

It seems like I see headlines every few months that a lab somewhere has created a paper-thin battery made out of unicorn horn which charges instantaneously when exposed to the sun and will run for a thousand years without recharging, and then it turns out to only work at absolute zero or to become unstable when three of them exist in the same area code or to emit radiation that kills anything smaller than a muskrat on contact. 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.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
This looks as though it is escaping from the lab. 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. http://powerjapanplus.com/battery/market.html http://powerjapanplus.com/battery/market.html
higherpurpose 12y ago
This one looks a little more promising. It will probably still take at least 3 years to see it in niche products on the market, though. But if I were Elon Musk, I'd keep a very close eye on this one, and if their claims are real, and won't take too long to appear on the market, I'd even buy them, and try to put the technology faster on the market.
- threeseed 12y ago
  Tesla is bleeding money and only sells in a handful of countries. They need to sort themselves out before thinking of acquiring companies. Toyota would be the far better choice especially since the CTO of PJP helped design the Prius battery.
  - 12y ago

savrajsingh 12y ago

Note that the battery still contains Lithium.

SeanLuke 12y ago

People have adequately discussed why charging time isn't a particularly significant concern in batteries right now. My concern about these batteries is different: so far as I can tell, they're up to ten times heavier than lithium ion. That's a killer issue for cars. Literature in support of carbon lead claims that this is offset but the cooling and electronics needed for lithium, but I strongly doubt this.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
These aren't carbon/lead. You are talking about a completely different battery technology.
- SeanLuke 12y ago
  aaaand I am an idiot. Saw a whole bunch of carbon anode lead stories yesterday with similar claims.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Easy to do given the amount of battery stories at the moment, this one is pretty intriguing though. "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/ElectronicsDesignArticles/ArticleID/7611/Dual-Carbon-Batteries-Powerful-Safe-Reliable-and-Cheap.aspx http://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDesi...

ommunist 12y ago

Looks like it is actually carbon-lithium. Kudoz to danmaz74. It does not stop to fancy me - why do we all need this stuff? When Philips introduced thin Li-ion batteries, moldable to any shape 10 years ago, it took about a year or two for the industry to accept this innovation. Japanese inventors will probably license production to a larger producer. But if organic cotton only has its unique properties if grown on Okinawa, there will be no mass-production, I am afraid.