Researchers Report Super-Powered Battery Breakthrough 244
another random user writes with news that researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are reporting a breakthrough in battery technology. They say:
"With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly. ... The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale (abstract). The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun’s group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance. With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available."
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Interesting)
You forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" checkbox. Observe.
Somewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
... Elon Musk has one hell of a rager over this. This could make electric cars that could go from Florida to New York on one charge, and recharge in similar time to a gas refill, a possibility.
Say you got 500 miles to a charge, which is a reasonable amount if these numbers are to be believed. That's the amount of miles driven by the average US driver in 2 weeks. So if the battery needs to be replaced after 8-10 charges, you're talking once a quarter. If the battery costs $250 and is easily user-replaceable, this isn't a big deal:
My quick, rough math says that if it lost 5% of the original maximum after every charge and the maximum charge of a brand new battery were 500 miles, 10 charges would come out to 3875 miles. If the battery can be produced for $250, that comes out to 15.5 miles to every $1 spent on the battery. Now, consider experiments are in progress to allow free/nearly free recharges, so the cost would really be reduced to just the battery. The current gas price I see out my window is $3.33/gal and my Scion xB gets about 30 MPG.
So, my Scion costs $3.33 to go 30 miles. The Tesla with a $250 battery would cost $2, and not explode the environment.
I'm sold. // of course these costs are pure conjecture until we know more.
Re:Somewhere... (Score:5, Interesting)
Recharging in the same time as a gas refill is unlikely to ever happen.
To go NY to Florida in an electric car will take on the order of 1MWh. To recharge this in 5 minutes (gas refill time) would require a cable transferring a power of 12MW. If we used 25,000 volts to do this (the voltage of overhead electrical lines for high speed electric trains) the current would be 480 amps. It's simply not practical to do while obeying the laws of physics.
Now think of how many people are fuelling up at a gas station at any given moment, and think about it if they are all drawing a power of 12 megawatts. There is no practical technology for the forseeable future that you can use to build a power grid capable of doing this. This is before we even get to safety issues of a power interconnect which is both high voltage and high current.
Also think of that 12MW figure for a moment, and you may get an inkling why personal motorised transport is absolutely unsustainable.
Re:Yes it does (Score:5, Interesting)
What concerns me is how this density is going to react to being shorted out.
Flames? Explosion? China Syndrome?