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Power Transportation

Toshiba's Fast-Charging Battery Could Triple the Range of Electric Vehicles (newatlas.com) 119

Posted by EditorDavid from the powering-up-pronto dept.
Big Hairy Ian quotes New Atlas: A key focus of electric vehicle (EV) makers is maximizing the range users can get from each charge, and for that reason new battery technologies are poised to play a huge part in driving their adoption. Toshiba has developed a new fast-charging battery it claims could allow EVs to travel three times as far as they do now, and then be fully recharged again in a matter of minutes.

Toshiba's SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery) has been around in various forms since 2007, with its chief claim to fame an ability to charge to 90 percent of capacity in just five minutes. It also boasts a life-span of 10 years and high levels of safety, and has found its way into a number of notable EVs, including Mitsubishi's i MiEV and Honda's Fit EV. The current SCiB uses lithium titanium oxide as its anode, but Toshiba says it has now come up with a better way of doing things. The next-generation SCiB uses a new material for the anode called titanium niobium oxide, which Toshiba was able to arrange into a crystal structure that can store lithium ions more efficiently. So much so, that the energy density has been doubled.
Toshiba calls the battery "a game changing advance that will make a significant difference to the range and performance of EV," and hopes to put it "into practical application" in 2019.
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Toshiba's Fast-Charging Battery Could Triple the Range of Electric Vehicles More

Toshiba's Fast-Charging Battery Could Triple the Range of Electric Vehicles

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  • Will be nice when the patents run out (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pinky's Brain ( 1158667 ) on Saturday October 14, 2017 @10:43AM (#55368333)

    We need either a patent unencumbered replacement for Lion which is far better, or multiple technologies which are far better. One technology which is far better will help fuck all for the next 20 years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CRB9000 ( 647092 )
      You are free to do the research, and then put the results out there. But, you'll have to get the backing for all the equipment and if you can't find someone to back you that isn't expecting to lock it down, don't be surprised.

      • Basic research is something the government used to do. Then multiple companies would compete to monetize the discoveries.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by TimSSG ( 1068536 )
          What country do you live in where the government used to do research?
          Note: Spying on people in not considered basic research!

          In the USA, Colleges and other places were and likely still are often funded by the government to do research.

          Basic research is something the government used to do. Then multiple companies would compete to monetize the discoveries.

          • The amount of basic research the government does is way down and companies as well as universities have figured out ways to get a lock on the results of the research even tho the government funded it and it should be public domain.

  • Fast charging is nice, but what we really need is long range on single charge, 600+. Lower the price. The cars must be below $30k for a middle income family.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by amiga3D ( 567632 )

      We don't need that, it'd just be killer. Something on the order of 200-300 miles would be adequate at a 30K or so price point for a small sedan. 10 year battery life makes it pretty close to adequate for lifespan. Adequate is of course, not ideal. Ideal would be closer to what you stated.

      • For me, what would be "ideal" would be this sort of massive improvement combined with an equally impressive gain in photovoltaic efficiency. IIRC, the current average efficiency for PV panels is something like 15% and there was something like an upper theoretical limit of 40%. (but I admit I do not understand the physics of why that limit is what it is)

        If we could achieve say a 65% efficiency and build a car body out of PV cells, there would be a rather significant number of owner/users who would never nee

    • Give me the ability to go 600 miles across Washington, Idaho, and into Montana on a single charge, then recharge over night.

    • Well, go ahead and buy it today. What you are looking for is a plugin hybrid. Many of this years models have a range of 600-700 miles, have sufficient seating and cargo room to act as family vehicles and have two engines/two fuel sources with a computer that automatically switches between the two. The electric engine/battery is big enough to handle 99% of daily commutes. You can easily find combined horsepower of 200+. Full safety and convenience features. Unless you take long trips, you only need to

      • I also like the idea of plug-in hybrids, but what worries me is battery durability. Many drivers will be completely draining the battery each day, those that charge at work even twice a day. If a Tesla battery survives 1000 full cycles, that is some hundreds of thousands of miles, so essentially the lifespan of the vehicle. Draining a plug-in hybrid battery each day, 1000 cycles is less than 3 years.

  • One other side of the fast charge issue is the power requirement required to do so. A "five minute charge" will require a very high peak power demand and that is extremely expensive to deliver as most power companies charge based on peak demand. There will need to be some sort of battery buffering or the like to provide sufficient power at a reasonable cost...
    • The home charging station could have it's own batteries that get charged slowly from solar or the grid, then dumps quickly for 5 minutes after you pull in. It could be sized to put in 100 miles worth of power, then go to slow charge. The home battery could also double as a UPS during a power outage. If they build it right, you could use older car battery packs that have lost some capacity for the home charger.

    • Interesting point...

      Overall you would need to charge about 333 (say 360 to make the math easy) cars per day or an average of 15 cars per hour worth of power.
      (http://www.strategycaseinterviews.com/blog/gas-in-the-us-oliver-wyman)

      It costs about $2.64 to charge one electric car from empty to full or about 22 kilowatt hours.

      That's a daily electric bill of about $950 (so say $960 or $40 per hour) for the station.

      That's about 6 houses during the summer in my area (or 20 houses during the winter).

      The lowest possib

      • "That's a daily electric bill of about $950 (so say $960 or $40 per hour) for the station.

        That's about 6 houses during the summer in my area (or 20 houses during the winter)."

        Houses in your neighborhood have electricity bills of $160 per day? Live near Al Gore do you?

        • Ah.. you have a point. And I tried to be so careful in my math. So it's about 180 houses worth of electricity per month.

  • The 6 minute charge time capacity is better than anything on the market or so it would seem. They say it is high energy density, but don't actually say what it is, you would think that if the specs were good they would be disclosed. Going off thier prototype cell in the link I calculate the volumetric energy density at about 540 watt hours/liter which is about 20% below the higher end of capacity on a volume basis. This battery may actually have the highest actual capacity at high discharge rates, which
  • Years of new battery announcements and still no new batteries. Still skeptical.

  • I googled niobium rarity and...
    http://www.businessinsider.com... [businessinsider.com]
    Due to its relevance in aerospace and defense, Niobium is considered a “strategic metal” by the U.S. government, meaning there are few or no substitutes for the metal’s essential use. Furthermore, of all strategic metals, Niobium is regarded as one of the most highly critical. But its supplies are considered potentially at risk. This is because only a few sources throughout the world produce the metal. Almost 90% of the world supply comes from Brazil. Nearly all of that comes from only one mine. Most of the rest comes from the Canadian Niobec Mine, owned by IAMGOLD (NYSE: IAG).

  • Toshiba has developed a new fast-charging battery it claims could allow EVs to travel three times as far as they do now, and then be fully recharged again in a matter of minutes.

    [...]

    The next-generation SCiB uses a new material for the anode called titanium niobium oxide, which Toshiba was able to arrange into a crystal structure that can store lithium ions more efficiently. So much so, that the energy density has been doubled.

    I may not be an electric rocket surgeon but last time I checked, "three times" d

    • For a full charge with economy driving it's 80% of today's batteries. Not even more, nor twice, nor thrice.

  • I like being able to charge that rapidly. However it does not seem to be practical for widespread installations. The numbers just don't add up.

    A cheap (Leaf, eGolf) EV has about 20-30KW battery (giving 80-130 miles range).

    The current widespread commercial chargers are generally 6KW (the kind you find at parking lots, offices, etc). They will charge the car in about 4 hours from a depleted state. (The home chargers are 3KW or even 1KW but let's ignore them for the moment). To get 6KW, the charger supplies 20

    • I've seen a fast charger which had a water cooled plug is production ready.

      Question? Why don't they charge in parallel?

      • Exactly. It does become practical when you include liquid cooling in the charging system. At 746 watts per horsepower and the famed inefficecy of combustion engines, we already successfully deal with an order of magnitude more heat energy/time. Further use of a supercapacitor bank, or large battery bank, on the charging side could provide far faster charges at the cost of some duty cycle. For example if you assume a 6 minute charge, and and 6 minutes of down time, you only need half the grid connection

    • (The home chargers are 3KW or even 1KW but let's ignore them for the moment)

      Most dedicated home chargers are 6-7kW. They are on a dedicated 30A/220V circuit. Or you can use a dryer outlet, which, as you point out, is also 30A/220V.

    • To get 5 minutes charging we would need to jump to 1,200A @ 408V, or 100A @ 4080V. The first choice is not practical. (At 1m this requires a cable width of 50cm! / 20in).

      You're way off with thise numbers.

      Copper has a resistivity of 1.68e-8. Assuming a 5 meter cable and a 0.02x0.02 section (for one conductor), i.e. 2cm by 2cm, and 1000A current, the dissipated power in the cable is:

      5 / (0.02*0.02) * 1.68e-8 * 1000^2

      which is 210W. Drop that to 1cm by 1cm and you have 810W, which is high in an absolute

  • A123 (Score:2)

    by OYAHHH ( 322809 )

    Admittedly I know practically zero about batteries. But I've used A123 batteries in my RC aircraft and they performed really well while having fairly short recharge times while doing that task safely (as opposed to LiPo batteries where you need a fire resistant bag for charging).

    How would this Toshiba tech compare to an A123 battery?

  • The common destiny of all battery-related breakthroughs revealed in this forum over the years has always been the same: complete oblivion after a few months. Is this one going to be any different?

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