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Power Transportation Technology

New Electric Battery Design Can Charge an Electric Vehicle In 10 Minutes (vice.com) 175

ted_pikul writes: Penn State University researchers report in the journal Joule that they've designed an electric battery that can charge an EV for 200 miles in about 10 minutes. The key to their approach is quickly heating the nickel foil-covered battery to a high temperature and more slowly cooling it to ambient temperatures. The researchers report that in addition to the fast charging time, this approach mitigated performance-draining "battery plaque" that can build up on batteries.
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New Electric Battery Design Can Charge an Electric Vehicle In 10 Minutes

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  • by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @07:55PM (#59364012) Homepage

    Great capitalism cycle. Create an expensive luxury item, make a profit on it, allowing you to research improvements, which let you do a true mass market version.

    Took some time, had to start with the hybrids to prove the market existed. But it finally seems to have worked.

    • by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @08:37PM (#59364146) Journal

      Took some time, had to start with the hybrids to prove the market existed. But it finally seems to have worked.

      Hybrids did nothing of the kind. Hybrids may prove to be a dead end. They added little to the technology in a full battery electric vehicle (for example, using NiMH batteries). Owning and living with a hybrid is nothing like owning a BEV. Plug-in hybrids came out after BEVs.

      Tesla showed that the market for long-distance EVs existed. Before that, EV designs from auto manufacturers were focused on "compliance cars" [cars suitable only as a second vehicle, used for commuting and frequently sold in limited markets'. Tesla showed what can be done. Tesla showed that there is a market for the BEVs being sold today.

      • You haven't seen hybrids reach their peak yet. That's about to come with mild hybrids. You know how every automaker is saying they're going to "electrify" their entire range within the next handful of years? Mild hybrids are how they're going to do it. The tier 1 suppliers have got them ready now. The starter and alternator get replaced with a single 48v motor-generator (in current systems and prototypes, usually belt-driven) and the vehicle gets a relatively small lithium battery. This provides seamless au

        • Bullshit.

          Hybrids hit their peak 5-10 years ago. BEVs destroy them in every way but price, and that's barely winning at this point. Less complicated, better performance, far less maintenance....Toyota bet big on hybrids, and they lost. Nobody is going to compete with those patents or license them. It's BEV all the way for anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

          • Every way? You seem to have forgotten the part about easy, near unlimited range due to gasolone. Kind of a big one...

            I have the best of both worlds - a plug-in hybrid, gets me a commute both ways if I plug in at work pure electric, but I can gas up and drive across the country. And no, "but you could theoretically plan your trip to plug in!" isn't a real argument anyone sane pays attention to.

            That said, my next car will be pure electric for sure, then I have the hybrid plug-in for long trips, and the electr

            • You can say you have the best of both worlds, but you also have the worst. You are maintaining and carrying around two powertrains. That's why I skipped over a hybrid and went straight to the BEV. Tesla has pretty much eliminated the charging issue for most of the country, and hopefully Electrify America and other initiatives will be ready when it's time for us to replace our family truckster in a few years.
              • by layabout ( 1576461 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @09:50AM (#59365992)
                When talking about hybrids, you need to differentiate between parallel hybrids like the Prius and serial hybrids like the Chevy Volt. With a parallel hybrid, you are carrying around two powertrains. Serial hybrids are an electric car with a generator in the back for when the battery goes flat. I thought the Chevy volt was a good transitional vehicle for the next four or five years. You got about 50 miles on battery which would handle 90% of my driving and then the unlimited range of a gasoline engine. FYI, the Chevy volt has a 55 kW generator attached to a 1.4 L engine. Given that you only need 20 kW or so at highway speed, whenever the engine runs, you are charging the battery with the energy that's not needed to run the car. Much more efficient use of gasoline.
            • Sorry, but the EV range isn't as much of a drawback as you seem to think.

              Current cheaper models get you somewhere around 150-200 miles per charge. At 60 mph that is around 3 hours before you need to stop for a 45 minute recharge. So with 3 stops you will have driven for 12 hours plus two hours for lunch and dinner. What remain is a 30 minute coffee break. Not a big deal, just slightly more inconvenient than a regular model.

          • Hybrids hit their peak 5-10 years ago. BEVs destroy them in every way but price, and that's barely winning at this point.

            What does "barely winning" mean? Seems to me that a hybrid "destroys" battery electric vehicles in every way, including price. A hybrid can do the daily commute on battery alone for most people. It can charge up overnight, with a quick charge at most any place a BEV can, and can fill up at the ample number of filling stations.

            In cold weather the range doesn't all of the sudden impose "range anxiety", or an issue of keeping warm, since the ICE will run to warm the cabin and extend range.

            It's BEV all the way for anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

            And for people tha

            • you need to do a search for "electric trucks", "electric semi" and "electric vans" to see that some are here or some almost here, makers like Rivian, Tesla, Nikola, Bollinger, Mercedes, Nissan etc plus a few truck startups are in that market
            • BEVs are limited to passenger cars right now, and are likely to stay there.

              https://www.tesla.com/semi [tesla.com]

          • It's BEV all the way for anyone with two brain cells to rub together.

            If you had two brain cells to rub together, you could have read my last paragraph.

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @08:19PM (#59364096)

    What I'm more interested in is the equivalent of the 5ft long rubber tube, that I can use to suck electricity out of a fairly full tank and put it into an empty one pretty rapidly.

    • They have locking gas caps now. They'll probably have locking charging plug caps in the near future...
      • >They'll probably have locking charging plug caps in the near future...

        Like the Nissan Leaf has had for years?
        Principally the lock is to keep the charging cable in, so someone doesn't take it out to charge their car next to yours. But it works both ways.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Had locking charge doors and locking cables for years.

        Having said that most cars don't support discharging the battery through the charge port anyway. Leafs do but most CCS cars don't.

    • Hell, I'd willingly take an EV, 10 minute charge and all...if it had the range I needed. ~100 miles is a joke for me, and a bad one at that, but that's all you can find today.

      I want to be on the EV train, I just can't until it has ice-equivalent range.

      • ~100 miles is a joke for me

        You drive more than 100miles between charges?

        I want to be on the EV train, I just can't until it has ice-equivalent range.

        Spoken from ignorance. The overwhelming majority of EV users never go near a fast charger or charging station. 100miles between charge is a lot when I have that full 100 miles available *EVERY SINGLE MORNING*.

        • Some people have very long commutes. In the decades I lived in California, it wasn't unusual at all to know people who lived 50-75 miles from work and did two-hour commutes (sometimes more). The error, of course, is in these people applying their experience to all drivers and deciding that electrics are doomed to failure because they don't meet their own personal use case.

          However, over the last decade, and especially in the last five years, their arguments have fallen. I have family that are loathe to give

  • by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Wednesday October 30, 2019 @08:27PM (#59364118)
    All these new batteries and not a single fucking one of them on the market. Get the idea?
    • All these new batteries and not a single fucking one of them on the market. Get the idea?

      Let's also not forget the problem that's supposed to be solved here, that of using fossil fuels for energy, fossil fuels that introduce green house gasses into the air like methane and CO2. If this energy for charging the cars is coming from coal and natural gas then it's not helping a whole lot.

      Another problem is the energy density of batteries. A battery will not get an airplane across an ocean. They certainly will not make them fly 20 hours like airlines are experimenting with now.
      https://www.dailymai [dailymail.co.uk]

      • by eepok ( 545733 )

        "Let's also not forget the problem that's supposed to be solved here, that of using fossil fuels for energy, fossil fuels that introduce green house gasses into the air like methane and CO2. If this energy for charging the cars is coming from coal and natural gas then it's not helping a whole lot."

        --The beauty of electric vehicles is that their effective emissions profiles change with the power source. Burning natural gas is better than gasoline or diesel and as a grid greens (more solar, wind, hydro, nucle

        • The beauty of electric vehicles is that their effective emissions profiles change with the power source. Burning natural gas is better than gasoline or diesel and as a grid greens (more solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc.), the greener it is to drive that EV.

          The other beauty of EVs is that due to the massive increase in efficiency, even charging them from coal plants produces a substantial reduction in CO2 emissions — and not even from next-generation coal plants, which are almost 25% more efficient than the majority of them are today.

          Of course, that also results in thorium and uranium pollution, so coal is not really a great substitute, but EVs on coal are still a net win as far as global warming is concerned.

    • A lot of what he covers are just kickstarter scams and the like. I'll trust that researchers at universities are a little more credible in their claims of efficacy. I think the problem with most of these designs is that they're either hideously expensive or incredibly difficult to produce. Or there's some other issue such as being too volatile to put into a vehicle that some idiot might get into a high speed collision.
    • All these new batteries and not a single fucking one of them on the market. Get the idea?

      I suppose you think the Lithium battery in a Tesla is the same as the one which was on on the market in the 90s too right?

      GTFOuttahere.

  • There are around 500,000 registered commercial trucks in CA. Assuming you replace half of them with electric trucks and plugged them all into a 1 MW rapid chargers at the same time would require 250,000 MW of power or 250 GW. The current size of the CA electric grid is 80 GW. Ok, they won't all be plugged in at once, let's assume each one needs 1 hour of charge per day and these are spaced out perfectly. Divide by 24: 10.4 GW - That's a lot of juice!
  • Not interested (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @03:57AM (#59364944)

    Wake me up when they have an actually working prototype that can be manufactured for reasonable costs and has survived a few 100 charging cycles. There are far too many "breakthroughs" in battery tech that amount to absolutely noting later on.

    • There are far too many "breakthroughs" in battery tech that amount to absolutely noting later on.

      There are also plenty of them which have contributed directly to your devices having the great charge they do right now, but observer bias just means that nothing ever amounts to anything amirite?

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      You might want to browse Amazon instead of Slashdot. The stories over there are all for products available to market. You do have to read the comments section to determine which ones are good though.

    • It takes time, but these incremental enhancements to the lithium battery *have* been implemented over time. It's just been so slow and steady you hardly notice. See for instance:

      https://www.economist.com/grap... [economist.com]

      The new technologies will take even longer to get to market. The "glass battery" from Goodenough et al will probably take a few years to be characterized and produced in quantity.

  • The link is dead
  • "Range anxiety" the article tells us is the primary reason why people are not buying electric vehicles. I would argue it is more lack of infrastructure. Unless you own a fast charge station at your home address, then you are already limited, and you have to constantly monitor your charge level. So, to me, the bigger problem is infrastructure anxiety, and whilst a 10 minute charge at a fast charge station appeals, you still need to get to the charge station.

    • Its even more fun if you scrutinize it.
      The Tesla will drive some 300-400km, hit a Tesla charger, and drive to the next one. Which works out to 4-5 hours of driving. Which means a entire days driving is only 3-4 pit stops to recharge.
      The average electric car will drive 100-150(1,5 hour of driving), find a charger, charge, then drive another 1,5 hour to do the same. So the average car will have to charge 2-3 times as often as a Tesla, making the range anxiety even worse. Stopping 6-12 times just for a entire

  • ...good, and fast, and durable and trouble-free and efficient and infinitely rechargeable and it will be on the market in a couple of (zillion) years. If you take all the battery improvement announcements I've read about over the last 20 years you would think battery technology has been so perfected that nowadays batteries would just buy themselves, walk to your car and install themselves once for a lifetime of hassle-free electric driving. I have yet to see 1 single battery like this on the market and I ha
  • by Vandil X ( 636030 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @09:09AM (#59365776)
    EV owner here.

    The first thing an EV owner should do is set their power gauge to Battery Percentage instead of miles. Lots of factors can affect how many "miles" you get. Speed, wind resistance, temperature, weather, load, all can reduce the range you get.

    Think of your smartphone -- It displays its power as a percentage rather than "phone call minutes left" or "web browsing minutes left".
    • Lots of factors can affect how many "miles" you get. Speed, wind resistance, temperature, weather, load, all can reduce the range you get.

      Good software in the car can do the conversion from percentage to miles better than I can do it in my head, especially if it has access to internet servers to get the weather and traffic information along the planned route.

  • This advance in battery science will set the world ablaze?

  • by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Thursday October 31, 2019 @02:21PM (#59367290)

    Oh boy. Another miracle battery announcement. Wish I had a nickel for every time I read one of those over the last 20 years.

    But let's look at this. Adding 200 miles of energy in 10 minutes. That is a pretty high energy transfer rate. 200 miles requires roughly 60 kWh. To dump that into a battery in 10 minutes (1/6 of an hour) implies 60 kWh / (1h / 6) = 360 kW. Give or take a bit.

    At 240 V, 360kW is 1.5 kA.

    This may be feasible in some heavily industrialized areas with excellent access to electricity. But not in homes, for example. Nobody has 1500 Amp electrical service in their house. And if they did, the grid wiring would need to be bigger and/or they would need bigger transformers, etc. So, not feasible for the home. And even in fueling stations along the sides of the interstate, this will not be feasible. Those areas are just not served by so much electrical capacity.

    I would not just handwave this and act like it is a minor detail. It is a pretty major consideration. A lot of infrastructure build-out would be required to get this kind of charge rate outside of areas that are very well served with electricity. Especially if EV's start to increase dramatically in numbers as many observers expect.

    But that probably doesn't matter because this battery technology will likely never see the light of day anyway.

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