http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7938001.stm

A prototype battery made using the new technique could be charged in less than 20 seconds - in comparison to six minutes with an untreated sample of the material.

...

That means that the excess material put into standard batteries to compensate for this loss over time is not necessary, leading to smaller, lighter batteries with phenomenal charging rates.

What is more, because there are relatively few changes to the standard manufacturing process, Professor Ceder believes the new battery material could make it to market within two to three years.

Oh-face?

There's a bit more of a technical article about this at Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/03/lithium-breakthrough-could-charge-batteries-in-10-seconds.ars) too.

This is good stuff.

Neat, lets see if we will get it now.

Har I was going to post on this but someone beat me to it. I'm anxious to see how this will pan out.

Doesn't that defy the law of thermal dynamics? Charging in six seconds, and holding a longer charge? With no heat? something doesn't add up. And what's the environmental impact?

Do you charge your cell phone battery as long as it lasts off the charger?

They had a thing in our internal site about these. Dont look for cell phone companies to jump on this quickly. They will stall it out because they make roughly $20 on every car charger they sell, which will practically go away if they adopt these batteries.

Do you charge your cell phone battery as long as it lasts off the charger?


Definitely not usually just a few minutes at a time and then every so often I run the thing all the way down and then charge it up.

I'm wondering if we'll ever have batteries that are completely memory resistant and can recharge to 100% of their potential after many discharges. Definitely a complaint of mine for the iphone... while the consumption has gotten better the past year it still is a juice hog.

That too:

the researchers found that their new material does not lose its capacity to charge over time in the way that standard lithium ion batteries do.

Nice!

My last phone I had for a little over four years before replacing/upgrading, and the battery never was a problem. I just plugged in at night and unplugged and took with me in the morning.

My slide rule works just fine without one of those newfangled batteries!

Get off my lawn!

Doesn't that defy the law of thermal dynamics? Charging in six seconds, and holding a longer charge? With no heat? something doesn't add up. And what's the environmental impact?


Wha ...?

Thermodynamics, in harsh reduction, merely states you never get more energy than you put in. It has nothing to do with capacitance or whatever else. In general, you find that faster reactions tend to be less efficient and thus produce more heat, but that's hardly a law of anything, merely an engineering tradeoff.

Batteries work by having an aggressive chemical process mediated in such a way as to extract the electron movement as useful current. Rechargeable ones have a reversible process. There is no reason you can't have a fast inversion by putting a much higher current into it than you'd ever want to extract; Your home wall socket can push 1500W easily .. the battery will likely output around 12W.

You would be right in that any given process will produce at least a proportional amount more waste heat at 1500 than 12W, but if the process is 95% efficient and you're only storing a tiny amount of overall current, who cares?

A phone battery is probably sitting around 4V x .5 amp ( 2 VA or 2 Watts of perfect work, and I'm being generous with the amperage here, it's quite possibly a lot less) peak output with a total storage of around 10watts, enough to power your phone at full power for a couple of hours. Those CF lightbulbs that produce so little waste heat around running at 15-20 W/hours, that is to say more energy in an hour than your phone uses in a couple of days.


The article clearly states they found a way to arrange the battery component materials in such a way as to maximize the available ions (atoms with extra electrons) to any given conduction path. They didn't make Magic Science Juice, they engineered an existing system better. This doesn't hugely change the output equation since that is governed more by the useful life of the powered device, but on the other end of things they can take advantage of much higher available current to charge very quickly.

Thanks Malse. I understand it better now: they are doing the same process, but in a smarter way. Looks like it wouldn't be any worse to the enviromnent than what we are currently doing.

I guess what makes me the oddball on this issue is that I only use my phone for making calls, and very few of those; no texting, no internet, no games, etc. Therefore, I have no idea how quickly a battery runs down when being used for all the other apps folks may use.

Maybe this will result in a better battery for my Altec Ipod dock, since that battery is only good for approx. 5.5 hours play with a full charge. On heavy mail days, I sometimes lose my tunes before I finish delivering. :(

This would be of great impact on Aircraft batteries for the military. Lightweight batteries in cars and planes that rarely need to be changed and juice up in seconds. So many possibilities. Toys for children, batteries for hand held communication radios.....This is a big deal. Hospitals... Hell, I want my entire house battery operated! To hell with FP&L, I'll use them to charge my home every now and again. Hope this is everything it sounds and more.

:devil