Toshiba launching SCiB batteries in March: 5 min charge, 10 year lifespan
By Thomas Ricker 
posted December 11th 2007 3:12AM
posted December 11th 2007 3:12AM
posted December 11th 2007 3:12AM
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GOOD NEWS! Chevron just bought this battery division from Toshiba! Chevron promises to release the batteries for automotive use real soon! Both George Bush and Hillary Clinton are happy with the deal. Ron Paul thinks its bad for the economy.
@evstreet;
Wot are you talking about?
Is there an emoticon for tongue-in-cheek?
Cool! now I would be able to play my Sega Game Gear in the car, without draining my car battery in less then 2 hours while the car is running.!
Sounds like you need a better alternator buddy.
Either that, or yours isn't working so well.
it's a joke, as the Sega GameGear was taking 6 AA batteries, and to add on top of that, it never reached double digit numbers. That was the main reason why this portable system never sold anything near the GameBoy, despite better graphics, slightly higher screen resolution, and a color LCD.
You have to take a casual press release like this with a dose of reality. Battery performance has been cited as the limiting reagent in mobile devices since their inception. There's an article in Scientific American from a few years ago that compares advances in various areas of electronics as they relate to computing. It basically shows drive capacity, processor speed, transistor density, and all that stuff exhibiting exponential growth over the past 50 years. Then there's a limp, pathetically horizontal line at the bottom that represents increases in battery technology. It seems like this might be a minor breakthrough in one part of the whole battery equation but not likely to cause a sea change in the landscape of mobile devices. If it were as important a discovery as the article would lead us to believe, it would be on the cover of every newspaper.
I would like to know the Ah capacity of the 24V battery as that is what my electric bicycle uses. My system is using 2 X 12V 8Ah that takes all night to recharge but can blow the entire charge in 5 minutes going up a steep hill. Not to mention that it weighs over 5 Kg and is not particularly small, either. 24v 8Ah but with a 5 minute recharge would be a huge improvement over what I have now, if the price was reasonable over the life of the battery. My current system costs me about $30 a year in replacing dead batteries, so a system that used the same power and lasted 10 years, could cost $300 and break even economically.
Opus
Missing from the description: both batteries hold 4.2Ah.
Question: what kind of improvements might these give in hybrid vehicles that burn petrol to recharge the battery when necessary? If the battery charges faster, do you burn less fuel in charging it up (and thus leading to mega MPG), or the same amount of fuel before, but in a shorter time span?
make a laptop version +1
Sorry about the timing of the post. I wrote the question about the capacity at 2:00, but it didn't confirm until 6.
i bet apple's gonna be all over this one like a fat kid eating cake.
Do you guys even read @#%@ before you post? RIGHT in the artical it says 4.2Ah for both the 2.4vdc cell and the 24vdc pack, ie 10x 2.4vdc cells = drumroll 24vdc @ 4.2Ah. While thats not an amazing rating its still better then most poly cells of that size/voltage you can get now. As well the charge time for that rating would be rad. Most Cell phones have a 3.7vdc cell @1.5Ah so 4.2vdc @ 4.2Ah would = around 3x as long battery life and take 5min to charge. Sounds good to me. As well with the laptop thing most have a 10.8v - 18v battery pack so even then making a jump to these new cells wouldn't weight much if any more. My laptop has a 14.4vdc @4.8Ah battery with 8 cells in it. Most if not all laptop battery packs have they're own recharge circit in them so you could even just drop these new battery in and your good to go.
Mike: point is, without capacity information you really just don't know what the capacity is, so you kinda have to make assumptions. Your assumption is that they can make any kind in any form of capacity, and my assumption is that the technology isn't by far mature enough to do that, otherwise they would have gone for the much larger consumermarket from the beginning instead of just targeting the industrial (more specialised and in some areas less interested in weight issues) market.
Oh, and since when is "american" a race? ;-)
Hung: maybe it's not the same, but see my reasoning up here; I really doubt this product is even close to ready for the consumer market.
And uhm... maybe my comment was douchebaggery, but calling it falsely premised nationalism is interesting; why would I do that and not make it obvious where I'm from? And your guess was completely wrong. Funny, but wrong. :)
The person writing about electric cars. The cars don't burn fuel to charge the batteries. They us the energy created when braking to charge the batteries. Don't forget one of the basic laws of physics. You can't create energy from nothing.
Obviously, this battery can be made in any shape they like. I believe this the same cell Toshiba started talking about in 2005; they're using some nano-engineered materials, to get around the anode/cathode breakdown problems in typical Lithium cells.
It's possible they're only releasing large cells to avoid a reverse-Panasonic problem. Back when Ovonics licensed NiMH technology to companies like Panasonic, they were only allowed to make small cells: D, C, AA, etc... Ovonics wanted all the hybrid car and industrial action. Toyota got around this initially for the Prius by buying D cells from Panasonic, and later on, 7.2V modules. Since Toshiba is also a consumer electronics company, and does sell laptops, could be they're going to keep a tight reign on this for small device. Or it could simply be they see the big demand on industrial applications, enough to meet their capacity.
It's certainly going to take a ton of power to actually charge an electric car with any range in five minutes. You're not doing this at home unless you have a home charger with local storage.. this is many times the power available to any home. But it's also not usually needed at home... what you need this for is practical recharging on the road. Even with a normal range (250-500 miles), an all-electric car would be a hard sell if the only way to recharge it was to wait 30 minutes at a charging station. But people wait 5-ish for gasoline today, so this wouldn't be a problem.
Electric-stations could certainly be made, there are various tradeoffs for delivering power (flywheels that spin up off-peak, proximity to a power station, etc).
This product would be great to incorporate into my computer backup battery.
This also would make a great emergency battery backup system for supplying power to household furance when the power goes out for three days in winter.