New dual carbon battery charges 20x faster than lithium ion batteries

http://powerjapanplus.com/about/news.html

by tudborg • 12 years ago

149 99 12 years ago

ghshephard• 12 years ago

This is one of those daytime fantasies we all have while daydreaming. Except, even when I'm really fantasizing, I never actually dream of things as ludicrous as this press release talks about.

What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies? You don't see claims like this about CPUs, Monitors, Network Cards, etc... It's always batteries for some reason.

And one of Carbon, Graphene, or Buckyballs always makes an appearance as well in these press releases. It would be nice to see a new material take the stage as the "10x faster to recharge, recyclable, energy dense, environmentally safe" battery technology that will solve all our problems.

alisnic• 12 years ago

Imagine these batteries in Teslas, that will mean a full charge in about ~10 minutes, which could potentially make all gasoline cars lame.

tormeh2• 12 years ago

This. We have electric engines pinned down. All that's missing from unlimited application of energy is better batteries and better power generation.

Look at it this way: Human endeavor consists of intelligent application of energy to mass. One of the three elements are close to being made trivial! It's very easy to get excited about batteries and renewable energy!

Tuna-Fish4• 12 years ago

Except that you also have to move the electricity into the car, which is actually the limiting factor in Teslas today, not the batteries. So this wouldn't really help at all.

loceng2• 12 years ago

AFAIK it currently takes ~20 minutes to half-charge a Tesla. 20x would mean charging fully in ~2 minutes - nearly as fast as the automatic option for replacing depleted batteries with fully charged ones.

cLeEOGPw3• 12 years ago

Except that it doesn't take 10 minutes to fill a gas tank and you can go 1000 km with full, unlike Tesla.

BillyMaize• 12 years ago

It's probably the fact that a huge leap in battery technology would make huge changes in both electric cars as well as being able to store solar power (and therefore allowing people to live off the grid). Faster computer hardware wouldn't have nearly the effect and I'm sure these companies want the biggest hype possible.

Tuna-Fish4• 12 years ago

Getting 10 times more power density than lithium-ion isn't hard. It's also not very interesting, as we have enough power density already. Now we need more energy density.

jjoonathan• 12 years ago

Number of occurrences: "power density": 0 "energy density": 1

mnw21cam5• 12 years ago

Indeed. And if you don't have enough power density to (for instance) absorb energy from regenerative braking and then accelerate out of a corner, you just add a large capacitor with a massive power density (but a low energy density).

cLeEOGPw3• 12 years ago

What about magnetic batteries that always slowly charges from Earth's magnetic field.

ema• 12 years ago

The earth's magnetic field is several orders of magnitude to weak for that. Look at how you can control a compass with a fridge magnet.

outworlder• 12 years ago

Assuming that it were orders of magnitude stronger, how could that possibly work, physically speaking? I see no way, unless the field was changing (rotating?) or the battery were moving to begin with.

wpietri2• 12 years ago

My theory: if you want something bad enough, somebody will come along and sell you something. It won't work, but they'll still sell it to you.

Sometimes it's pure scam, of course, but I think that's rare. Mainly it's people who are clue-deficient in some important way. They think it works. Or they think they can get it to work. Or, like many marketing people, they're used to trusting somebody else that it works. It's the tech world's version of the magnetic healing bracelet or the ear candle.

The reason nobody is out selling 20 GHz processors is that nobody really wants them. It'd be nice, sure, but we're all pretty happy with what we have. Our desire for something better isn't strong enough to override our sense for what's realistic.

iliis• 12 years ago

Good point! Altough bad example with the CPU: I do want a 20 GHz one and so do a lot of others. But I can see if it works as advertised very quickly whereas you cannot really absolutely with ultimate certainty prove that this bracelet doesn't work...

lectrick3• 12 years ago

Because affordable, fast, dense, safe electrical energy storage is pretty much the biggest obstacle to moving many technologies forward.

mikeash6• 12 years ago

It is interesting to consider what could be done if somehow a battery were invented that could, say, store 1GWh of energy in a $1 rechargeable cell the size of a AA battery with 99.9% in/out efficiency and no danger of catastrophic failure.

Every car would be electric. Airplanes too. The idea of running a vehicle on gasoline would be as ludicrous as the idea of running them on steam is to us now.

The massive challenges of wind and solar energy would disappear. Transmission and varying supply/demand are trivially solved with storage.

In computing, the massive effort expended in the name of efficiency would become unnecessary. Multitask all the things all the time! You want your phone to spin the CPU 24/7 listening for swear words so it can record hilarious videos automatically? Go for it.

Someone• 12 years ago

Not always:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Controversy (not clear cut in Wikipedia's mind, but I think their editors are somewhat in denial)

lotsofmangos4• 12 years ago

What is it about battery technology that seems to attract the nutty companies?

This is a collaboration between an academic research department and a mining conglomerate, with the CTO being the guy who developed the nickel cobalt aluminum cathode for the lithium batteries they use in the Tesla and the Prius. I wouldn't call it nutty.

andersthue• 12 years ago

Only two press releases, made on the same day.

throwwit• 12 years ago

Better article with a youtube vid... http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182500-dual-carbon-batter... . I'm particularly happy if this leads to less mining of Lithium.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

From the picture [1] it looks like they still use Lithium inside the battery (Li+)

1. http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...

twelvechairs• 12 years ago

lithium batteries are also special because of their light weight. This says it has an 'energy density' which is 'comparable' (density by mass or volume?). Vague enough for me to infer it can't compete on weight.

jakozaur• 12 years ago

Yeah the energy density is the most important factor. If it's not competitive there will be some niche market for fast recharging, but lithium is good enough in many use cases.

danmaz743• 12 years ago

Bit better article: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...

nextw33k• 12 years ago

I'd love to see advancement in battery technology, I am surprised its never the established manufactures coming up with such innovations.

However this is still vaporware:

"Power Japan Plus will begin benchmark production of 18650 Ryden cells later this year at the company’s production facility in Okinawa, Japan"

Plenty of people have improved battery technologies, the issue has always been scaling up the process in a cheap enough way. If these batteries cost too much then its back to the drawing board.

thescrewdriver• 12 years ago

Over 3,000 charge/discharge cycles...

"Reliable – first ever high performance battery that meets consumer lifecycle demand, rated for more than 3,000 charge/discharge cycles."

tinco• 12 years ago

If you assume a normal cell phone user charges his phone at night, and it will work the whole day, it means around 8 years of use.

If you calculate from lithium ion, based on my own experience with my phone and my macbook, a lithium ion battery crosses over into the less acceptable performance after 4-5 years.

If the degradation curves can be compared that would mean you could expect 12-15 years from these batteries. Pretty impressive!

stcredzero• 12 years ago

world’s first and only organic carbon material

Organic = made of carbon. At least it meant that originally. Now the consumerized term meets "Carbon."

That said, I hope this works out. New battery tech rarely ever does, though.

jebus989• 12 years ago

"Organic" as in organic chemistry is to do with compounds containing carbon.

"Organic" dictionary definition: "relating to or derived from living matter", i.e. [0]

They add that the carbon they use is new as well—it's an organic compound grown from cotton fibers

[0] http://phys.org/news/2014-05-power-japan-dual-carbon-battery...

JackFr2• 12 years ago

I assumed they meant the batteries were created without hormones, antibiotics or GMO's.

zodiac• 12 years ago

Actually there's such a thing as inorganic carbon, eg in carbon dioxide.

IanDrake• 12 years ago

Some of this inventor's existing patents:

https://www.google.com/patents/US7052802?dq=ininventor:%22Ka...

nathanb2• 12 years ago

It seems like I see headlines every few months that a lab somewhere has created a paper-thin battery made out of unicorn horn which charges instantaneously when exposed to the sun and will run for a thousand years without recharging, and then it turns out to only work at absolute zero or to become unstable when three of them exist in the same area code or to emit radiation that kills anything smaller than a muskrat on contact.

I'm glad we've got labs researching battery technology, since I think that's one of the most important areas of research we can develop today. But forgive me if I'm skeptical until I see something show up on the shelves.

lotsofmangos4• 12 years ago

This looks as though it is escaping from the lab.

Power Japan Plus executives have years of experience overseeing battery manufacturing and supply chain at industry powerhouses like Sumitomo Metal Mining.

The company owns a battery production facility in Okinawa, Japan, where it will begin bench production testing of 18650 Ryden cells later this year. This facility will allow Power Japan Plus to meet demand for specialty energy storage markets such as medical devices and satellites.

http://powerjapanplus.com/battery/market.html

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

This one looks a little more promising. It will probably still take at least 3 years to see it in niche products on the market, though. But if I were Elon Musk, I'd keep a very close eye on this one, and if their claims are real, and won't take too long to appear on the market, I'd even buy them, and try to put the technology faster on the market.

threeseed• 12 years ago

Tesla is bleeding money and only sells in a handful of countries. They need to sort themselves out before thinking of acquiring companies.

Toyota would be the far better choice especially since the CTO of PJP helped design the Prius battery.

baldfat• 12 years ago

YES just like the Fuel Cell batteries that you pop a pill in and it works for three days!!!

I want fuel cell!!!

SideburnsOfDoom• 12 years ago

It seems like I see headlines every few months that a lab somewhere has created

Mostly because it is very much needed for a whole lot of things from mobile phones to cars to making solar energy work 24-7, so if someone gets there first they will become immensely wealthy capitalising on a shift of our civilisation.

But yeah, proof of concept is not path to market, press releases are not profits and all that.

I am also sceptical of claims that a new battery is both safer and energy-denser. These two things are not natural allies.

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

The press release says that it has an energy-density comparable to that of lithium-ion batteries, which in PR speak means "a little bit less than the worst lithium-ion batteries" which means "less energy-dense".

netcan• 12 years ago

Skeptical.. sure.

Just like cancer or time travel or any kind of cool & urgent research projects, looking at it through the lens of pop science media on twitter is not ideal.

But.. I still want to hear about it.

nathanb2• 12 years ago

This article has a "path to market" section, which I appreciate. But that section raises its own questions, such as: if this technology is so amazing, why is it being deployed in satellites and medical devices but not cell phone batteries and laptops? Why would you put unproven technology into the most fault-intolerant sectors first? Maybe I'm too much of a skeptic, but that doesn't sound plausible.

Honestly, unlike you, I don't want to hear about it if it's going to turn into vaporware. Should it be published in a peer-reviewed journal? Absolutely. Do I want Apple and Tesla and Samsung looking into it? Definitely. Do I, personally, want to hear about it? Not particularly.

savrajsingh• 12 years ago

Note that the battery still contains Lithium.

SeanLuke2• 12 years ago

People have adequately discussed why charging time isn't a particularly significant concern in batteries right now. My concern about these batteries is different: so far as I can tell, they're up to ten times heavier than lithium ion. That's a killer issue for cars. Literature in support of carbon lead claims that this is offset but the cooling and electronics needed for lithium, but I strongly doubt this.

lotsofmangos4• 12 years ago

These aren't carbon/lead. You are talking about a completely different battery technology.

SeanLuke2• 12 years ago

aaaand I am an idiot. Saw a whole bunch of carbon anode lead stories yesterday with similar claims.

ommunist• 12 years ago

Looks like it is actually carbon-lithium. Kudoz to danmaz74. It does not stop to fancy me - why do we all need this stuff? When Philips introduced thin Li-ion batteries, moldable to any shape 10 years ago, it took about a year or two for the industry to accept this innovation. Japanese inventors will probably license production to a larger producer. But if organic cotton only has its unique properties if grown on Okinawa, there will be no mass-production, I am afraid.

New dual carbon battery charges 20x faster than lithium ion batteries

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