Another reason why batteries can't charge in minutes:
Lithium-ion batteries contain both a positively charged cathode and a negatively charged anode, which are separated by a material called an electrolyte that moves lithium ions between them. The anode in these batteries is typically made out of graphite -- the same material found in many pencils. In lithium-ion batteries, however, the graphite is assembled out of small particles. Inside these particles, the lithium ions can insert themselves in a process called intercalation. When intercalation happens properly, the battery can successfully charge and discharge.
When a battery is charged too quickly, however, intercalation becomes a trickier business. Instead of smoothly getting into the graphite, the lithium ions tend to aggregate on top of the anode's surface, resulting in a "plating" effect that can cause terminal damage -- no pun intended -- to a battery.
"Plating is one of the main causes of impaired battery performance during fast charging," said Argonne battery scientist Daniel Abraham, an author of the study. "As we charged the battery quickly, we found that in addition to the plating on the anode surface there was a build up of reaction products inside the electrode pores." As a result, the anode itself undergoes some degree of irreversible expansion, impairing battery performance.
[...] At the atomic level, the lattice of graphite atoms at the particle edges becomes distorted because of the repeated fast charging, hindering the intercalation process.
[...] "The faster we charge our battery, the more atomically disordered the anode will become, which will ultimately prevent the lithium ions from being able to move back and forth," Abraham said. "The key is to find ways to either prevent this loss of organization or to somehow modify the graphite particles so that the lithium ions can intercalate more efficiently."
Journal Reference:
Saran Pidaparthy, Marco-Tulio F. Rodrigues, Jian-Min Zuo, and Daniel P. Abraham. Increased Disorder at Graphite Particle Edges Revealed by Multi-length Scale Characterization of Anodes from Fast-Charged Lithium-Ion Cells - IOPscience, Journal of The Electrochemical Society (DOI: 10.1149/1945-7111/ac2a7f)
(Score: -1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @04:36AM
I think this is an excellent post - a technical news that can be reasonably explained in layman's terms.
Except the summary didn't quite do the job. Or did it? I'm a bit woozy at the moment.
Anyways, I will go down to the bottom of this, and post up a crispy tl;dr summary what this is all about.
When I get sober. One of these days.
Stay tuned.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday December 07 2021, @05:26AM (7 children)
You could just buy two batteries. Or two devices. Or be a little patient. Also, if charging the battery too fast is a problem anyway, couldn't you set up cars (e.g.) to "daisy-chain" on a really powerful charger, and then have them pass through power to the next car so multiple parking spots could be served by one charger and a bunch of cables?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @03:10PM (2 children)
Where do i buy patience and how much does it cost?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 07 2021, @06:11PM (1 child)
Nevermind how much does it cost. I want it RIGHT NOW!!! No waiting!
The server will be down for replacement of vacuum tubes, belts, worn parts and lubrication of gears and bearings.
(Score: 3, Funny) by krishnoid on Tuesday December 07 2021, @07:55PM
The whole skit starts at 20s, but starting here will help you learn patience [youtu.be], and much other wisdom. The bit is from a comedy troupe called the Frantics.
(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Tuesday December 07 2021, @05:35PM (3 children)
Hybrid vehicles had issues where they couldn't take all of the power provided to them (regen breaking can generate a lot of power quickly). With battery electric vehicles this was largely solved for the reason you listed: multiple batteries in parallel.
However, there is a limit to extending this technique: total weight. The electric trucks will be able to take serious power because they have massive battery banks, however you now need to spend your electricity moving the massive vehicle. More batteries also increase cost, so this option really is not viable for a tiny city driver. When you have limited range, the charging rate really becomes critical because you will charge on the road more often.
To combat the charge rate there is two techniques I know of: innovative chemistry or including supercapacitors. Lithium Titanate has been researched as an anode material for rapid charging/discharging, however I don't know of any commercial applications using this technology yet. Supercaps have such limited capacity and expensive price they are only used in niche applications with very transient loads. An example would be an electric excavator. The batteries constantly discharge into the supercaps, and the supercaps enable very high current draw when lifting the load.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @06:30PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @06:41PM
The hot part could power a steam boiler at an efficiency of under 30%.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday December 07 2021, @08:01PM
I'm guessing if you're on a job site, you could also have little trucks or robot dogs carrying battery packs that move around and plug into the heavy equipment and act as a continuous discharge source. Or they could drive around the site and swap out battery packs like those cordless tool battery systems.
(Score: 2, Informative) by captain normal on Tuesday December 07 2021, @05:30AM (2 children)
Over cooking a lithium battery could cause it to explode. The same for just about any battery. They are basically a capacitor. We used to play with a variable power supply and turn capacitors into firecrackers.
https://ipo.lbl.gov/lbnl3263/ [lbl.gov]
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @05:35PM
Batteries and capacitors both store energy that is delivered as electric current, but they do so in completely different ways. Capacitors store the energy in an electric field, which is just another way of saying that opposite capacitor plates store charge of the same magnitude but opposite polarity in very close physical proximity to each other (the plates, that is) but never touching. A battery stores the energy in chemical compounds created by an electrochemical reaction, and the battery electrodes are in contact with each other (but separated by a certain distance) via the battery electrolyte medium. Capacitors and batteries are very different in many fundamental ways.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday December 07 2021, @08:48PM
With a big enough capacitor you get a re-usable firecracker. This was played to great effect in a physics class I took. After half an hour or so of lecture on electrical fields and such that some students found sleep-inducing, the demonstration of charging followed by rapid discharge was performed. It's quite a startling event even if you're fully awake.
IIRC, during the same lecture the dual of this was also demonstrated: energy storage in the magnetic field of an inductor saturated with a strong direct current. This one is not nearly so startling. Instead of bringing contacts in close proximity, you pull them apart. The current "wants" to keep flowing and you get a hissing green arc as the copper contacts are ionized.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @05:46AM (7 children)
If tfa is correct that lithium-ion batteries are never going to charge in minutes, then electric car makers will move on to the next most promising technology. Might be lithium metal, or some other energy storage medium all together.
If electrifying the fleet of personal cars is ever going to get past some small amount of market penetration (people with room and money for two+ cars), then fast charging is required. The old line of, "rent an ICE car when you need to travel" certainly isn't an option now--just check the price of car rental at this time (or really, at any peak/holiday time).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 07 2021, @01:26PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday December 07 2021, @02:23PM
Some of the metal-air battery technologies are effectively one-shot and then recycle/rebuild - but they are also talking 1000mile+ range. I can see that working as a swap-out tech, maybe as a range extender for built-in LiON packs - 300 miles or so on built-in then rent a metal-air pack (or two, or...) to add on a 1000miles range for the long trips.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday December 07 2021, @09:09PM (1 child)
Instead of swapping batteries, why not have a short-range pack for most of your daily driving? Then when going on long trips you open a door on the side of the vehicle (under the doors) and/or the front and back (also low on the vehicle) and slide extra packs in. The extra packs are the rentals so yeah, you only care that they work well enough for the long trip.
I got curious about this and the full Tesla packs weigh around 1000 lbs. You could have your core pack be about 350 lbs and give you 100 miles of range, then the extra packs would get you an extra 200 miles.
The biggest problem with any swapping scheme though is the service aspect. Plugs are self-serve. Swapping requires staff, and a reasonable sub-pack weight is about 50 lbs. So you'd need staff or a very reliable robot that could install 8-12 of these things.
The other challenge is the installation itself--the battery pack is currently a sealed, temperature controlled unit with permanent contacts between cells built to integrate in to the pack. A swapping system needs an enclosure that can be opened and closed while still maintaining temperature, standardized removable electrical contacts, programming to sense the new sub-packs and integrate them, etc.
The suspension of the vehicle might also need to be more dynamic to handle the different weight of the vehicle. Sub-packs should probably be installed symmetrically for this reason, with the system refusing to roll if an odd number are installed.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 09 2021, @08:19AM
They don't want to figure out how to make your batteries last longer. They want you to get a new device every five to ten years. If your device lasts decades then how would they profit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 09 2021, @03:53AM
We could use existing fuel delivery infrastructure with flow batteries but a tank full of dangerous chemicals has everyone's jimmies rustled.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Tuesday December 07 2021, @01:52PM (1 child)
I don't think (particularly for family sized cars at peak/school-holiday time) "just rent an ICE" has ever been a cost effective option.
Certainly at various times (like, when the big repair bills came in) over last decade I looked at the cost of renting instead of keeping our old diesel large-family-car, and rental just to cover the handful (per year) of long family trips where we'd fill the car always came to more than the cost (including depreciation) of keeping the car on the road for another year. Every time we used it for the rest of the year was in effect a free ride.
Now, since covid, the long family trips have basically ceased, so I got rid of the car - no sense paying to keep it sat rusting on the road going nowhere. At some point we'll probably replace it because juggling everything with one small (what was the "second") car is a bit of a pain, but won't replace it with an EV unless they actually start putting charging facilities in for on-street parking* instead of just one or two limited-stay fast charging bays for the whole town.
(*) Yes I know they do have them in London, however that's 200 miles away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @05:40PM
EVs are niche transportation solutions: they are for driving around town or to the next nearest town, transporting only people. They aren't for towing (yes, I know a couple of EV trucks are out there--not much uptake) or anything outside the city/suburbs.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Orion Blastar on Tuesday December 07 2021, @07:06AM (1 child)
what happens when you drive from New York to California? Can your battery hold a charge that long or do you need to recharge it along the way causing hours of delays?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @07:31AM
http://www.autoextremist.com/current/2021/12/5/a-long-strange-trip-indeed.html [autoextremist.com]
Near the end of the story is a section on road trips with battery electric vehicles (BEVs)...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @03:22PM
'tis amazing shit:"look ma! no moving parts!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @06:31PM (1 child)
This article confirms something I read a long time ago about fast-charging batteries causing their longevity to go down. (The previous one I saw was that fast charge = heat = killing batteries.)
My question is, given this, how come there aren't any products or services for slow-charging phones. If I'm going to bed, I don't need the "charge 80% in 15 minutes" speed. I'd much prefer more battery longevity than a faster charge most of the time.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 07 2021, @06:38PM
It's called a longer cheap USB cable and 500mA USB charger. Keeping your phone and battery cool is also a good idea.
What really is lacking is the ability to set the phone stop charging at 70% or X% (and charge again at 40% or Y%) without having to root your phone. This is actually technically possible for many phones but requires root.