Minute Battery Charging With New Korean Carbon Coated Lithium-Ion Battery

One of the biggest limiting factors to the commercial acceptance of electric vehicles is its battery. First of all, it bears a significant chunk of the vehicle’s overall price, regardless of the type of material used as the electrode. Second, charging times for an EV battery even today is still significantly slower than pumping fuel in a gas tank.

Thankfully though, developments are already on the way that will eventually solve the problem of battery economics. As for the developments in battery charging systems, Koreans have apparently developed a new recharging material just recently that could drastically cut down battery charging times in mere minutes.

The announcement for the development of the new recharging material was made last Monday, August 13, 2012, by the science ministry of South Korea. The team of researchers were from the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, and are lead by Professor Cho-Jae Phil. Funding for the research was said to be partly given by the science ministry. The exact technical details of their research were not thoroughly discussed by the report, but it does include fundamental explanations of the concept.

According to the report, their new battery also uses the exact same nanoparticle material as conventional batteries do, but instead of directly aligning them to form dense multi-layered structures, they first bathe the particles in a solution that contains graphite. After carbonizing the nanoparticles, they are then used to form the battery.

The end result? The electrodes of the battery become lined up and coated with a network of conductors all over. This means that if you try to recharge the battery, it would distribute the particles all over the battery, instead of just slowly going over via small particle groups from the inner side towards the outer side. The new recharging material would practically cut down charging time by an enormous rate, which, according to the research team, would be about 97% to 99% (of the time needed to charge conventional batteries). They expect to boost the current efficiency of high energy density batteries today with this seemingly overwhelming development.

The next step to their research is how they could design the battery on a large scale, so that it could be efficiently used by EV’s, the primary target objective that inspired the research in the first place. If their research can be economically feasible, then even pumping gas on a regular vehicle might look slow for us in the future.

Does it seem like the research report was too good to be true? As it is officially announced, it is most likely confirmed, but aside from our own personal opinions about its claimed results, I’m also worried about what these lightning fast chargers would do should they suddenly become prevalent. Wouldn’t a power grid experience massive energy spikes when a significant number of EV users charge their cars all at once? Also, it would seem that the chargers themselves would also need to be tweaked and redesigned if we are to be able to really charge it (safely) in the short times that the research has claimed.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by amcgore via Flickr.

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Christian Crisostomo (250 Posts)

Christian Crisostomo is just your average tech geek that loves to see man's newest and most recent technological exploits. He holds great interest in the potentials of green technology, and is enthusiastic about the continuous development of environment-friendly alternative energy.

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