Toshiba's New Lithium-Ion Battery Promises 320km Range On 6min Charge

Toshiba has announced a new next-generation lithium-ion battery that is aimed at use in electric vehicles and the battery has the potential to revolutionize the EV market. The new battery uses a new anode material that promises to allow an EV to travel 320km on a 6-minute ultra-rapid recharge. That is three times the range possible on that amount of charge with current batteries.

The new anode material used in the battery is a titanium niobium oxide that is able to provide twice the capacity of the anode used in current lithium-ion batteries. The currently used anode is graphite-based. The new battery gives both high energy density and ultra-rapid charging and the new anode is less likely to suffer from lithium metal deposition during fast charging in old conditions.

That issue is a cause of battery degradation and internal short circuits. The new battery is part of Toshiba's SCiB line and the line is currently used in industrial and infrastructure applications inside cars, buses, railroad cars, elevators, and power plants. Toshiba's new battery uses a proprietary method for synthesizing and disarranging crystals of titanium niobium oxide and storing lithium ions more efficiently in the crystal structure inside the battery.

Toshiba has been testing a 50Ah prototype battery and has been able to show that the battery retains the long life cycle, low-temperature operation, and safety along with fast recharging of the current SCiB. Energy density by volume is twice that of the current SCiB.

Toshiba says that the next-generation SCiB is able to maintain 90% of its initial capacity after 5,000 charge/discharge cycles. Rapid-charging can be done in temperatures as low as minus 10C in only ten minutes. Plans are to commercialize the new battery in fiscal year 2019.

Source: Toshiba