An interesting development in Li ION batteries

Argonne Awarded Lithium Battery Technology Patents: http://www.cmt.anl.gov/science-technology/batteries/default.shtml

CMT's Khalil Amine Named Scientific American 50 Research Leader: http://www.cmt.anl.gov/awards/SciAm50.shtml

Researcher's wheels turning on battery for hybrid cars: http://www.suntimes.com/output/zinescene/cst-fin-ecol21.html

Toshiba with ultra-fast recharge LiION batteries

Toshiba's New Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery Recharges in Only One Minute (http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_03/pr2901.htm) Can recharge to 80% capacity in 1 minute, this is fabulous. These kind of batteries already are able to deliver a 300+ mile range in a regular size car, so to have it also take only a couple minutes to charge is going to make pure electric cars extremely feasible.

This is a performance comparison they offer. Presumably "Capacitor" here means an ultracapacitor. In any case they're claiming this new battery is somewhere around perfect in all categories.

A six-minute charging Li-ION

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7081

The company is Altair Technologies in Reno NV.

Li-ion batteries work by forcing lithium ions from a lithium cobalt oxide cathode to migrate to a carbon anode via an electrolyte solution. Altair's patented modification is to make the anode surface out of lithium titanate nanocrystals, using chemical tricks to give it a surface area of about 100 square metres per gram, compared with 3 square metres per gram for carbon.

Other Lithium Battery resources

GBP Battery Co. (http://www.gbp-battery.com/) - Chinese manufacturer of lithium batteries.