Toshiba today announced the commercial launch of the SCiB the Super Charge ion Battery, a rechargeable battery that can recharge to 90% of full capacity in less than five minutes.
Primarily targeting the industrial systems market, the battery offers safety and a long-life cycle of over 10 years, even under conditions of constant rapid charging, according to Toshiba. The company aims to make this high potential battery a mainstay of its industrial systems and automotive products businesses, with global sales of 100 billion yen targeted for fiscal year 2015. The first SCiB will be shipped from March 2008.
Toshiba adopted a new negative electrode material, new separators, a new electrolyte, and new manufacturing technology.
"This is a truly innovative battery," said Mr. Toshiharu Watanabe, Corporate Vice President of Toshiba Corporation and Chief Executive Officer of Toshiba's Industrial Systems Company. "The excellent performance of the SCiB will assure its successful application in industrial systems and in the electronic vehicles markets as a new energy solution. In terms of environmental impacts, the SCiB offers a long life that will reduce waste."
The SCiB is housed in the SCiB Standard Module ten 4.2 ampere-hour (Ah) SCiB cells aligned in series connection which maximizes the battery characteristics with a battery management system function (BMS) that monitors voltage and temperature in order to protect the cells in case of emergency, and that balances the state of charge in each cell.
In addition to applications that include battery-powered bicycles, motorcycles, automated guided vehicles, electric forklift trucks and construction machinery, which already use rechargeable batteries, the SCiB is also a promising candidate for emergency power sources, electric power regeneration in wind power systems and stabilization of electric power supply. Application in hybrid cars is also planned, with the intent of extending application to electric cars in the future, after advancing development of a high-performance SCiB cell.