CEO Duo Kani and CTO Dr. Kaname Takeya want to change how we think about batteries.
Power Japan Plus knows the future cannot run on the lithium-ion batteries we all have in our smartphones and cars, and they’re banking on cotton to be the next big breakthrough.
According to PJP, the Ryden dual carbon battery is a Carbon Complex piece of tech. PJP takes organic cotton, changes the structure of the carbon fibers in the plant, and uses this modified material for energy storage. The end result? A battery that can hold more energy, hold energy for longer, and can be charged significantly faster than lithium-ion packs — in minutes instead of hours. The Cotton-based matter form the positive and negative electrodes, and the conductor is an organic electrolyte.
Dr. Kaname Takeya, the CTO of PJP (and one of the key figures behind the battery system in Toyota’s Prius hybrid), says that current battery tech has “made great improvement on performance, but [has] done so by compromising on cost, reliability and safety.”
The biggest implication for these new batteries (assuming they pan out) is for use in cars. Electric cars like the Tesla Model S, while fantastic pieces of technology, still rely on aging lithium-ion battery hardware. These new Dual Carbon packs could launch electric cars out of the niche category, and into the middle America mainstream.
The initial benchmark production run of over 18,000 Ryden batteries will start at the Power Japan Plus facility in Okinawa later this year.
Published: May 14, 2014 04:40 pm