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500 Miles on a 5-Minute Recharge?
ctroutwi writes "In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering UltraCapacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultracapacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately $9 of electricity and then drive 500 miles."
More info on ESS, and ultra-capacitors in general.
Sorry to follow up to my own post. Typos galore. Subject line should read 40,000 Amp. not 4000. And pumping 25 gallons of gas in 3 minuts is 18.75 MegaWatts.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I am old enough to remember city streets in places with overhead power lines for this.
Uh.. we're all old enough. They still exist. Philly, Seattle, Vancouver, Newark/Jersey City, Houston, Dallas, Baltimore.. there are many others.
What kind of service will allow you to suck down $9 worth of electricity in 5 minutes?
Good point. Let me slap some math on it.
At $0.25/kWh, $9 is 36kWh. You would have to pass 432kW of power. At 120, 240, 480 and 600 volts, this would be a current of 3600A, 1800A, 900A and 720A, respectively.
At $0.04/kWh, it is much worse. At that price, $9 buys 225kWh, which, to pass in 5 minutes, requires a power of 2.7MW. At the same voltages as above, this would be 22.5kA, 11.25kA, 5.63kA and 4.5kA, respectively.
Hell, even at 13.2kV, this would be a fairly big current, somewhere between 32 and 205 Amps.
I'll take the slower charge, thank you very much.
www.wavefront-av.com
Should this become the path the energy comsuming manufacturers take (cars, laptops, tools, etc), anyone who is not familiar with electronics, please tatoo the following thought in your mind for your own sake:
A capacitor can discharge at an equally alarming rate as this charge time suggests. To take a phrase from Mohamar Khadafi in the eighties, you cross this line, you die.
Seriously - discharging a capacitor will kill you instantly without the proper safeguards in place. Get into a choice car-accident where this connection is made and kaboom! It will explode - if you are the connection, you will die.
A tank of gasoline has nothing on a charged capacitor. Just ask any poor fool who has mucked around with the innards of a television set shortly after unplugging it.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
If we had to run off highway lines like electric busses (or cars in the Super Mario Bros. movie, blech) We'd all be paying the same (likely extravegant) rate.
Hmmm... Here in Vancouver, I see busses all the time get disconnected from over head power lines. The driver has to get out, line up his connection again to the power line, before he can drive away. Traffic in the meantime gets backed up because everyone is waiting for this bus, stuck in the middle of a left turn.
While your idea is good on paper, imagine how utterly crazy it would be if we all had to do that? The sheer logistics of a city with that spec is utterly insane.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Just to add in a city that still has them that's not quite as large as those: Dayton, OH. They snake throughout the entire downtown area. So to the GP, you're not that old (or that cool; stop showing us your e-peen). They will probably still be around by the time you die. Your grandchildren might be able to tell their grandchildren that they "remember city streets in places with overhead power lines" for trollies and buses.
The idea of replacing the batteries in electric and hybrid electric cars is not a new one. BMW was at one point determined to use ultracapacitors in it's hybrids, rather than batteries, because without chemical reactions taking place, the storage of electricity is much more efficient than batteries. BMW has apparently abandoned that in their alliance with DCX and GM on their hybrid system, but since BMW hasn't announced any of their own hybrids, we can't exactly tell yet. I believe also that it would allow greater maximum output from a car, if one were so inclined to let a couple/few hundred kilowatts go to the electric motors.
The problem is that the ultra capacitors haven't been quite ultra enough yet. I'm no expert on capacities of capacitors, but you're limited by size/surface area in the capacitor and 'they' seemed to 500 miles is quite a claim, and unless they have a specific car, it's not a usefully specific claim. And if they do have a vehicle, it's best to make sure it's not a lightweight go kart like an Elise (or the new Tesla car, which is an Elise), as those cars tend to not please typical automotive tastes.
There is still potential out there to make much more effective capacitors. I believe MIT students/professors/people of some sort came up with a Carbon Nano-fiber fuzzy capacitor that multiplied many times the surface area inside a capacitor on which the charge is built up by making the charge holding surface out gagillions of those little fibers. That sounded like a hilariously expensive proposition to me, but perhaps it's not as expensive as my imagination makes it out to be, or it could even inspire others to find similar and less expensive ways to make significant advances in the field of ultracapacitors.
At the very least, companies who make outrageous claims like this one bring awareness to different technologies and methodologies such as capacitors vs. batteries. I'll be interested to see if/when someone brings a capacitor driven car to market, be it these guys, or BMW, or whoever.
you cannot dodge the quad laser. jumping is useless.
Eastern Kentucky sits on the Saudi Arabia of coal.
Only in terms of production, not in terms of capacity.
There is far more coal, which would be far cheaper (and safer) to get at, out West. The only reason coal mining goes on in your state at all is because of pork-barrel politics "protecting" your local industry.
But instead of strip-mining useless desert that nobody ever sees except for during trans-continental flights, we are digging ever deeper death-traps in the Southeast. Your government at work.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
To go 500 miles you need to store as much energy as there is in 10 gallons of gasoline.
Not true. You're forgetting that electric vehicles are substantially more efficient, even after motor/controller/charging losses. The Prius isn't an accurate benchmark, because no matter what the environmentalists say, it's still an internal combustion engine powered vehicle that wastes more than 3/4 of its gas on producing heat, not propulsion.
Please help metamoderate.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Gasoline, in liquid form, is not explosive, nor does it burn all that fast. That's why gasoline fires take so damn long to extinguish.
It only becomes a powerful explosive in vapor form. Cars force tiny trickles of it at a time into vapor with carberators or fuel injections systems. Otherwise, the stuff is just as safe to be around as pretty much any flamable liquid, including vodka, paint thinner, lamp oil, etc.
The kind of wattage we are talking about to charge these cars, however, is the sort of thing utility companies typically put barbed-wire fences around to keep people the fuck away from it.
Maybe you could rig up a system where I park my car on a conveyer belt, and go inside the station for a nice cup of coffee while it is pulled into a fully-automated charging station and then rolled out to be boarded when it's done.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It certainly fits into the existing models we've built for transportation.
However, the question is this - is it more efficient to burn the gasoline/fuel to create the electricity to use the electricity to run the cars, or to just continue refining internal combustion engines. It might be the case that the current state of electrical engines are just not as powerful as the gasoline ones, and to get an equivalent amount of work from the electrical engine requires more gas to be burned at the plant level for generation, thus negating environmental or fuel supply benefits.
But - I am not a electrical engineer, so I am not sure. I sure do hear a lot about the problem of using juice from the plants vs making each car more efficient.
> $9 is a huge amount of electricity in term of charge. passing that through a line in 5 minutes
> is gonna take one HUGE ass line..
Worse. Imagine a 'gas station' of the future with a dozen 'pumps' hammering away. Imagine the electrical feeder line that will be needed going into the station. Now imagine a city, where 'gas stations' are usually on at least one, perhaps two corners of any major intersection. Now imagine one out on a lonely stretch of Interstate. All hammering away at the electrical grid by the Gigawatt/hour. Where do we get all that additional electricity? With all the major upgrading of infrastructure, increase in power station fuel costs, etc. required I wouldn't expect electric rates to remain constant, that $9 will become $50 by the time it moves from early adopter status to mainstream.... and any remaining savings on the gas bill will be more than offset by the higher electric bill.
If we start a major program of building nuke plants NOW we might be able to get ahead of the demand curve but we will still be looking at a major upgrade of the distribution grid. Everybody will have a megavolt line running through their neighborhood.
Democrat delenda est
5 minutes = 1/12 of an hour. So required current to transfer that much energy in five minutes would be 4909 amps.
Of course, the recharging stations might be very high voltage. High voltage transmission lines are routinely 110 kV and up. At 500 kV, transferring the current might only take 11 minutes. Don't know that I'd want to play around with voltages like that!
What was once true, is no longer so
You forget that a gasolien car has an efficenty of about 20% and a electric car aof about 90%.
... that was a joke, but I guess you get the basic idea)
So divide your numbers by 4 on the elctrricity side and you get: 1.2 MW. Of course you would not charge it ona 110 volts line but on a 230 volts line, like in europe. (oO
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
> > Imagine the electrical feeder line that will be needed going into the station.
> You mean that single 20 ga wire?
No. Power is Volts X Amps (X power factor if we are using AC but lets keep it simple, K?) Wire guage sets a practical limit to Amps and Volts is limited as well by other physical limits. Recharging in 5 minutes needs megawatt hours of energy delivered in minutes. Doing that means a crapload of both volts and amps.
> Likewise the power pump station will have a mini substation getting transmission voltage and stepping
> it down to something around the distribution voltage range (maybe even lower).
No, a largish filling station will need a major substation. And the cable going into your car will be a big thick cable; a pair of large fairly rigid conductor with several redundant layers of insulation over them, probably with sensors buried in the insulation to shut the system down at the first hint of a weak spot.
Democrat delenda est
Let's expand the math for a little bit. First, let's assume a national (USA) average of $0.09/kWh, as that makes the math a little easier. Nine bucks divided by 9 cents per kilowatt-hour equals 100 kilowatt-hours. 100 kilowatt-hours of energy dispensed over five minutes represents a power draw of 1200 kilowatts, or 1.2 megawatts, roughly one one-hundredth the capacity of the now-decomissioned Trojan Nuclear Power Plant near Porland, Oregon. Divide that by the standard US voltage of 240V AC, and you have a current draw of 5000 amps.
That requires some fat-ass wires.
As most homes in the US have a 200A electrical service, this represents the power draw of approximately 25 homes loaded to capacity. Further considering that the National Electrical Code requires that continuous load of a circuit be 20% less than the rating of the circuit (typical peak load would therefore be 160A), and that average peak load will probably be closer to 100A, this battery will represent to the electrical system a load equal to 30-50 homes!
I guess it's time for everyone to build nuclear power plants in their back yards.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
OK -
The patent applied
and received is US Patent: 7,033,406
Feel free to yank the patent off the USPTO web site.
Issue Date: April 25, 2006
(Hopefuly they are not 24 days late.)
Unit described in the patent:
Weight = 336 pounds
Capacitance = 31 Farads
Peak Voltage on the capacitors = 3500 V
Energy stored = 52 KwH
Size of Unit = 1 cubic foot (its in there read the fine print)
The patent also describes an energy distribution system that includes "fuel stations" that use the same capacitor storage, and charges capacitors at the fuel station during graveyard shift. (double conversion losses, but that can be argued, and there are MUCH better ways to do this)
The "ultra fast charging" as per the marketing/media blurbs are commented on in the patent, "if sufficient cooling for the charging and wire interconnect is avaialble...." so the guy writing the patent was aware of the issues with the resistive losses in the system.
The capacitince structures are a ceramic technology, using special dielectrics. A lot of content there on the chemistry and fabrication technology.
Not sure if this is vaporware or the "next big thing" - we shall see.
Jerry
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
Don't forget that only 15-20% of the energy stored in gasoline is converted to mechanical energy to drive the car. The other 80-85% of energy is waste heat.
According to the Wikipedia article on Ultracapacitors>, they have a cycle efficiency of 95%.
I don't want to work that into your calculations, but it amount of energy needed to drive a car X miles is far less that what is contained in a tank of gas that will drive you X miles.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Can you imagine working for a towing company with these cars on the road?
"I'm sorry ma'am, we're not allowed to give jump starts in the rain."
Anything gets wet, and you could have a lot of dead tow truck drivers. Your average mechanic would have to learn a whole new trade that many of them would have difficulty learning part of, much less all of it. How many of the components would be 'sealed'? By sealed, I mean 'not authorized to even open, return to manufacturer.'
I remember when run-flat inflaters were the latest fad. Problem with them was, the gas wasn't inert, it was flammable. You got a puncture, and the poor slob that tried to rasp the puncture out and seal it caused sparks between the rasp and the steel-belts in the tire. A couple people died on a simple tire filler, and now we're talking massive amounts of electricity..
Sorry, I like the idea of biodiesel better. The "death vs cool" ratio is much higher.
I just drove 450 miles in my Prius and then put $16 of gas into it. The next generation Prius that's supposed to come out in 2007 or 2008 is supposed to get 94 EPA-estimated miles per gallon vs. 55 for the current generation. At that point the price difference per mile is marginal, and I don't have to worry about losing power to dielectric absorption while the car is not in use.
As with all problems, you need to look beyond the obvious. Refilling millions of electric vehicles at one time could be a problem. Distribute them across time and you have a much different (and presumably much smaller) problem. Recharge yours at night in your home and you may have no problem at all (other than laughing and dancing your way to the bank as your transportation costs plummet). Add a spin-the-meter-backward solar electric system and you could start feeling very green, even if you do throw away all your aluminum pop cans.
A much smaller electric engine and shorter range. The Tesla car has a 185kW motor and it's a Ferrari killer. Reasonable range is more like 300 miles at far less than full power. IIRC, the Porsche 924 was supposed to maintain 55mph with 15HP (11kW in a direct conversion, presuming they meant 15hp at the wheel). If power requirements are 20% greater because of your lead foot and 20% greater because of some math error I just made, you're still at 16kW sustained. Driving 5 hours then requires 80kWH, not 2,000kWH, and only 0.96MW. That's about 400amps at 2400 volts for 5 minutes, still nothing to sneeze at. A little inefficiency in the system could easily melt the asphalt beneath your feet. Better not wear Crocs.
r s%2C_Inc.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Tesla_Moto
Using ultracaps for hybrid cars is nothing new. Dartmouth's Formula Hybrid team built two race cars based on them last spring. (I helped build, and got to drive, one of them)
On our main track day, we had a cap explode. Nothing major, but it did spray toxic chemicals all over the inside of the enclosure. After talking to the manufacturer, we were informed that this is actually really common. (Which is a no-brainer to anyone who knows the failure curve) Maybe these people are pre-stressing their caps to weed out the ones with flaws. But given that Sony couldn't manage to do that with production-run batteries...
The other thing is that it took a lot longer to charge than these people are talking. We had a heavy-duty lab power supply, running off a generator, and it took a considerable amount of time to charge up to the 300V we needed. And I know you're saying, "Well, that's for a race car" but these things are so light, that you'd need a lot more juice to run a tiny Toyota-size two-seater than we needed for this.