Slashdot Mirror
Charge in 5 minutes, Drive 500 miles?
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 Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."
I emailed the on-duty editor (regarding this being a dupe), like any good little /. subscriber. Unfortunately my e-mail bounced pretty much immediately. Normally I would resist the temptation to join in the /. circle-jerk that is shouting "OMG DUPE DUPE DUPE!!" but I wanted someone (ScuttleMonkey, etc) to note that the 'daddypants' email link is bouncing. ..ScuttleMonkey, if you want the full error, feel free to let me know where to e-mail it.
( ERROR: Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at... Line 126 )
On a sidenote, what seems odd to me is that not only is this a dupe that is currently visible on the index of slashdot, but that the article summary is almost identical to the earlier submission, and is even from the same submitter. Insert Matrix deja-vu quote here.
Mods, try to be on the lookout for copy and paste karma whores (man, plagiarism annoys me). Unfortunately with 700+ comments on the last discussion, this may not be easy, haha.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
500 Miles on a 5-Minute Recharge?
Glad to see you're reading the site ScuttleMoney.
It feels like just yesterday I was following a link provided by troutwi. Wait a minute, its the same article.
This car can go form 0-dup in 3.4 seconds has to be some kind of record. Thought for a minute they were both on the front page at the same time.
Unbelieveable...still on the front page and everything!! What gives with this ridiculous "staff"?
Certified Microsoft Notworking Specialist
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/09/25/183 7254.shtml
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
How well do these capacitors retain their charge? How many charges are they good for? The biggest concern I've heard of against fuel cell cars is that their cells are worthless after five years or so.
Also, I doubt they're hooking it to a regular outlet if they're getting $9 of electricity out of it in five minutes. Granted, you could make charge stations that are similar to gas stations (or add them to gas stations) but you really should list all the materials we would need when considering the cost of this alternative.
I'm not trying to rain on your parade, just pointing out that it's not going to be adopted by everyone in the United States unless it's obviously cheaper than the current method. On the surface, it appears to be
My work here is dung.
I just hope they don't farm out making the batteries to the same company that makes them for Apple and Dell. A tank full of combustible liquide seems good compared to that.
Great Intellect...
Nah, I think this is called RAID-1 (aka mirroring).
You know, that redundancy, security & back-up stuff...
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
Damn!!!!They changed something in the Marix.
Now that I'm in the past, I can use these new lotto numbers I got from the future... I'll be rich!
This time around I have thought of something to say.
As we strive for higher energy density in our laptop computers, electric cars, mobile phones, etc; we are creating devices which can potentially release much of their stored energy in a short space of time. It doesn't have to be a chemical explosion. I have in my workshop a melted bicycle tail light and four cooked NiCD batteries from cycle commuting years past when I put two batteries in the wrong way and created a short circuit.
So IMHO battery/capacitor explosions are the way of the future, certainly much more than the backyard LPG explosions we get from time to time here in Australia (LPG is a cheap substitute for petrol, but a bit volatile.)
How is Alan Cox going with his hair? Is it growing back yet.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It sounds promising, too much promising. It look like new Microsoft product AD. It can't be that much good...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
Great, why doesn't this stuff ever happen on a saturday...
There are limits on how much energy you can store in a capacitor no matter what you do. The basic trick is to somehow increase the plate area while decreasing the spacing between the plates. You also need a material between the plates that will not break down due to the voltage. But no matter what you do, the breakover voltage goes down as you move the plates together.
A better approach might be to store the energy as compressed air. http://www.theaircar.com/ Of course the guys making the compressed air car seem to be stalled.
How about making fuel from turkey guts? http://www.changingworldtech.com/ We got all excited about them and they're sort of economic now.
How about desk top fusion?
So, I'm not holding my breath. One of my favorite sayings is: "There are liars, there are damn liars and then there are battery chemists." AFAICT that saying applies to this story.
Yeah, I expect there are a bunch of comments to this effect about the dupe.
What I'm wondering is why these guys call themselves editors. I'm frustrated that ad revenue and subscription fees go to these people who totally disregard all semblance of professionalism. I wish I had a cushy job like that, where I could sit back, press 'Accept' once in a while without even reading the blurb or the front page, and get paid for it.
[
Are we going to see this type of knotting in the space-time continuum every time someone charges one of these cars with 1.21 jigawatts?
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 25/1837254
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I've submitted a few stories over the last few years, none of which /. editors are
were ever accepted. (Ok maybe your standards are higher than mine?)
But THIS? For crying out loud this story is such a DUPE it appears
TWICE on the same web page!!!!! This proves the
smoking bananas!
its Deja Vu!
Wanted : A Signature.
...they want their article back!
So, between this dupe, the dupe editor, and 5 minutes, could I drive 1000 miles?
Really, do the editors even read Slashdot? You CAN read it at work you know. OSTG won't mind.
Equivalent to 5 gallons of gas per minute.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
now all they need to do is create something to supply the 900KW it would take to charge it.
At the top of the page now it's showing:
Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future?
Oh the irony...
BTW: Mods, try to be on the lookout for copy and paste karma whores (man, plagiarism annoys me). Unfortunately with 700+ comments on the last discussion, this may not be easy, haha.
Also, I doubt they're hooking it to a regular outlet if they're getting $9 of electricity out of it in five minutes.
You would be suprised. try running a basically closed loop 220V, 30amp connection for 5 mintues, it wouls be easy to eat up $9 dollars fo juice.
How long until they're bought out and run to ground ? Last time we had a chance at EV cars, GM bought controlling share of the batterie technology and used their Delco crap. The higher performance batteries never really made it in the cars, just a few got the first line issues. And when GM got out of the EV business, they sold that controlling share to Texaco/Mobile, or was it exxon ? They want us to go Hydrogen and Biodeiesel next. The Electric car won't see the light of day until the Big Oil Profiteers get UberUber Mega Rich... Sad that we let them supplant technology and lie to us... Watch the film "Who killed the Electric car"...and the rest.. Cheers
End of Line.
well... I thought it was an interesting article when I posted it the first (and only) time yesterday... However, I had nothing to do with the encore!!!... This is only the 2nd story I've ever submitted, and the only one to ever get accepted... (albeit twice)..
There aren't enough "Redundant" modpoints in the world to shut you all up. Just stop yelling Dupe, would you? I think it was pretty obvious from second one.
Meta will eat itself
Different editor. Come on, give 'em a break. You can't expect effective communication in the electronic age.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
It's fairly obvious that /. editors don't even read /.
So good I read it twice
I can somewhat tolerate every 10th article posted on /. being about an energy storage device. . .
but the same article, come on now.
I love it when dupes are duped, but 2 on the front page is not quite enough. Can we have 1 more please?
3 stories about 5-minute charges, all on the front page with slightly different names.. that would be art!
Whoa! Slow down, cowboy! You have to wait between posts to give everyone a chance to dupe. It's been 16 1/2 hours since this story has been posted.
You may be behind a firewall, blahblahblah....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
What is a gallon of electricity?
Really. I'm curious.
...i messed around with anagrams of "ScuttleMoney" and got...
Yo celment slut
To clumsy teen
and my favourate...
u my clone test
Jaj
you suck scuttlemonkey!!!
SEE SUBJECT
You mean a "White Hole":
CAT: So, what is it?
KRYTEN: I've never seen one before -- no one has -- but I'm guessing it's
a white hole.
RIMMER: A _white_ hole?
KRYTEN: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole
sucks time and matter out of the universe: a white hole returns it.
LISTER: So, that thing's spewing time back into the universe? (He dons
his fur-lined hat.)
KRYTEN: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time
phenomena on board.
CAT: So, what is it?
KRYTEN: I've never seen one before -- no one has -- but I'm guessing it's
a white hole.
RIMMER: A _white_ hole?
KRYTEN: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole
sucks time and matter out of the universe: a white hole returns it.
LISTER: (Minus the hat.) So, that thing's spewing time back into the
universe? (He dons his fur-lined hat, again.)
KRYTEN: Precisely. That's why we're experiencing these curious time
phenomena on board.
LISTER: What time phenomena?
KRYTEN: Like just then, when time repeated itself.
CAT: So, what is it?
It's time that we have fuzzy unique key on the 'subject' field.
But there is a car that takes 5 minutes to charge and it will go for 500 miles!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"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 Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."
Would it be so hard to let Slash reject submission with already-submitted links? -- insolit, but the captcha text is "laughs"
> You can't expect effective communication in the electronic age. ...at least on slashdot
except during long trips, where you must recharge on the way. By focusing on this point, it completely misses the real advantages of that these capacitor based cars.
For day to day usage, you would simply plug the car in at home each night. Existing power distribution is perfectly capable of providing enough power for the typical daily commute.
One other huge advantage seems to have gone unnoticed in the last thread. With a capacitor, you can recover nearly all of the energy during deceleration. This makes city driving immensely more efficient than with current cars.
Given these two points, such cars offer the hope of vastly decreasing both energy consumption and pollution. Even without recharging stations, you could build a very nice hybrid by sticking one of these in the back: http://www.propulsiontech.com/apu.html
I meant to write this the first time the article appeared :-) I had originally thought that it wasn't going to work out; but getting to the end, it turned out they did. Oh well - now I've done it, you might be interested... for your viewing pleasure...
Supposition: 500 miles on a 5 minute charge, with $9 worth of electricity.
$9 worth of electricity = 100kWh
100kWh = 360 megajoules
500 miles = 804 kilometres
Force = Energy / distance
= 360e6 / 804e3
= 447 Newtons
(of course the above is only the average force available for that journey)
F_drag = 1/2 * Drag_Coefficient * Cross_Section * AirDensity * Velocity^2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient gives Drag as around 0.3 for an average car. Cross-section is probably about 3 square metres.
F_drag = 0.5 * 0.3 * 3 * 1.29 * v^2
= 0.581 v^2
55 mph = 24 m/s
F_drag_55 = 334 Newtons
Which is well within the average 447 available; and gives scope for losses. So; it turns out it's not crazy to suggest you can get 500 miles on $9 worth of electricity.
I wonder how far my house would travel a month...
Carpe Daemon
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/01
A breif run down:
-S
It is said that a child learns wisdom from the parent,
but the truly wise parent learns joy from the child
...like they always do-pappa......
I don't think that anybody has reported it yet, but I think this is a dupe
A capacitor bank to store that much charge (100 to 200 KwH) is going to cost, retail, at today's prices, oh, about $220,000 to $440,000 AND take up most of the space inside a minivan. . It's unlikely these folks have made that much of an improvement in cost and density.
That much energy stored in a capacitor bank will make Jerry Brukheimer really envious-- every such car out there will explode on impact.
Most houses are only wired for 100 to 200 amps at 120VAC, which scientists tell us, is only 24KwH per hour. Every house would have to be rewired from the power pole with wire two to five times as thick. And a fusebox and timer able to schedule your time sucking up the amps.
If EVERYBODY tried to do this, we'd need three to five times the available electic power. No way this can happen, there isnt that much available capital in the whole world to build that many power plants. And oh, those power plats would have to use nuclear or coal, not exactly "clean energy" in the broad view.
in the editors memories. Buy you only get 500 miliseconds of storage after final submission.
Cliff Claven
K.E.G. Party Chairman
Founding Leader of: Koncerned for Egalitarin Governance
Here's some hard data: these things are low voltage devices. E.g., Maxwell's data says 2.7V for theirs. They also have crap power density: 3-5 Wh/kg. (Yes, I didn't miss a "k" there.) They may have high capacity, but Q = C*V, so low voltage still puts a limit on it.
So if you want to store about 90 kWh in a bank of those, you'd need anywhwere between 18,000 and 30,000 kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yes, between 18 and 30 metric _tons_. Not quite a commuter car, you know? I'll also go on a limb and say that buying whole tons of them will cost a pretty penny.
Also, transferring 90 kWh in 5 minutes means 1080kW power. More that 1 MW. So, yeah, I don't think your average power socket can do that. At 2.7V that means 400,000 A, too.
So, basically, it's just snake oil. It ranks up there with the promises to make energy out of water by changing the orbits of electrons in hydrogen. Some fraudster figured that he can get tens of millions of dollars VC to pretend to make such a thing. And given the IQ of some VC these days, they probably will too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Slashdot does 500 discussions on a single news item. In just two days.!!!!!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Even better, the 'tagging beta' seems not to let people tag stories with 'dupe.' I did, and I'm sure a lot of others did, but it hasn't shown up. Fortunately, 'dup' and 'superduper' seem not to have been similarly purged.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So strange. I left work with this story at the top of the front page and when I come back in the next morning, I see only one story has been added since then. All /. could come up with in 16 hours was a single story for the front page?
Normally, dupes are annoying, but this one caused me some trauma!
500 miles? Let us say the hybrid has the efficiency similar to Prius, 50 MPG. To go 500 miles you need to store as much energy as there is in 10 gallons of gasoline. 10 gallons of gas, is 37.5 litres of gas, that is 30 Kg of gas.
Energy content of gasoline is 45 MJ/Kg. That means you are storing 1.35e09 Joules of energy. You are charging it in 5 minutes? So dividing by 300 seconds, the Power rating for the charger is 4500000 Watts or 4.5 MW. If you try to charge it from your friendly neighbourhood 110V line, the amp rating for the plug is drum roll please, 40909 Amps
Now think when you are pumping 25 gallons of gas into that Hummer in 3 minutes, you have a 8 MW device in your hands!
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=deta il&aid=1559571&group_id=4421&atid=354421
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Think of the possibilities....;)
Soon, anyone with minimal technical skill will have their own quartershrinker.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
and that's an appropriate word for Slashdot.
A great concept would be if they could make a biofuel/EEStor hybrid that could withstand the elements, as well as an offroad 4x4 truck. I'd love to be able to drive something like this all through the mud like a redneck, or in this case- a GREEN-neck! Then you could have an all-terrain vehicle that is capable of driving from Canada to Argentina with maybe three/four refuels depending on your tank size and diesel engine use... man that'd be sweet.
Oh yeah, and....uh like dupe, and stuff, uhhhhuuhhuhuhhuhh
They don't care if its a dupe. Slashdot editors are assholes.
They claim to care about site integrity and good material but are extremely biased with their rejection button.
I've seen _really stupid_ articles get posted and _very good_ articles get canned for no apparent reason.
There's no review process and no rebuttal or possibility for reconsideration.
Okay, so its their site and they make the rules. I can live with that. But they're still assholes.
(Probably I am too)
16 hours until the next Slashdot dupe article
A dyslexic who likes anagrams. Vaugly disturbing and yet oddly appropriate.
-
Cue non-stop flood of "It'll never work" spam.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I was quite skeptic initially, but I took notice at the VC firm backing the project.
Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers were early investors in Amazon, America Online, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Google, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems (just to name a few). Looks like it is more serious than virgin snake oil.
... but this dupe is showing in the RSS feed as well. The worst part is, that it can't be unintentional, because the headline is different !
Have a gander.
Official Memo
Attn: Slashdot Users
Date: Now
Re: Official policy - tags
Please be aware that the tag "superdupe(r)" is reserved for the third posting (second re-post) of an article.
Please use the common tag "dupe" or "dup" for the first re-post.
This will help ensure consistency in our statistical analysis and reporting.
You may use the tag "!superdupe(r)" to help remove incorrectly tagged stories.
Thanks,
Anonymous Coward
CEO, Slashdot Holdings
...tell you a story about the ultra-capacitor that could charge in 5 min~!#%$%&$%*@#$!DNF
...now that you've explained how many gallons of electricity it is, could also please give us the equivalent Libraries of Congress of electricity? It seems useful somehow. ;-)
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
The same info 2 days in a row? Uhhh. . . .ok.
It's Groundhog Day!!!!
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Living next to a major highway I would have to say that the best part of an electric vehicle becoming mainstream would be how much quieter the world would become without all those combustion engines rumbling along. Naysay the technology all you want; I hope it's true.
Almost every post is marked "-1 Redundant" - It seems people have some mod-points to burn, and that they haven't considered:
- This whole article was posted previously, so was going to attract statements and discussion pointing this out.
- The actual topic is the lameness of the contributors for not reading their own fucking articles.
- Pointing out the article is a dupe and a repeat is not off-topic.
- The moderators aren't following the mod guidelines in promoting the positive.
- The moderators are feeding the karma whores who are cut-n-pasting the 'informative' posts from the previous article.
For the price per gallon (~.45 a gallon), they assume 25 mpg. The cost for the trip at that price would be $50, not "$60 or more". If you are going to compare things, don't do it misleadingly. My brother gets 10 mpg in his truck, so I could say that "At today's gas prices, covering that distance can cost $125." Then I can compare it to my Mom's old Metro which got 50 mpg and say "the EEStor device would power a car for the equivalent of about 18 cents a gallon."
Use a different system, or at least be consistent with what you do use.
Freedom is assumed. Then they try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.
But to be fair, is it just me or have they been doing a lot better lately? Certainly I've noticed fewer, and I've appreciated it.
I know it's more fun to bitch about people, but you ought to hand out some kudos every once in a while too. We could do with a bit more of that on the Intarweb.
ScuttleMonkey has just posted a dupe, of the exact same story that was posted only four hours earlier, and which is still on the main page. The summary is near identical, the submitter is the same, and what's worse the different titles are immediately noticeable and recognisable. It's a total farce with no excuses. To make some would be to further make a farce of the situation.
ScuttleMonkey should resign. No one could honestly consider themselves fit for an editorial position after such a slip up. I cannot for the life of me see how he can go on working for Slashdot after this. He should resign, or be sacked.
May the Maths Be with you!
after tripe you also may get a hankering for menudo.
Since we'll never see this product anyway, let's pretend it's real. Supposing you connected one end of your capacitor to ground and connected a metal rake to the other end way up in the air... what's the possibility of charging the thing from ions in the atmosphere? P.S. I'd prefer to not hear responses from the "just wouldn't work" crowd, but rather "it wouldn't work because of 'this' and I know because I have a Ph.D. in 'that'" crowd.
It won't help as much as you think. A lot of the noise coming from a highway is from the tires on the road. Sure you get the odd hot rod, motorcycle, or truck downshifting. But from living near rural I-476, when traffic is moving, it's mostly tire noise.
If it works as it's supposed to, it will charge up in five minutes and provide enough energy to drive 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity. At today's gas prices, covering that distance can cost $60 or more; the EEStor device would power a car for the equivalent of about 45 cents a gallon.
My father is fond of the acronym "TANSTAFL" to describe situations like this. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. I don't care how hard you squeeze your eyes shut and wish for this, there is no way in hell you get a two orders of magnitude increase in efficiency.
The key to that entire quote is " If it works as it's supposed to ". Talk about leaving yourself an out. This would be wonderful, but it just isn't going to happen, at least not the way described here.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... I don't know about you, but my guess would be that maybe it's not a fish. In this case, if it "acts like a capacitor", then it _is_ a capacitor.
In fact, if you RTFP (Read The F***ing Patent), it _is_ a fancy capacitor, plus circuitry to get a constant voltage out of it. In fact, it's downright the most classical kind of a capacitor, with two surfaces separated by a thin dielectric material. Only they use a fine powder to achieve lots of surface.
So, yes, it _is_ a capacitor.
At any rate, if it "acts like a capacitor" then it's fair to compare it to the best ultra-capacitors available. And if what they're proposing ends up having to be 80 times better than the best existing ultra-capacitors, then I'm getting a tad suspicious. Sure, it could be that they're geniuses, but I'll hold the celebrations until I hear something about a working prototype.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A gallon of electricity, converted to metric, is roughly 2.34567 shitloads of electrons
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
Ah, yes, the metric shitload. Much easier to work with than our antiquated American shitloads, based upon (but not matching) the old British shitloads...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
This thread, any minute now, is likely to lead to the dreaded car analogy.
So it is certainly possible to envision a capacitor-driven car, but it would be *VERY* expensive and probably very heavy using current technology. Apart from the construction issue, most of these capacitors also have limited current capabilities... the internal resistance goes up as the current goes up. Historically they have only been usable in low-current applications.
-Matt
No offence Insipid, but the irony is just too damn sweet.
In an discussion under a duped article we have a post that refers to Deja Vu that was modded Redundant! It doesn't get better than this folks!
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I do not think it means what you think it means (at least here at Slashdot, anyway) :-)
/. apparently pays "editors" for. At the least they should change the job title to "button clicker" or something more accurate.
More like "automated poster of random articles, without the application of any thought whatsoever." Seriously, a well-trained rat could hit the "Publish" button and accomplish pretty much 99% of what
I swear you could write a script to spellcheck article submissions and post some random subset and the result would be better than Zonk + ScuttleMonkey
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
unbelievable... they wasted two mod points on me that could have been used to mod two other more deserving posts up... idiots... when I made my OP, there were NO posts in the topic... none at all...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
$0.45 / gallon of electricity?? Huh? Could I get that in kilo-watts of gasoline, just so I have a better frame of reference?
"Blow away the combustion engine"
I heard Sony was in a licensing negotiations to build them. It's not a saftey issue, when they blow up they burn through the cars frame instantaniously and continue burning through concrete, asphalt and dirt till they extiguish themselves. They work faster than a plasma cutter. James Caan in a remake of the movie "Thief" is going to strap one to a bank vault and set it off. It burns through thirty floors and lands on the first floor security personal desk. As everyone charges upstairs to see what's up, Caan and associates repel down the hole using teflon rope, with fire extiguishers blasting to make their escape.
Bubba said, "I should a knowed to slowww down after I smelt dirt aburning. I hit that hole going 70 and blew both left tires and bent them rims." Joe Tech said "I never saw a leaking capacitor like this before. One that ruined a surrounding 2.5 ton horizontal transportation device. I know we throw away a lot of power supplies for this very reason and they eventually leach their way into the water table, however I've never seen one go straight into the aquifer without going to the county dump first."
Okay, so you're using a huge capacitor to store enough energy to push a one-ton car approximately five hundred miles.
So how wide is the blast radius when it short circuits?
Every single 'dupe' post is a dupe in itself, ya nerds.
I've got one thing to say: May the force be with you.
If you've ever read the RiverWorld series by Philip Jose Farmer you would see a lot of simmularities between this and the batacitor that powered the Not For Hire. I'm surprised this wasn't a topic, on another note where are they going to find grail stones to charge them?
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
...and that's why electric cars are a dead end. It's too hard to charge them fast enough to make it usable.
What we really need to be looking into is a 'gasoline replacement'. An artificial liquid fuel similar enough to gasoline, that we can use the current fueling stations (tanks, pumps, hases, etc), the current transpartation (gas tankers, etc), the current gasoline infrastructure.
Why a liquid fuel? Several reasons:
1) We already have a transportation and distribution infrastructure in place for liquid fuels (gas stations, etc)
2) Liquids are relatively easy to handle. (tanks, hoses, etc)
3) The public is already familiar with liquid fuel (gasoline) and it's handling. (Don't smoke at the pumps, etc)
The biggest problem people seem to have withhtis is the expense. "It costs tooo much," people whine. Well, guess what- ALL FUEL PRODUCTION COSTS! It's just that, with gasoline (which comes from oil), the 'production' phase happened a few million years ago, and so we don't factor that into our calculations- we just see the energy we get out of oil, and not the energy that went into making it. Well, guess what? From now on, any fuel we produce, will have to include the 'production' cost, too!!!
Commercial capacitors are made by folding or rolling the plates. There are limits, of course, imposed by the laws of physics. There are many different capacitor types and each type is suited for a different application. For a high power capacitor used in a radio transmitter, I might use something with just two plates separated by a sheet of mica. For automotive use, I might use a supercapacitor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor Choosing the correct capacitor is often not straightforward. All the specs can look correct and the circuit won't work because there was one spec that you'd never heard of before.
So, you're going to dump 52 kWh into the battery in 5 minutes? That
means 624kW to charge the thing for 5 minutes. Let's assume that the charging
circuitry is 99% efficient, so only 1% of the charge is lost as heat.
That's a nice 6,000W heater you've got there. Even at 99.9% efficiency,
it's still a rather powerful hair-dryer. At 99.99%, then we're talking coolness.
Just the equivalent of the heat from a 60W bulb.
There are a number of techniques - you could use a liquid (alchohol), charge batteries that are kept in the car, use small batteries that are transferred to the car at the fuel station (i.e. the way propane canisters are rented), or burn solid/gaseous fuels.
In the end it probably comes down to cost. Saying "we need a new liquid" is kind of pointless. We need to know what options are available scientifically, and then choose based on various tradeoffs between the technologies.
Best way to do this is probably market forces.
+1 month before I think about subscribing. Seriously, what the fuck DO you do with subscription money? Use it to light cigars? Because you sure as hell don't use it to ACTUALLY LOOK AT THE SITE.
P.S. 5 minute recharge at some ungodly number of amps at an insane voltage. Um, yeah, that'll almost work, really.
The $80,000 battery electric Tesla Roadster is selling well (although deliveries don't begin until next year.) Zero to sixty in four seconds, with a range of 250 miles per charge. Charging takes four or five hours, but who cares, if you plug it in and go to bed? Tesla plans to build more-affordable electric vehicles (EVs) once early adopters get the economy-of-scale ball rolling. I'm saving my pennies for a $30,000 third-generation EV that will outrun everything at a stoplight (just like the late, lamented GM EV1.)
Breathe free,
Why are hybrid cars considered an "alternative"? They're just replacing a mechanical transmission with a more efficient electrical method, where the torque is turned into electricity, the electricity is stored, then used instead of the direct torque to rotate the wheels. The energy savings come mostly from the fact that you don't need a massive engine to get moving, so you can have a smaller motor running more efficiently for less time.
Calling it an "alternative" is like calling Fuel Injection an "Alternative".
"Oh, you poor dear, you're still reliant on fossil fuels? I use fuel injection. I'm green as a leaf!"
It's been a long time.
Altair Nanotechnologies (partnered with Boshart Engineering, an auto proving firm) is now testing an electric vehicle powered by its safe and fast-charging lithium batteries. From a corporate release this summer: "Altairnano NanoSafe battery cells have now achieved over 9,000 charge and discharge cycles at charge and discharge rates up to 40 times greater than are typical of common batteries, and they still retain up to 85% charge capacity. As an example of the application significance of this feature if a conventional lithium battery is charged and discharged every day then it would typically last for about 2 years. Under the same scenario, an Altairnano battery would be projected to last 25 years. This durability is critical in a high value application like electric vehicles." These batteries are expensive now. After the first ten thousand electric vehicles (EVs) powered with them are sold (the $100,000 Tesla Roadster sold its first hundred in three weeks in August,) volume production will begin reducing battery costs. Sometime in the next few years, the EV equivalent of the Model T will go on the market; then we can stop funding terror and begin to breathe free.
Breathe free,
%9.00 power at $0.11 per kWhr, 81.8 kWhr
81.8 kWhr x 60 min/hr / 5 min = 982 kW
Estimate storage system voltage = 600 Vdc (optimistic, 400 Vdc is more likely)
Charging current: 982kW / 600 V = 1.64 kA (that's one serious cord and connector!)
Assume 480V three phase power
Assume an ideal charger: 100% efficiency and 1.00 power factor
982 kW / 480 Vac / sqrt(3) = 1.18 kA per phase input current
If you add a "two pump" recharge island at each filling station in town, that's a huge impact on the power grid. We aren't talking about off-peak usage here, this is day time demand that strains generation capacity. It's an interesting technology, but has the same shortcomings as any extreme-rate recharge scheme. Adding large, variable loading to the power grid at peak hours won't help establish a viable EV market. As high density energy storage for a hybrid car--there it has potential. As storage for an overnight-recharge EV--there too it holds promise, if it performs as well as they claim. But with 500 mile range, there's little benefit compared to the high costs of extreme rate charging.
Dude, the whole Detroit is against electric cars concept is a MYTH. There is absolutely no reason why GM or Ford's owners would want to do any favors for Exxon and vice versa. The facts of the matter are thus:
a) People do not want to buy electric cars at the price / performance point they can be offered at. Sure, some people moaned about their EV1 leases being terminated and the cars being crushed, but the vast majority of Californians turned their backs on the technology.
b) Mass production does not reduce commodities costs. If you have a battery with an ounce of platinum in it, it is going to be 3k, minimum, because, platinum right now is around 3k an ounce. Even good old gold is expensive.
The bottom line is, if people -really- wanted to buy electric cars, GM and Ford would most certainly make them, because they want to sell cars and honestly, features in cars at this point are just items that appear on a bill material and are associated with a marketing cluster analysis. But, as it is, most environmentalists are impoverished cheapskates, as well, and so, cannot afford or will not pay premiums on exotic vehicles at a high level of production.
This is my sig.
charge batteries that are kept in the car,
Useful for commuting, sure. Where a car can charge overnight or all day long.
But, try using one of those card to drive from, say, New York City to visit friends in Boston. It's a 4 hour, 200+ mile trip. Are you willing to to take 3 days to do it, so your batteries can charge every 70 miles or so??
use small batteries that are transferred to the car at the fuel station (i.e. the way propane canisters are rented),
Even 'small' batteries are HEAVY. You'd need heavy machinery to lift them into place. Not to mentionthe fact that EVERY car would have to have a standard 'battery pack'. And it would certainly take longer to swap batteries than to pump a tank of gas.
or burn solid/gaseous fuels.
Solid fuels? What, fill the back of a pickup truck with wood, or coal?? You are funny.
As for gas, it is not too bad.... Unless you think about the lack of density (compared to liquids) and the high-pressure tanks, hoses, and fittings required.
To them I ask: Are you going to spend your life attacking everything new that comes along? You sound like a bunch of grumpy old men.
When you get old, you can look back think about all the opportunites you missed to innovate and change the world... To engineer new solutions... To be a part of the future, vs. fearing it.
You know -- some of us engineers think that new technology is COOL!
Why would it discharge if you don't use it?
Don't leave the radio on for 2 years and expect
the car to start when you come back.
A back of the envelope calculation shows that to consume $9 of electricity in 5 minutes, you need between 3000 and 4000 AMPS at 240 volts. Just drive to your nearest electric company substation and drive on to the busbars to charge?