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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.
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...
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...
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.
[
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!
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.
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.
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.
You mean like the "electrical energy stations" mentioned in TFA, from which a 5 minute charge may be obtained?
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)..
It's fairly obvious that /. editors don't even read /.
The basic trick is to somehow increase the plate area while decreasing the spacing between the plates.
Well, we can mount the capacitor under the car. That gives us a few square metres to play with. The rest of your objections, I have no answer to. Ultimately, electirc cars are, and always have been potentially fantastic, except for the huge issue of electricity storage.
220V * 30amp = 6,600 watts * 5 minutes = 0.55 kilowatt hours. You're only a few orders of magnitude off from "$9 worth of electricity", specifically 52 kWhs for EEStor's product. To charge 52 kWhs in 5 minutes, you'd need to be chugging through ~600 kW of power, or about 2.7 kiloamps at 220V.
Bye, bye wall plug.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No, you still have to walk it.
M iles.html
http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Proclaimers/500-
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
What is a gallon of electricity?
Really. I'm curious.
...i messed around with anagrams of "ScuttleMoney" and got...
Yo celment slut
To clumsy teen
and my favourate...
u my clone test
Jaj
It's time that we have fuzzy unique key on the 'subject' field.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
But there is a car that takes 5 minutes to charge and it will go for 500 miles!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."
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
This is only a problem if the cost/effort of replacing them is significant. Otherwise, it's part of your normal service schedule.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
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
Ahh... but you missed the finer point of this one... This one has exactly the same title, the same submitter, and the same text as the other one. So either the submitter double-submitted, or Timothy (who approved the other one) screwed up and didn't remove it from the queue. Come to think of it, Timothy probably screwed up by not checking the queue to see if there was a dupe of the article he'd just approved....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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.
I think the parent makes a valid point. A lot of the emphasis here seems to be on how tricky it would be to safely entirely charge one of these from empty in 5 minutes. However I have to wonder how much that is actually the requirement. Most people pulling up to a service station don't have totally dry tanks. In addition, when you can go home and trickle charge over night why would you try to fill it completely at the service station? Filling it enough to last the remainder of your expected use for the day would seem more likely. There is also the question of how frequently most people would actually need a service station given that their vehicles get topped off every night and they start full each morning. If you think about that, it is a markedly different fueling pattern from what we are used to with gas powered vehicles. Moreover, what is to say that you couldn't add an extra boost to the range by starting to integrate solar cells into the tops of the vehicles? They wouldn't be enough to run the car, but they might be enough to give that extra bit of range that gets most people over the charge threshold beyond which they almost never need a service station at all and certainly don't have to fully fill the car while there. Ask yourself how many miles you really drive in a day, then ask yourself why you are trying to fit an electric car into the same fueling patterns that you have with a gas powered one.
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
$9.00 of power based on my 'current' rate, ~$0.08/kWh, is 112.5kWh so it's even worse.
No - my RSS feed says:
500 miles on a 5 minute recharge?
for #2 it says:
Charge in 5 minutes, Drive 500 miles?
There is only a subtle difference, but it's there. Maybe the kind submitter (who should be banned for being such a lame fool) would care to give us #3:
"For a 5 minute recharge, 500 miles!"
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)
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that's what the 5 minute at recharging stations are for. Probably running 440 or 480 directly off the power lines? At home I'm sure it will take longer. I also recall seeing something mentioned or implied about a "battery swap" at those stations, so perhaps the charging time is considerably longer, and the swap only takes 5m?
;).
;)
I also checked their patent, which seems like a reasonable decent use of a patent for a change provided it actually works. Think of the Tesla using this instead of 6381 exploding Sony batteries
But more importantly, does this remind anyone else of the batacitors from Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld? If you could only charge them with lightning strikes - free power!
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
...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
And what do they consist of? How will this affect the power grids of large United States cities? What are possible cost implications here? My point was that they're not listing the total cost of making this switch.
Stop thinking! No progress allowed! Be a team player! Team players get food. People who think and speak get fired! Be a team player! No progress!
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
If everyone's car magically transformed into an electric? It would be disastrous. However, worst-case, everyone buys an electric as the gasoline cars wear out. The transition would take 10+ years, and the grid would expand to cope with the increased demand.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
insightful moderation?
Because it brilliantly and accurately illustrates how quick people are to dismiss new ideas by haphazardly flinging one nonsense question after another at them until everyone is so confused that nobody knows what the fuck the idea was in the first place.
I think there are some valid concerns that need to be addressed.
Concerns? Forest fires are valid concerns. This is a car that runs on electricity.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
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.
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.
Solar cells are logical to consider for electric cars, but aren't necessarily cost effective. Remember that we're talking about $9 of electricity for a full charge. Have you thought about how long it will take and how expensive the panel will be to generate that many kilowatt-hours of electricity?
If you can easily plug your car in at night to top off the charge you're not going to bother with the cost of a set of solar cells. But it might be worth doing if you have a short commute, park in the direct sun all day, and can't easily recharge at home. It wouldn't take more than a few square feet of solar cells to meet that demand, I'd think.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Flamebait much?
The issue most people are bringing up is the "$9 of electricity in 5 minutes". Mostly by people with real engineering experience. And they have a point. $9 worth of electricity is a LOT of power, enough that if you try and transfer it in 5 minutes, things WILL melt. This isn't some vast conspiracy to keep this technology suppressed, it is common sense.
FWIW, I think the press release has padded the numbers a lot, like it is really going to be $3 worth of electricity that they will charge $9 for, "5 minutes" really means 15 minutes, and "500 miles" really means 150 miles. But still, it would be a step in the right direction. Now if they can answer how it'll heat a car when it is -10F to keep me from freezing to death on the way to work...
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
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.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
A good way to mitigate this surge in power demand at home, it would be smarter to have an equivalent capcitor sit at home and charge over the course of an hour or two and then unload it's charge to the vehicule's capacitor.
With this method you could even schedule your capacitor to cahrge during the night where electricity is cheaper (at least here in europe).
What are the advantages vs a battery? Well your local Shell station could be running massive capacitors for you and you could just plug-in real quick without the need to wait hours at a time to fuel up.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
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
Of course, they could use larger versions of the capacitors at the fueling station to store a "charge" of 52 kWhs. 52kWhs * 3.6 MJoules = 187.2 MJ. The vehicle gets pulled into a stall, the driver gets out, large copper or gold rods drop from the ceiling into sockets which are directly connected to the capacitor. You have a bank of capacitors which switch on in succession, ramping up current (this minimizes switching problems, since 2700A is not fun to switch) with some type of diode in the middle to prevent back flow. In 5 minutes, the car is charged. Meanwhile the capacitors are recharging from mains current. Green light comes on, next car comes in. To make it work, you'd need something a little beefier than a 220 home circuit, possibly a 12.5kV line which is pretty common in commercial areas. You could probably do at least one car at a time, more if you could increase the charging capacitor capacity (which would be fully charged overnight or during off-peak times).
As far as costs, of course the cost of electricity is going to go up for everyone. However, with transmission lines, you build them (once) and then the power keeps coming. So after the initial investment, you are going to save money over gas. Gas has to be brought in by truck, which costs money in labor and fuel and truck insurance, etc. Then you have pump maintenance, etc which is no longer necessary. On the other end you have a regional distributor who takes a cut, a refiner who takes a cut, a global distributer who takes a cut of the crude oil, and then a producer who takes a cut. Not to mention the people doing the transporting between each of these middle-men.
With electric, you are going to cut out a lot of middle men. The utility, if fossil powered, will buy in large bulk quanities that will be delivered to one location, probably by ship. So, just by moving energy by transmission line we are cutting back on the total energy use required by the country. It's all a big chain reaction.
I hope they can make this thing work.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
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
Because I like to drive long distances, for trips for instance. Right now, when my tank is empty I can fill it up in a few moments and drive on. If it takes to long to recharge, I'll have to stop for the night when my capacitor runs down.
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.
the voltage is 3500 volts,
read the patent, I posted all the information on it yesterday at the original posting
sheesh!
dupe posting and dupe commentary...
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
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?
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.
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.
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.
It appears to be for the means of manufacturing a specific design of capacitors. That should be exactly what patents are for. The same thing would occur for room temperature super conductors, should they ever be discovered. Once known, they'll be obvious, but to initially produce them will be hard.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Forget about putting one of these ultracaps in my car. I'm getting one for my house. I can buy all the electricity I use in a day at off peak rates, store it in the ultracap and use it throughout the day.
The payback time for the ultracap is less than 2 years in my area. After that, I get half price electricity. Not to mention, power outages of less than a day would no longer have any impact on me. I cant remember a time when my power was out for more than a few hours.
The more I think about this product, the more it changes the world. Wind generated electricity gains about 30% better cost effiiency due to the fact that they can sell off peak generated power at peak rates.
In fact, the idea of off peak disappears entirely, due to arbitrage. All electricity becomes cheaper due to this.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
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.
"Road improvements etc."
You misspelled war.
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.
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!
Capacitors leak charge across the dielectric. To increase the charge capacity of a capacitor, you increase the surface area of the charged plates, move the plates closer together, or most likely, both. Moving the plates closer together means a thinner dielectric, which, obviously, will have a lower resistance than a thicker dielectric of the same type, and thus a higher leakage current. Large capacity capacitors don't typically maintain their charge for very long.
You can read more about capacitors in many places on the web. Try clicking on that link and searching for the word 'leak'.