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The Replacement For the Battery?
jackd writes "Great article in Technology Review, bordering on 'too good to be true,' about a small company in Texas that is developing the replacement for the electrochemical battery. The device is a kind of hybrid battery-ultracapacitor based on barium-titanate powders. Quoting: 'The company boldly claims that its system... will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety... The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance.'"
Leave cars to companies that specialize in cars, like Honda or Ford, that can apply your batteries to already working hybrid or electric cars with manufacturing, distribution and sales in place. If you have amazing [anything] technology - focus on that technology instead of re-inventing its applications.
I've blogged about this EESTOR stuff twice already:
s torage_r.html a pacitor.html
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/09/power_
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2007/01/ultrac
And I remain unconvinced that they are going to actually achieve what they claim. And even if they did, we don't have the 10,000amp service at my house necessary to actually charge them at speed. And we haven't heard anything about "leakage" (or "self-discharge") rates.
It's all vapor ware until they show us a functioning prototype instead of just bragging about materials purity...
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
a deep shade of skeptical. In fact I'm borderline disgusted. A claim like this should ONLY be made when at least an engineering sample is available for review.
I'm tired of "too good to be true" products whose primary goal is to draw VC.
I bet in a few months, they will only be somewhat better and in a year, it will turn out that their product is actually inferiour for mots applications. Same scam over and over again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Per the article,
So, let's see...lead-acid batteries have a energy density of 30-50 Wh/Kg. Lithium-ion is 110-160 Wh/Kg. If it packs 10x as much as lead-acid batteries we can expect an energy density of 300-500 Wh/Kh. About 3-4x that of li-ion battery. Although the claim doesn't seem overly outrageous I find it unlikely that someone has managed this sort of improvement while the rest of the world is clueless.
This might be some shocking news to you - but your big oil companies didn't end up rich and powerful by being morons. I fail to see the financial gain in Shell (or any other big oil) buying the company and disbanding the project. Wouldn't it be more sensible for them to buy the company, finish development, and then have a strategic advantage over their competitors by being able to roll with the punches as oil demand goes down and demand for high performance energy storage goes up.
Actually, no, what I have written is crazy. I forgot to take into account that these are the same people that suppressed the 400 mile to the gallon carburettor and had the guy killed that invented the car that only runs on water.
If the battery works the way they claim it does for as cheap, etc., then they stand to make much more money letting the company flourish then selling it to Shell. Even if they did sell it, Shell would have the wits not to destroy the technology; they would just become a more diverse (and profitable) energy company as a result of the accusation.
Oh man.. as if tossing a charged capacitor to an unsuspecting victim wasn't funny enough already.
I just don't get this danger angle. I mean, yes, charged high-voltage capacitors can be dangerous. So can bottles of gasoline with flaming pieces of cloth stuffed in the neck. And yet, none of us seems to be particularly freaked out by a fifteen-gallon can of gasoline strapped under our butts when we're driving---even with thousands of tiny explosions occurring per minute under the hood in front of us.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be concerned about the safety issues---just that I think we can be reasonably confident that the obvious ones will be licked if this comes out to market.
Um... Couldn't you just use another bank of capacitors? At home, you can charge one bank slowly, and when you get back from the trip, use them to dump power into your car. The ones at home would be cheaper because there are much lower size and weight restrictions.
The same concept applies at the gas station- just have a big bank of capacitors. On the other hand, this type of power is perfectly doable if you have a high voltage line going to the gas station. I think people forget how much juice is going through those things, thousands of times more than what gets to your house.
If they can make a reasonable electric battery for a car that provide power for trips up to 60 km or so without needing a recharge, transportation could change dramatically.
Yeah, then all we'd need is this shit called "energy."
KFG
From time to time I've read the idea of swapping batteries in EVs as the solution to long charging times. It doesn't make sense for several reasons:
1) The most obvious reason is that different makes and models of cars will use differing battery packs. It would be very difficult for a station to stock packs for all cars that might show up.
2) Even for packs of the same type, there will differences in quality. If you just bought a car with 200 miles of range, would you want to have someone yank out your shiny new battery pack and replace it with one that had deteriorated to 80 miles range?
3) These schemes assume that it will be really easy and quick to replace the pack. That's far from proven. My estimate is that you're looking at a minimum of 20 minutes. While designing an automated system to swap packs is possible if they are all the same, it seems very unlikely that they will be.
4) Advances in battery technology are making it increasing less likely that the swap can be done quicker than a recharge. In the case of capacitors, the potential recharge times will so short as to make swapping a laughable proposition.
5) The propane tank example is a poor one if you want to support the EV battery swap idea. Where I live, the price of a refurbished and filled propane tank is ~$10/gallon which is much more than the value of the propane itself. One of the major factors is the cost of testing/refurbishing/replacing the tanks returned by customers which can be in arbitrarily bad condition.
6) People seem to miss one of the main advantages of EVs which is that the paradigm of periodically going to a "gas station" to get energy for powering our cars will mostly go away. Most EV charging will be done at home and with perhaps some supplementation at our workplaces. The only "gas station" type charging that needs to be considered is for the 5-10% of driving which is outside of a reasonable EV range. This will go down even further as EV ranges get higher.
7) The interim step towards full EVs is plugin-hybrids. These will be on the road within a few years and will bridge the gap from today's technology to the availability of long-range full EVs with a network of quick charging stations for those relatively few trips that take one far from home.
So, simply put, there will never be a large infrastructure for swapping batteries in privately-owned passenger vehicles as a means of extending range.
a residential hookup just doesn't have the capacity for a fast charge.
You could use some sort of energy accumulator. Store up the hydro for 24hrs, then dump it in 10 minutes. You could dump 144 times what a normal residential service could provide directly.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
"Well I wouldn't want 120KV lines in my house, kinda dangerous since they arc 5 feet or so. "
Not lines; a line. Proabably with a nice idiot-proof interconnect (so there's never any bare conductor). You could probably do it with a low-voltage/high-current magnetic coupling (also designed to not be 'on' until coupled).
"You would also have to have a transformer to upconvert from street voltage to 120KV, those are expensive."
Never heard of a flyback? If not, I don't suggest disassembling your TV. Anyways, they can be had for tens of dollars, or built for less (if you have LOTS of time on your hands)
"Just because you increase the voltage to offset the current flow, it will not negate the fact that you are sending 12KW through, you need big wires for that."
You're not sending 12KW through; you're sending 12 kWh through, over the course of five to eight hours. That means your cable has to be rated for 1500-2400W, 12.5-20A@120V at the transformer input, 0.0125-0.02A@12kV at the output.
Knowing a little Ohm's Law might help you out. Or at least knowing the difference between a Watt and a Watt-Hour.
Meanwhile, the voltage step up has nothing to do with 'offsetting' the current. Because of the way ultracaps work, you have to fill them using a very high potential difference (or suffer a greatly reduced operating capacity). You then step the voltage back down in the device using it (one of the reasons I don't see this tech in small applications anytime soon).
Anyway, a 20A/120V line is about 3/8" in diameter, insulator included (you generally see them as the bright orange extension cables). Hell, your air conditioner has thicker than you'd need (they're usually rated for 30A@120V). Truth is, current determines conductor size, so at 0.02A the conductor need not be very thick - though you'd want to bring it back up to the 3/8" diameter using insulator so as to protect from the voltage; I imagine 12kV would hurt a bit.
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