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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.'"
Geez.. ultracapacitors.. we had supercapacitors till now.. whats next.. ubercapacitors? ubersuperultracapacitors.. anyhow..
So far, the supercaps i know of are quite expensive, and their performance degrades - i.e. with each charge cycle, the capacity gets smaller and smaller. I am not sure what the lifespan of a supercapacitor is, but it surely isn't terrbily long. I guess for the current applications (flash in cameras for example) its not all that critical - how many times is flash used over the lifetime of the camera.. If the lifespan is really improved, then they may be onto something.
The trick is to modify the composition of the barium-titanate powders to allow for a thousandfold increase in ultracapacitor voltage--in the range of 1,200 to 3,500 volts, and possibly much higher.
Oh man.. as if tossing a charged capacitor to an unsuspecting victim wasn't funny enough already.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The Not For Hire ran on a batacitor charged on the grail stones. According to Phillip Jose Farmer these things were supposed to have been developed in the early 80s. 5th paragraph.
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First off, this was reported in Business Week back in 2005, with some of the same quotes.
What's striking is that Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms, is funding this. If they're funding it, it's not totally bogus; they will have done a due diligence and had some competent people look over the technology. There may turn out to be some reason it's not feasible, but if it was physically impossible, they wouldn't have obtained money from that group.
Your car battery, if it were made large enough to hold the same amount of energy as your 50-liter tank, would weigh about 17 tons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density):
50 l * 0.74 kg/l (gas) * 46.9 MJ/kg (gas) / 0.1 MJ/kg (Pb batt) = 17353 kg
For your laptop's battery, that figure improves by a factor somewhere around 6.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
Typing too fast.... before someone else points out the idiocy in my original post I'll fix a few of em myself.
> Get the losses down where those Maxwell caps are and you lose 15 miles per day to losses.
Since the power loss is not constant, which was the whole point, obviously this part has to be taken in the context of the next (fairly mangled) sentence and assume nightly recharging to 100% to enable the 500 mile advertised range. Which would be the logical course, so an unexpected trip could be undertaken without worrying about charging.
> Large losses mean splitting it into banks and only charging what you plan on needing plus a reserve.
Doh. The obvious method is of course to leave it one big bank and only recharge it to give tomorrow's driving plus a fudge factor if self discharge is a problem. (Explanation left as exercise)
But running the numbers a little more gets some disturbing trends. Assume the loss is only equal to 15 miles of driving per day as I did in the best case above. That means every single car would be wasting enough power to drive a NYC to LA round trip annually. But keep the caps around 25% charge most days would cut the waste in half. Assuming that the real world loss curve looks close to a perfect capacitor discharge.
Democrat delenda est
Why charge batteries for cars on the spot and wait for it? Once, I like to drive up to what was once my petrol station, and quickly swap the battery for another one, fully charged. Now if Shell etc. is to produce or charge batteries, that would leave the logistics chain to the "petrol" station intact, hence leading to a higher probability of success.