Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
10 amp-hour 12V Li-Ion Battery: 500 grams ($100).
versus
10 amp-hour 12V Ultracapacitor (or 36-amp-second 12kV ultracapacitor): 50 grams ($100).
Current-limiting resistor of sufficient wattage rating to ensure that ultracapacitor storing that much energy won't vaporize any conductor that it happens to touch...: 450g. ($Priceless)
Perhaps the same could be used here. Pull into a "gas station". Dump & replace the whole battery pack (or the old powders or whatever) and pick up fresh. That would make a lot of sense from various angles. You won't have to fit a 10kA feed into every house. Just one hefty feed into the recharge station.
Of course, for any such technology to work, there is going to have to be some sort of regulatory standard for batteries (just like there are for fuels and oils) to ensure interoperability.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I find this shocking.
I see the claim about charging in 10 minutes---but I've never seen them claim that will happen at home. It is indeed quite clear, as you've figured out yourself, that a residential hookup just doesn't have the capacity for a fast charge. But frankly, that's not that big of a deal, because in practice it will not be impractical to recharge a car at home over the course of hours.
It's when you're on a long trip and you need to refill and go that you'll be wishing for a filling station with an ultracap-compatible, high-power electrical supply---for which you'd likely be willing to pay a premium kWh rate.
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.
As likely as it was in September: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/ 25/1837254
The good news: everything in the article is true, and they've already started production with a major worldwide OEM.
The bad news: it's Sony.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
If you are ready to buy stock in this company after reading this article. I own a business that you might want to buy stock in. My company makes food replicators, the kind on star trek. We don't have a working model yet but it should be out in a year or two. Please send checks to.... you will receive your stock certificates in 6-8 weeks.
The 10x comment must be pretty rough. From the article, the EEStor ultracaps will come in at 280Wh/kg, with Li-ion at 120Wh/kg and 32Wh/kh. So really, it's more like 2.3x the density of Li-ion. I dunno, that doesn't seem that far to me.
From TFA:
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
This is what I was talking about... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_Battery http://www.refueltec.com/
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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
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.
Um, you mean like the recently announced Chevy Volt (made by GM, the "company that killed the electric car"), which has a 40 km capacity on battery, and a small electric engine that kicks in as a generator when the battery runs out? They expect to be producing it in two or three years.
What was once true, is no longer so
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.
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Feh. I want to know two things:
Watts per kilogram (330) and Watts per cubic centimeter (not derivable from speculations).
Then I'll be impressed.
(a 25g AA battery at 1.2v output would store 6875 mAh, assuming a similar density to NiMH. Half of that would impress me.)
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Taken from the Technology Review article:
"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."
The Jim Miller quote above confuses me, as Maxwell Technologies advertises a 125V output power module which is spec'd to only lose 70% of its charge after 30 days. So why is he contradicting his own company's products?
For those who are unfamiliar, while ultracaps sound fantastic, they are ultimately bound by the physical laws of capacitors, one law being that their output voltage drops (linearly) as they discharge. Maxwell Technologies knows about this, so they develop ultracapacitor arrays with extremely high internal voltages (4000+ V) and regulate the power output using efficient step-down converters. Battery cells, of course, do this naturally, because the electrochemical reactions generating the current do so at a voltage determined by the electric potential of the galvanic reaction inside the cell.
This is one reason why you don't hear much about using ultracaps in portable electronic equipment. While ultracaps may be relatively compact, they are still bulky, and though they may be able to provide the necessary voltage, you have to factor in doubling or even tripling the required voltage to use efficient step-down converters. The story gets even worse for charging. Let's say you want to charge using 12 volts DC. Do you run through dedicated charging circuitry which takes in "safe" voltage, but can only charge the ultracap at battery-style rates (low current), or do you try and charge the ultracap in its theoretical minimum charge time (high current), which means that the wall-warts you are used to seeing will look more like big, boxy IGBT/Invert-based welders (and you thought your xbox 360 power supply was big...)
In short, while it sounds good in theory, the practical challenges of discharging and charging ultracaps are fairly sizable.
Why would it?
For example, your television steps your house current up to a couple thousand volts. At, say, 120kv, your house circuit need only handle 20A (ie: 120kv by 0.02A is 20A at 120v. Given the specs of 280Wh/kg and 100lb [45.5kg] for a vehicle power system, that means we have 12kWh to fill. That means 5 hours for a complete fill-up, or just leaving your car plugged in overnight.)
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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.
I was pretty sure the order was supposed to go:
Capacitor
SuperCapacitor
Capacitor64
Capacitor^3
Gii
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
Be careful. Slashdot has been running lots of stories that are "investment opportunities". Read this, the first comment to the story linked from the Slashdot story. I didn't write it, it was written by someone with the nick Emosson, but it sounds correct. (Also, read the other comments showing skepticism of the idea.):
"Unfortunately EEStor never made and will never make the supercapacitor described in the patent because they ignore a well known physical effect, called "dielectric saturation".
"Barium titanate has been used in capacitors for decades, due to its high dielectric constant: (PDF file).
"However, the dielectric constant drops as the electric field strength increases: http://www.nap.edu/books/NI000488/html/49.html
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v71/i12/p890_1
"At a hypothetical field of 3500 Volts over a thickness of 12.76 micrometers, as proposed in the patent, the dielectric constant of barium titanate would be orders of magnitude lower than the claimed 18500, reducing capacity and energy density by the same factor...
"This has been discussed in more detail by Prof. Anatoly Moskalev on December 24th and 26th, 2006 in
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/index.php?p=43
"with an update on January 20th, 2007:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/?p=46."
Also read this comment considerably below:
"Further evidences of EEstor's hype! by Roger Pham 1/22/2007 10:41 PM
"In his patent #7033406, Richard Weir, EEstor CEO, cited data published WAY BACK in 1985 from the Japan's Journal of Applied Physics, as basis for the high dielectric property of Barium Titanate (BaTiO3)powder, when coated with aluminum oxide and calcium magnesium aluminosilicated glass. If BaTiO3 capacitor was so good way back in the 1985, the likes of the GM EV1 would be around evey street corners since 1996, or the Prius would have been a PHEV way back in 1997!
"What held back coated BaTiO3 powder from becoming a SuperCapacitor was the fact that BaTiO3 has dielectric property that varies by nearly ten folds with just typical seasonal swing in ambient temperature, and the fact that its dielectric property drops by as much with high electrical field strength, as Emosson has brought up!"
barium titanate has an extremely high dielectric constant of around 5000 at room temperature. see http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/selvaduray/page/papers /mate115/hsiaolin.pdf
This is hundres of times more than polystyrene, but the challeng is still formidable:
A cap with 320Wh/kg or 1GJ/m^3 or 1kJ/cm^3 at 3kV would require:
C/cm^3=0.7Farad
Since C=k*e0*A/d, e0=8.8E-12, k=5000
we get C(BaTiO3)/cm^3=4.4E-8*A/d
and with A*d=1cm^3 (not all of the cap can be dielectric so this is a ceiling)we get:
A=4m^2 and d=250nm
So with d=250nm, and U=3kV, the voltage across the dielectric is 12GV/m. Breakdown voltage for most ceramics are less than 300MV/m.
This would imply less than 1% the capacity claimed. Still an incredible feat, but the car would only go a few km.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Isn't this the 3rd year these startups have been pitching supercapacitors? The first one was in San Diego. In exchange for a super sized check, they gave you a 5F capacitor that supported up to 1V and recharged 100 times before it died. Still nothing new to report here.
The "electric car revolution" is a funny thing. As soon as you cross the Sunol grade, all the hybrids, vegetable oil, methane, ethanol, corn starch, soybean powered cars disappear and you're back in giant SUV land.
You are almost there, just put the parts together correctly. You said:
> Maxwell Technologies advertises a 125V output power module which is spec'd to only lose 70% of its charge after 30 days.
and
> they are ultimately bound by the physical laws of capacitors, one law being that their output voltage drops (linearly) as they discharge.
Now do the math. Or you could if enough numbers were available, so lets do it back of the envelope style. It's all about the discharge CURVE. Remember caps won't self discharge like a battery. That voltage is going to be slip sliding away from the small unavoidable losses and the that first 10% of the voltage drop will be seeping out what percentage of the watt-hours? 19% Ouch!
It will be like a car with a leak in the gas tank, the question is will be be a slow leak that can be ignored in most cases or will it feel like losing gallons per day. They are promising a car with a 500 mile range. Get the losses down where those Maxwell caps are and you lose 15 miles per day to losses. If the losses creep up to 5% terminal voltage per day to losses and recharge nightly and that will be paying for a 50 mile drive whether it sits in the driveway or runs all day. Large losses mean splitting it into banks and only charging what you plan on needing plus a reserve. Big lot of bother. Lets hope for low losses, but at the extreme voltages they are talking about I doubt it.
Democrat delenda est
This temperature "issue" is a red herring.
As the thing requires being kept above -20 to work, put it in a well-insulated box with an electric heater and see to it that the heater comes on if the temperature goes near -20. A heater working at those temperatures, and only looking for a rise of a few degrees in a very small volume, wouldn't consume much energy at all, and it can tap the ultracap for energy, or simply be plugged in. Or keep your car in a garage. Or both. Hell, around here, we have to plug in our cars now when it gets around -20, because gas engines don't work very well when they get that cold, either. My car has both battery and engine-block heaters.
Where I live (Montana) we see -40 once or twice a year in a cold year. Not yet this year, though we've been down to -20 once. I would *love* to have this kind of clean, high rate, long-lifetime energy storage available, and not just for cars. The cold, we know how to beat. Energy storage -- that's the issue.
I'm a lot more concerned about materials availability and manufacturing practicality than I am any of these supposed limits; if they can just make them so they work under limited circumstances, I'm pretty sure we can adjust the circumstances if we cannot adjust the ultracaps themselves. Electricity is particularly friendly to voltage and current conversions. The available power's the same, or at least, barring the efficiency losses of conversion, which aren't horrible. And anyone who is saying that the environment is a problem is ignoring our demonstrated ability to create just about any environment we want, wherever we want to.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Heard about this on the radio and looked it up a couple months ago:
0 06-07/06-022.html
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2
It's a battery-capacitor hybrid that has interesting properties. It's not at the same production level, but doesn't provide quite the same strong claims as the EESTOR system. Any opinions on the Brown effort?
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
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.
Isn't there other capicitors in an earlier story..
Nano fibers used to increase a capacitors surface area i believe was the concept.
There was also a similar development with lithium cells, also using nano-fiber graphite forests for electrodes, producing hysterical energy densities and recharge rates (like 80% in a minute or so), high efficiency (since they'd slag down at that rate otherwise), and both long lives and a large numbers of cycles (since the graphite nanotubes don't tend to degrade anywhere but at the tips, and very slowly there.)
Somebody also did something similar with lead-acids, of all things. Built the plates' base structure by plating the lead onto a graphite (non-nano) fiber base, rather than starting from a lead skeleton. Greatly increased charge/discharge rate and efficiency (since the graphite conducts better than lead) significantly reduced weight (like well under half of a regular battery if I recall it right) and enormous increase in number of charge/discharge cycles before failure (since the graphite skeleton holds its shape rather than participating in the chemical reaction, which is what's behind some of a lead-acid's failure mechanisms - thus letting the plates "heal".)
And then there's vanadium redox...
Lots of good alternatives in the pipe. A conglomerate of oil companies would be hard pressed to buy them ALL up and bury 'em. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It does indeed sound aw.. ahh crap!! low battery warning!!
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
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
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Well I wouldn't want 120KV lines in my house, kinda dangerous since they arc 5 feet or so. You would also have to have a transformer to upconvert from street voltage to 120KV, those are expensive. 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.
"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.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Meanwhile, if you don't have time to wait 8 hours (I imagine most people would have it plugged in as they sleep), you pull up to the juice station and plug into their 12kV@30A (360kW) line and be out of there in two minutes flat. It would best be supplied off their own ultracaps that feed off a continous flow of converted 480V 3-phase at 100A apiece (48kW, meaning a 15 minute recovery time per customer. As a station, you'd want lots of extra capacity). I give this setup because there's already infrastructure to install that sort of line.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1