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A New Lease On Internal Combustion
Somnus suggests we check out the latest issue of MIT's Technology Review, where researchers describe how they can dramatically boost engine output and efficiency by preventing pre-ignition, or "knock." How they do it: "Both turbocharging and direct injection are preexisting technologies, and neither looks particularly impressive... by combining them, and augmenting them with a novel way to use a small amount of ethanol, Cohn and his colleagues have created a design that they believe could triple the power of a test engine."
How long before this is bought/patented by oil companies and sealed away in the same warehouse as the Ark of the Covenant.
It's a cool idea, but it's about twenty years too late to do any good, IMHO. The modified engine requires two separate tanks, one for gasoline, one for pure ethanol (or possibly just a high ethanol mixture like E85). This means that gas stations would have to be retooled to provide ethanol. If you're going to retool the gas stations to provide ethanol, you might as well retool them to provide hydrogen instead. The whole reason for sticking with gasoline is that the distribution mechanism is already in place. Once you take that away and have to start changing things, that benefit evaporates faster than the ethanol....
And don't get me started about the customer confusion this would cause. "You mean my engine will stop running if I don't keep both tanks full?" If you think printers are bad, imagine your SUV suddenly having the engine capacity of a Yugo because you ran out of ethanol (if the engine runs at all). And I don't think they've considered the safety issues, either. Pump the wrong fuel into the wrong tank, and bad things could happen. That means that the new nozzles would have to be incompatible with gasoline nozzles and vice-versa or grandma's going up like a rocket ship.
It's a neat idea in theory, and perhaps it will find an appropriate application, but I don't think cars are the right application for the technology. IMHO, by 2011, gasoline-powered vehicles should no longer even be manufactured. Even at maximum efficiency, they are only about 20% efficient. If it's 25% more efficient, that's only 25% efficiency, and that isn't counting loss from the transmission, etc.. Using a gasoline reformer, fuel cell, and electric motor, as best I can tell from running the efficiency numbers for various key parts of the system, we should already be able to beat those numbers by a significant margin (say a factor of two), and that's with technology that is available now and doesn't require any special fuel source....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"You are quoting Cobasys' press about itself. This is not unlike citing the "Live green, go yellow" campaign as "proof" that GM's products are all ecologically beneficial, or "Carbon dioxide, we call it life" as proof that Exxon-Mobil is likewise."
Yes, that would have been a perfect response... had my post only quoted from their website. It didn't. Hence, straw man.
"Chevron then put the battery rights under control of a Joint Venture, "COBASYS," and decided to fund a lawsuit against large-format (electric car battery) competitors such as Toyota-Panasonic."
That can be summed up as follows:
NEWS FLASH! Company with patents sues competitor who infringes on said patents, Details at eleven!"
It would be news if Toyota had infringed on their patents, there was money to be made, and they *didn't* sue. Hell, they don't even meet the definition of a scummy patent holding company, as they *actually do* make products in the field that their patents are in, and are ramping up their operations. Their actions don't suggest ulterior motive at all. Evidence of an ulterior motive would be them *not* doing something that they could have made money on (in order to help Chevron) -- for example, *not* making batteries for hybrids when they have the patents for them. Here, they're being run of the mill, money-grabbing corporate pigs, looking out for *their* bottom line.
It appears likely that the advances in Li-ion and carbon-backed lead-acid will make it far more difficult to keep the next round of batteries out of vehicles.
NiMH are advancing as well, although being an older tech, odds are that they don't have as far to go (although one could have said the same about lead-acid batteries). Carbon-backed lead acid is not *that* impressive, and if it has the typical lead-acid chemistry reliability, let me be the first to say "no thank you" to a car full of them. Li-ion: see this post for my take on Li-ion.
It's always easy to say "NotYetHereTech will revolutionize the world!" Unfortunately, NotYetHereTech, more often than not, never comes or is obsolete by the time it does. Thankfully, there are so many NotYetHereTechs out there that the world still changes -- it's just a bad idea to back only one horse.
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.
It would be news if Toyota had infringed on their patents, there was money to be made, and they *didn't* sue.
And the outcome could have been "Toyota agrees to license the prismatic cell technology from Cobasys". This would have made Cobasys a lot more money than keeping Toyota out of the market for another 7 years.
Whatever Cobasys asked for, Toyota didn't think it was worth it. It happens. You think Microsoft wants to use mp3 after their recent patent blow? Once again, I'll reiterate: Cobasys *really does* make batteries that *really do* go into vehicles that save gasoline, hurting Chevron's bottom line. They also license to other companies that do the same thing, undercutting the notion that they're opposed to licensing. You're kind of boxed into the line of argument that they're opposed to the use of *one type* of cell that they hold the patents for while they *promote* the use of others that they make. This makes absolutely no sense. Hell, the terms of the settlement involve Panasonic EV and Cobasys cross-licensing future tech: that is, not only does Cobasys get the rights to use Panasonic's NiMH patents, but Panasonic got the right to use Cobasys's patents. Strange choice of settlement for a company that's trying to hide the tech, wouldn't you say?
A123's li-ion phosphate batteries are a mere 100 Wh/kg. Call me unimpressed. PO4FeLi is still less than conventional Li-ion (about 25% less, if I remember right). Altair is indeed dodgy. I'd say "dodgiER", because most press release claims about new tech simply fall through when it comes to commercialization. All of them are still better energy density than NiMH, but not by nearly as much. Charge cycles are rarely ever a problem for Li-ion. As I stated earlier, it's about battery age (well, not just age -- age at a given temperature; that's why you're supposed to cold-store your laptop batteries if you're not going to use them for a while). You can run your laptop battery up and down constantly for a month and see almost no change, but if you leave it sitting in your closet for a few years, when you get it back out, it'll have lost significant capacity.
A few years ago, a small Li-ion cell was a lot of money. Today, you can order cars (Tesla roadster, eBox
I hope that you were trying to make me laugh. If not, you seem to think that paying $100k for a car isn't "a lot of money".
Assuming ethanol comes from murdered children and the hydrogen from magic, hydrogen saves 132% more lives than ethanol.