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EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor
An anonymous reader sends us to GM-volt.com, an electric vehicle enthusiast blog, for the news that last week EEStor was granted a US patent for their electric-energy storage unit, of which no one outside the company (no one who is talking, anyway) has seen so much as a working prototype. We've discussed the company on a number of occasions. The patent (PDF) is a highly information-rich document that offers remarkable insight into the device. EEStor notes "the present invention provides a unique lightweight electric-energy storage unit that has the capability to store ultrahigh amounts of energy." "The core ingredient is an aluminum coated barium titanate powder immersed in a polyethylene terephthalate plastic matrix. The EESU is composed of 31,353 of these components arranged in parallel. It is said to have a total capacitance of 30.693 F and can hold 52.220 kWh of energy. The device is said to have a weight of 281.56 pound including the box and all hardware. Unlike lithium-ion cells, the technology is said not to degrade with cycling and thus has a functionally unlimited lifetime. It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles."
What's the benefit of a patent for something that doesn't exist yet? At most, they're issued for things that are obvious or have existed for decades. ;)
I wonder what they will charge for this?
Let's see. 50kwh. That would run my computer for...two days no problem with monitor and broadband modem included.
Gimme two of these and some high-efficiency photovoltaics and good-bye power grid. I don't care if my house is ugly, cover the entire thing with HEPV.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
TFA:
52.220 kWh of energy
A single car battery is about 200 watt hours. The batteries in the Tesla Roadster holds 53 kWÂh according to Wikipedia.
Now thats an interesting coincidence. I wonder if they just worked out how much capacitor would be needed for the power plant of the Tesla.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Actually the watt-hour is a measure of (electrical, in this case) energy. It's an awkward convention, but it makes sense when you realize that Watts are equal to Joules over time and that multiplying time back in leaves you with Joules.
Epic correctional fail. kWh was correct.
Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
How do you figure?
The patent specifically mentions kW*H in reference to the 52.220 number.
I assume you were just trying to be smart and correct the summary thinking it was a typo. However, a kW*H is a valid unit of measurement.
In fact you could use them interchangably but it would give the very wrong idea as they measure different things.
A watt is one joule of energy flow over a second. so a KW would be 1000 joules of energy flow over 1 second.
A KW*H is a flow of a kilowatt continuously over an hour, therefore it would be a flow of 1000 joules over 3600 seconds.
So to recap:
1 kw = 1000 joules/sec
1 kw*h = 1000 joules/sec * 3600 seconds
If you were just going to measure the total energy usage, you'd have to keep it just in joules, in which case 52.220 KWH would be 187,992,000.
So yeah, big difference caused by little changes in notation. Of course i haven't done electricity in ages so i probably oversimplified somewhere and fubar'd up.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
the present invention provides a unique lightweight electric-energy storage unit that has the capability to store ultrahigh amounts of energy
Can't you express these things in units we all all understand, like jigawatts per nanofornight?
... and then they built the supercollider.
The worst, most inefficient computer in my house uses roughly 250Wh in continuous draw (less if the monitor is off, which it usually is). Relatively modern machine too (Pentium 4, lots of disks, etc).
Unless you have some seriously fucked up computer with hairdryers instead of heatsinks or a g'damned Cray as your desktop I can't see how you'd use that cell up in a 'couple of days'.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
A lot of cool data in the patent filing.
3-6 minutes charge time for 52 kWh. 286 lbs for that compared to 752 for a Li-Ion battery. And the Li-Ion takes 6h to charge.
It's things like this that convince me that while patents need some serious fixing, they shouldn't be abolished. While we haven't seen all the details, it looks like genuinely interesting and original to me and a step beyond the currently available state-of-the-art. Of course, only time will tell if this is really a good patent, and if the product is really any good in practice. It's easy to make things that look good in the lab but don't do so well in real usage.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
A capacitor has the ability for almost all braking energy to be fed back into it.
In stop-go traffic this could make a massive difference in mileage compared to a conventional battery.
No sig today...
It's only in Hollywood gasoline make cars explode with impact (or rather just before). In real world gasoline will burn yes but rarely explode as it need pretty exact amount of gasoline and oxygen to explode. Stop using Hollywood movies for education.
Ok, I have not read tfa (in this case tfp), but I do know a bit about capacitors. Follow along with me here: You can calculate the energy stored in a capacitor (in Joules) by E = .5*CV^2 where C = capacitance (in Farads) and V = voltage, or
--> V = sqrt((2E)/C)
--> 3500 = sqrt((2*187992000)/52.22)
3500v is a lot. Up until now most comercially available supercapacitors do 5.5v or less and tend to leak energy over time. It's possilbe these guys have really made a stunning break through (the fact they filed for a patent is sure something), but the numbers set off my bullshit detector.
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
It's only in Hollywood gasoline make cars explode with impact (or rather just before).
Sure they don't.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
No one has noted yet that these caps also have insane *individual* unit specs! They're rated for 3500 V, have about 1 milli Farad and weight about *5 grams* each. This is absolutely unheard of. Normally you have to choose two from: small size, high voltage and high capacitance.
The energy that a cap contains is written as E = U^2*C, so it's obvious that scaling up the voltage gives you high rewards very rapidly. The problem has been that the insulating layers inside caps cannot handle high voltages without being made very thick. This means less capacitance since ideally the plates should be as large as possible and as close as possible.
The bill of materials looks nice too: Aluminum, Barium, Titanium, simple plastic. If they can actually produce the goods, this could be very cheap to mass produce.
If they can commercialise this, it *will* revolutionarise portable power (3500 V inside your iPod?;). But until they show a working prototype I'd hold my horses and not bet on this to solve our energy storage problems.
From the numbers in the summary, a fully-charged one of these would supply enough energy to propel a 3300lbs (1500kg) car from 0 to 1100mph (500m/s)
Ahhh you must be from the Theoretical Physics Department, over here in Engineering we have wind resistance, friction and efficiency to worry about.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
At first I wasn't getting why this would have better capacitance than conventional materials. Then around page 6, I realized that they're laying down a lot of layers. Like, a micron of conductor and nine microns of dielectric in each pass.
This is what patents are really for.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
3-6 minutes charge time for 52 kWh.
Better use the heavy duty extention cord.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In their favour, an electric motor is much more energy efficient than an internal combustion engine. 20% seems to be the maximum for a practical internal combustion engine. Electric motors should easily be able to reach 90% efficiency, with the record being 98% efficiency. Thus that 4.5 litres of petrol (1.2 US gallons of gas) becomes 20 litres. Not too bad for a first attempt, given that a small car (eg. Toyoto Echo/Yaris) typically takes 30-35 litres of petrol on a fill.
Yaris and their ilk aren't the model of efficiency in their design. Surely it wouldn't be too hard to make a Yaris type car use 35% less energy, resulting in a capacitor powered electric car with similar range to a petrol equivalent?
It's NOT KW*H! It isn't kw either, nor is it kw*h.
It is however kWh, meaning kilowatt hour, and it is a unit of energy.
Start getting you units right, and capitalization DOES matter. M = mega, m = milli.
k, not kw.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
For more details on this, and people who have analyzed all the current data on in check out --> http://www.theeestory.com/
I've checked it out about once a week, for updates on it, but over the past year, it's heading towards vaporware.
Um, not really.
A combustion event, aka 'explosion' occurs at the beginning of every power stroke in a reciprocating internal combustion engine. When an engine 'knocks' there is a combustion event as well. What makes it a 'knock' instead of a normal part of the power cycle is that it occurs at the wrong time. Knocking indicates perhaps a spark timing issue or the use of a fuel with an improper octane rating (which indicates resistance to knock). Octane ratings describe the resistance of the fuel to spontaneous ignition relative to a mixture of iso-octane (by definition Octane rating of 100) and n-heptane (by definition an octane rating of 0). Extrapolation is what allows for an octane rating of greater than 100. Diesel fuel has a similar concept, a Cetane number which indicates susceptibility to "spontaneous" combustion, since diesels use compression to ignite combustion events rather than an electrical spark.
Modern cars do depend on a much higher octane rating than historical vehicles. This allows for running on a much higher compression ratio and/or the use of turbo-chargers which allow for an engine that is thermodynamically more efficient (as compression ratio approaches infinity, thermodynamic efficiency approaches unity). This is one reason why diesels (compression ratios in the 20's rather than 5-10 for gasoline vehicles) get better mileage for a comparable vehicle/power output.
You are, however, entirely correct about the relative difficulty of causing a gasoline burn or explode. Only the vapor state is flammable and only at a narrow range of particle size.
"But it works in this simulation software that I have just coded! How this cannot count as an 'working device'?!"
The patent implies they had built at least 10 of these things (they have a table of test results), years ago when they submitted the patent. If it is real, there is no reason they can't demonstrate it publicly now. So where is it?
Modern cars do depend on a much higher octane rating than historical vehicles.
It's actually the opposite - Our cars are normally built to run on pretty low octane ratings today. We have to take a huge swath of the stack for gasoline to satisfy our demand for it, and the result is that our gas, knock wise, is pretty low.
From what I can find, the Model T ran on 93 octane. Not exactly what I'd call a low octane.
Early gas was actually pretty high octane(but tolerances weren't as tight); we didn't actually need all that much of it and it was still competing against Ethanol*, among other fuels. It was only later that gasoline demand started getting high enough that they started running short on the higher octanes, and needed to mix in lesser octane hydrocarbons.
One interesting fact i came across was that the Model T was Ford's original dual fuel vehicle - it featured manual spark advance control and could run on anything from 100% gasoline to 100% ethanol.
*During this time period, everything was competing. There were dozens of electric car companies; steam, ethanol, diesel, gasoline were all competing.
I don't read AC A human right
Well whatever unit it is, 640k of them ought to be enough for anyone.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The stats are awesome for this if it's true. Here's a quick lowdown. Full stats are below (taken from PDF doc).
The weight is more than twice as light as Lithium Ion
The volume is 20% smaller than Lithium Ion
The charging time is 60x faster than Li-ion (15x faster than NiMH)
-----, EESU, NiMH, LA (Gel), Ni-Z, Li-Ion
Weight (pounds), 286.56, 1716, 3646, 1920, 752
Volume (inch^3), 4541, 17881, 43045, 34780, 5697
Discharge rate/30 days, 0.1%, 5%, 1%, 1%, 1%
Charging time, 3-6 min, 1.5h, 8h, 1.5h, 6h
Life reduced with deep cycle use, none, moderate, high, moderate, high
Hazardous materials, none, yes, yes, yes, yes
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Oh, yeah. kWh are confusing. I guess it's only natural to ignore the fact that 1 kWh is simply the energy spent by using a device that has a power of 1kW for an hour.
On the other end, 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 furlong = 220 yards and 1 mile = 8 furlongs. Sure. That makes TOTAL sense
Lead acid batteries start to degrade quickly once taken below 60% of nominal capacity, and car batteries may only stand 30-40 cycles of discharge below 50%. My marine batteries weigh a total of about the same as the EEStor claimed device, and have a real-world capacity of 1.5kW/hour, if I don't want to replace them every 3 years. This is a ratio more like 30 to 1.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Now, using 1 Joule == 1 Watt for 1 Second, that comes out to 566kWh, roughly 10 times what this (and other) electrically powered vehicles can manage.
Looks like they have a long way to go before they have enough juice for mainstream use.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I get a kick out of that as well. I know capacitors. and they can explode.
Gimmie one and a way to significantly exceed it's specifications.
I'm guessing 72,000V at and inrush current of 20 amps would make this thing explode.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Now its good that this thing allegedly won't explode while being charged
Welcome to the wonderful world of internal resistance.
Wikipedia files it under output impedance, although no one outside of maybe textbooks refers to it that way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_resistance
In summary, no perfect current or voltage sources exist. All power supplies can be modeled as a "perfect" supply with a series resistance.
In practice the difference can be huge. Short out an old fashioned 10 aH zinc copper gravity cell and nothing particularly interesting occurs due to its high internal resistance. Short out a 10 aH nicad, and good luck dodging the shrapnel.
Another amusing comparison, when NiMH batteries were very new, like in the late 80s, RC car racers like myself were impressed that they held around twice the charge of the old NiCd technology. However, the internal resistance was so high, that they didn't go so fast. I guess in the intervening decades NiMH now has a low enough resistance to use in RC cars, but that sure wasn't always the case.
Internal resistance has always been the problem for supercapacitors. I remember being quite disappointed when, as a kid a few decades ago, I bought one of those newfangled carbon based super caps, like 0.1 farad at 5.5 volts, and expected if a couple thousand uF made a shower of sparks when shorted out, 0.1 farad should make like an atomic explosion when shorted, however the internal resistance of the cap was like multiple ohms so it didn't even spark. I vaguely remember that once charged it ran a LED a long time though.
The problems super caps always had (until now?) is you need a ultra high conductivity for the plates to get a low internal resistance and a ultra low conductivity for the dielectric (not dialectic, that's another story) to get low leakage currents, and both have to be compatible with each other (from an electrical standpoint, sodium metal foil and ultra purified water sounds like a good capacitor design, but from a chemical standpoint, maybe not so good. Chlorine is probably an even better insulator than water in this application). Finally it would be nice if it were made without toxic waste like PCBs or beryllium oxide insulators (both of which have been used in electronics applications in the past). And then there's minor little things like mechanical stability, manufacturing problems, and material sources like tantalum. Their claim to have worked around all those problems is what makes this patent very impressive, if true.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
we like massless frictionless spherical monkeys hanging from massless ropes attached to frictionless pullies, thankyouverymuch.
Ahhh you must be from the Theoretical Physics Department, over here in Engineering we have wind resistance, friction and efficiency to worry about.
--
Ahh you're from the Engineering department... Over here in the Manufacturing department we have to worry about cost ,liability ,feasibility ,and marketability to worry about.
and don't you dare talk to marketing, both of you will confuse them and those idiots will go out telling everyone we can go 10,000 miles and charge in 6 seconds for -$10.00.. "Why you'll make money!" they will market this very wrong.
So when marketing comes by, look sad and say it kills puppies.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You misunderstood my flame. * is ok. But the letters are wrong.
k = kilo, not K
W = Watt, not w
h = hour, not H
just imagine plugging your car in at the mall, forgetting to set a max out, and coming back to find you've downloaded 32 gigajoules, and that'll be 1000$ please sir.
A full capacitor, like a full gas tank, won't accept additional charge. Plus, you can't spill electricity, so no, you're scenario is dumb.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles.
It may not explode when you hit it, and I'm not genius with electricity, but can't capacitors discharge their energy pretty quickly? Wouldn't 52kWh discharged through a pile of metal with people trapped inside be somewhat less than safe?
The result are 1,5 MJ per kg. Though better than normal still a long way (by a factor of 30) from fuel gas.
True, but you can't turn kinetic energy into fuel-gas (i.e. regenerative braking), and your I/C engine is wasting >65% of the energy anyway, so as part of an overall system, energy density isn't the whole story.
I'm from the Legal Department, and I just got off the phone with $ANIMAL_RIGHTS_GROUP.
Apparently someone has been telling marketing that we kill puppies for fun, and they spun it as a feature.
Anyone want to explain to the R&D Department why their funding is getting cut?
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
How many times you can charge/discharge a storage medium without it degrading is no way related to thermodynamics. Now if they claimed %100 efficiency, you'd have something to complain about.
The gas back then often got high octane ratings by using a lead additive. Increased environmental regulations for leaded gas are one reason why engine efficiency dropped so badly in the '70s (most because lead doesn't work with catalytic converters rather than regulating lead directly).
Blending in some kind of alchol may get us 120 octane pump gas once again. Another problem solved by booze!
Not a typewriter
If we really want to split hairs, we should note that "explode" and "detonate" are two different concepts. Some explosions are detonations, and others are simple deflagration where the fuel burns rapidly but evenly over some period of time.
The physics of the two is vastly different. A detonation denotes an event where the material burns at a rate that is supersonic, and a deflagration is subsonic.
In a detonation, an instantaneous pressure jump moves through the material faster than the material's normal speed of sound. This produces instantaneous pressures that can go into the millions of PSI. A strong enough shock will shatter any material.
Occasionally, the fuel/air mixture in an automobile cylinder will partially detonate. These cause weak shocks that we notice as "knocks" and "pings" - and which over time will destroy the pistons in the engine. High compression, low octane fuel, and local hotspots in the cylinders are the usual reason for this.
As a side note, even smokeless gunpowder doesn't detonate, it just deflagrates on a time scale of 0.5 - 3 milliseconds. If it did detonate, the gun would quite spectacularly imitate a fragmentation grenade.
From the perspective of an observer outside the combustion both can produce similar effects, though detonations are much more spectacular.
If the capacitor is cheap enough, you could have a second one at home, either on trickle ready to quickly charge the first, or remove the dead one and put in the other.
OK -- 52.220 kWh and you can charge it in 5 minutes or so. How?
Even if you have a dedicated 220 vac connection, how many amps do you need to draw to feed this beast in only 5 minutes?? Or are we going to need 460 vac connections at home?
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
It is not something that you can produce in bulk, store it, distribute it, and tap a burst when you need it.
Could you not build the electric equivalent of a gas station, which used a bank of ultracapacitors as a buffer between the power grid and the ultracapacitors in the end-users' cars?
Or for remote locations, use the same permanently-installed bank of ultracapacitors, but charging from one of those multi-decade no-maintenance fission power modules the Japanese are developing.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Yes, briefly.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
This conversation has just taken a turn for the absurd... ...LY DELICIOUS!
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
It was only later that gasoline demand started getting high enough that they started running short on the higher octanes, and needed to mix in lesser octane hydrocarbons.
Nope, it was the EPA making the refiners stop using lead. Otherwise you are correct, gasoline used to have a much higher octane rating.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I think, in the context of a slashdot forum, anything is okay so long as a reasonable person can discern meaning. mW vs MW is indeed a problem, but kw vs kW??? What exactly did YOU think the 'w' stood for?
Never, in any context is it ok to write incorrect information. And the problem comes when people start writing mw, Mw, mW and MW respectively, and then mixing 1,000 with 1.000. The numbers get way way way off, so it is _never ever_ ok to start messing with units and hoping the reader "gets what you mean" just because you are lazy.
And people correcting other people, they just have to get things correct or it's an epic fail. What is the point if being a smart ass, if you are just another dumb ass who gets it wrong again?
The correct figure is: 52.22 kWh
The home recharge rate difficulties you outline don't really exist.
If mobile supercaps become affordable, then fixed home supercaps will be even cheaper, probably by a large factor because they can be much larger and heavier and less energy-dense. (You could even use lead acid batteries in the home charging station if that turns out cheaper.)
This means that your home AC supply can charge your home supercap station at whatever rate the mains wiring can stand (in particular, overnight when the electricity rates are cheaper), and then when the car comes home the home station just slams its stored power into the car's supercap at a huge rate and in a short time.
Transferring high power a very short distance is not a problem: just think very fat copper busbars and motorized conical high-area connections.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I agree completely, but I think you should reconsider your usage of "." and ","... when writing scientifically or mathematically, I NEVER put punctuation in the number except to indicate the decimal place. The main reason for this is that people from different countries use different symbols (1000 = 1,000 in UK/US = 1.000 in many European countries / "exactly 1 to three places" = 1.00 in UK/US = 1,00 in many European countries). So, to avoid confusion, I prefer to just write 1000 rather than 1,000 or 1.000. (as a note, I prefer to use a "." for the decimal place when writing English, because it matches the style used by the native English speaking countries, just as I use "," if writing German)
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It's very difficult to sell perpetual rights to something that is only patented for a couple of decades.
The EEStor device isn't really a supercap, in that it's not like normal supercaps in either construction or operation. It's "merely" a ceramic cap with a very high dielectric constant and very high breakdown voltage. The model they discuss is 30F in 280lb -- hardly competitive with the little tiny 1F supercaps you can buy cheap. Except that it runs at 3.5kV rather then 5.5V.
Also, you can buy more conventional supercaps with very low ESR these days. For example, Cooper Bussman makes a supercap that's 100F at 2.5V, with a 20mOhm ESR. Available at Digikey for $26.
Welcome to the wonderful world of internal resistance.
Wikipedia files it under output impedance, although no one outside of maybe textbooks refers to it that way
Impedance acts exactly like resistance, except it's only for alternating currents. Run 5v DC through a coil and it will still be 5v. Run 5v AC through a coil and your output voltage will go down. That's called impedance; impedance impeded AC while letting DC pass. The higher current's frequency the more it is impeded.
Wikipedia is correct; DC current cannot pass through a capacitor, so it is indeed impedance rather than resistance.
Free Martian Whores!
Never, in any context is it ok to write incorrect information
WRONG, language is about communications and so long as the point was conveyed correctly and the meaning non-ambiguous there is no problem messing up the case. This is especially true when a bunch of lay-people are discussing a technical area. People like you need to adjust their attitude to realize that human languages are NOT the same as programming languages or scientific equations, some of the time getting it close enough really is ok.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually, there is PLENTY of power. The problem is that the demands does not match the palants. And a number of studies have already been done concerning the car charging. It was determined that there is PLENTY of power assuming that most charge at night. That is why we are moving towards time based power (more expensive in the day vs. night).
.01 and sell it back at .05.
And if EESTOR is real, or even if the other ultracaps come down in costs, what will happen is that ppl will charge at night, and either us it during the daytime OR sell it back to the power companies during the day. IOW, they will buy the power at say
Finally, you ppl in the east have an issue because your grid is one big one. Enough of the systems go out and it brings down a number of them. Internet tech needs to be applied here.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You may want to use precision words in the discussion. I think there is a little confusion with the use of explosion and combustion between you and the GP. I think the GP is referring to detonation, which is characterized by supersonic combustion. I think you are referring to deflagration, which occurs subsonically.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation
What should be happening in your engine is deflagration. I am not positive, but I think knocking is detonation not deflagration.
You are clearly thinking about spoken language when what we have been discussing written language about facts of how good a battery is.
A 52,220 kWh battery is 1000 times better than a 52.22 kWh battery.
And when I say I'm using 1.000 mW or 1,000 MW of power, how much am I actually using.
These figures are clear when you _say_ "fifty two kilowatt-hours", but they are totally useless if you get it wrong when you are writing it wrong.
So be exact when it comes to numbers and figures.
I'm gonna go and call my mom and use 20,000 MW while I'm doing it.
A combustion event, aka 'explosion' occurs at the beginning of every power stroke
It's not an explosion. It's rapid, but controlled, combustion (burning).
When an engine 'knocks' there is a combustion event as well.
Nope. Knocking is preignition or detonation (explosion).
Wikipedia is correct; DC current cannot pass through a capacitor, so it is indeed impedance rather than resistance.
You, ah, reading the same wikipedia page I am? We agree about impedance and AC current etc, but the wikipedia page is a totally different topic.
Output impedance
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Internal resistance)
and then a whole bunch of talk about internal resistances of batteries and such.
What I was getting at is that in a sense an output impedance is a complex measurement with a real an imaginary component, and an internal resistance of a battery (or a big super cap in a DC application) is basically an output impedance with a zero "j" or reactive component. But any one in the industry would laugh if you called it an output impedance instead of an internal resistance.
The whole internal resistance thing is relevant to this super duper capacitor in that if it's low enough, a short circuit makes a big bang. If it's too high then it dissipates alot of energy as heat when you try to draw too much power out of it. If the internal resistance is way too high, you don't get to pull energy out of it fast enough to heat up or blow up anything including itself. The original post was just the usual fear of technology, what I don't understand must be evil, etc, and I'm thinking that a super duper capacitor like this would be inherently safe if it's internal resistance is high enough. I saw talk of micron scale conductors, so I don't envision directly driving a photoflash with this thing...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Back to basics. A capacitor is an insulator between two conductors. The key concept here is that their insulator has an insanely high breakdown voltage, which is why they can supposedly make an ultracapacitor that operates around 500V instead of the usual 5V or so.
The patent says "The alumina-coated calcined CMBT powder and the poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic have exceptional high-voltage breakdown and when used as a composite with the plastic as the matrix the average voltage breakdown was 5.57 * 10^6 V/cm or higher. The voltage breakdown of the poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic is 580 V/micrometer at 23 degrees C. and the voltage breakdown of the alumina-coated CMBT powders is 610 V/micrometer at 85 degrees C."
Note how many different units they use. Conventionally, dielectric strength is quoted as KV/mm. So we have
First, why did they make a composite that's worse than either of its components? This would be obvious if they used the same units for all their breakdown voltages in the patent.
Second, those are unreasonably good numbers. The usual breakdown voltage for PET as used in Mylar capacitors is only 17 KV/mm. Why is their PET 35 times as good as everybody else's?
(Check this, please. Look at the actual patent image. The searchable text version at the USPTO doesn't show math symbols very well.)
A combustion event, aka 'explosion' occurs at the beginning of every power stroke in a reciprocating internal combustion engine. When an engine 'knocks' there is a combustion event as well. What makes it a 'knock' instead of a normal part of the power cycle is that it occurs at the wrong time
This is incorrect. When things are functioning normally, the fuel burns by deflagration, the reaction front is propagated subsonically by conductive heating of adjacent material. If you have knocking, what's going on is detonation, where the reaction front is propagated supersonically by compressive heating of adjacent material. Both deflagration and detonation are combustion reactions, but the latter is more powerful, less efficient, and far more destructive to your pistons. It's not just the same reaction occurring too early.
Adjusting for the differences in efficiency between an electric and gas engine it's about the equivalent of 5galons of gas. However, at 300LB's you could have two without much trouble so you could have a good range a decent range including some energy reserves.
PS: (52.220 kWh * 98%) / (36.6 kWh/US gallon * 30%) = 4.7 gallon but you can probably use more efficient regenerative breaks because you can charge faster.
Speaking as a Professional Engineer, there are capacitors that are not the simple dual plate (ceramic or electrolytic) you seem to think is the norm. Most utilities use capacitors with ratings up to several hundred thousand volts. they use (mostly) similar in concept designs to what you are used to, but spacings and insulators differ. Charge/discharge times differ too. the larger capacity units are physically quite large. Speed of light, internal reactance, etc. will limit how rapidly the charge can go in or out. Utilities use these units to adjust the power factor of a line to limit losses.
The unit under discussion seems to be a mix or matrix of small spheres coated in a conductor, suspended in an insulating matrix. similar designs have been proposed and made in laboratories since the time of Tesla (Nikolai, not the car). Most didn't work. This one is claimed to work in the lab. Each small sphere is a separate charge holder. As long as the insulator is thick enough, the unit should hold. The voltage is probably the highest they could get in the lab. That's to keep the KWH up. There will need to be a high voltage power supply, with a bleed off down to the voltage used by the motor. (Two way I hope). It'll take a lot of electronics to make this thing really work. There will be some power loss in the matrix. Some leakage, as well as some internal impedances to deal with. The car engineers should take care of that. If they can't, then it will just be another unfulfilled promise. The last hundred years is littered with those.
If that voltage could be raised an order of magnitude, I could use a couple of these on a substation I'm working on. If they are suitable for 60 Hz, that is.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
It's a measurement of a property of some (yet unknown) material whose thermal insulation properties are somehow linked to it's inductance: "Crank up the insulator coils; there's a cold front coming soon."
Language students: Don't try to learn English here. This ain't it.
There's a much safer way of charging your EV from overhead power cables for free. People have been doing it to heat their homes (illegally, of course) in outlying areas of Canada for years: place an inductor under a 350kV powerline & run wires to your house. The powerline operators hate it because the inductance messes up their power factor, and the poachers eventually get caught because the powerline operators sporadically use a small plane to patrol their rights of way for inductors. But, a 10 minute recharge-and-flee time would make detection near-impossible!
The Model T and Model A were dual-fuel vehicles. The distributor, which sent a spark to each cylinder, was "digital": You used the five digits of your left hand to pull the lever on the steering column to advance the spark timing as you drove. When running on alcohol you would advance the spark timing a great deal more than for gasoline, to accommodate alcohol's cooler-burning, high-octane qualities. The dual-fuel vehicles also had a carburetor that could be adjusted from the inside of the automobile by turning a knob (incorrectly termed the choke) on the dashboard.
Remember that when the Model T was built, gas stations were few and far between. Most farmers ran their cars off pure alcohol because that's all they had access to. The Model T will run off pretty much anything that can burn. It was engineered for a time when there was no infrastructure for cars, i.e., no gas stations, no roads, no highways. If anything, it's a better vehicle than most coming off the line today (as long as we're not counting safety features and comfort).
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
"It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles."
I'm skeptical. I recall reading ultra-ultra-capacitors have so far proven increasingly unstable as you find ways to store more and more charge. Researchers have found that out the hard way too. Once you reach high energy densities of charge you have what effectively is a bomb.
55kwh is a lot of stored energy, that can be unleashed by a simple short. Even if the capacitor material itself is super stable and won't internally short if punctured, you can still have that energy being dumped into an arc or whatever has shorted circuit. That's a hell of a big bang in the worst case scenario.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The EESTOR stuff has been analyzed---yes buy some random guy on a blog, but somebody who really seems to know what he's talking about.
Only in freshman physics can you say that the energy in a capacitor is simply E=1/2 C*V^2---or more correctly---measure the capacitance at V=approx 0 and then extrapolate.
Barium titanate is definitely a known ferroelectric (this is not misspelled) material with a very high dielectric "constant" k.
But it it is not really constant! At sufficiently high voltages (i.e. interesting for power storage) you get dielectric saturation, meaning that k = k(V) in reality and it declines heavily. You just can't make atoms and electrons do what EEstor wants. There isn't enough place to stably put that much energy in electrons unless you change their energy states--which is otherwise known as chemistry---and gasoline.
And if you have 50 kW-hr or so in a little place, and you get a short thanks to a collision which breaks the circuits, there's no way to NOT have a freaking BIG ASS meltdown and explosion. That potential energy IS going to go somewhere and if it was all in E-fields and capacitance, it will discharge really fast if there is a hint of a dielectric breakdown and this will vaporize.
Only if the 50 kW-hr is experimentally measured, not imputed from a low power separate measurement of capacitance or dielectric constant, will I believe it.
I have the feeling that this patent document may really be used for continuing the funding cycle, not actually protecting a (nearly physically unbelievable) technology.
They probably did create a very good ultracapacitor with good materials processing, but I bet the energy storage is still in the ballpark range of known ultracaps.
Having it be otherwise would be like saying you've refined petroleum into a new chemical fuel which has the energy density of fissile uranium, and no radiation!
There isn't any Moore's law in thermodynamics.
"It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles" It's easy to compute that fully charged EEStor contains 1.5 MJ/kg of energy. Assuming that polyethylene terephthalate is the bulk of material by mass (specific heat 1.0 kJ/(kgÂK)), accidental discharge of any single unit (in a car crash, for example) would release enough energy to heat it to 1500 C. Melting point of PETE is only 260 C. At that point, battery components will start burning, bringing temperature even higher, and likely setting a chain reaction. And EEStor is extremely fragile, with enormous potential differences across tiny gaps (3500 V across the 10 micron gap). The likelihood of such catastrophic outcome in even a moderate car collision is high.