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MIT Electric Car May Outperform Rival Gas Models
alphadogg writes "Inside a plain-looking garage on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus, undergraduate Radu Gogoana and his team of fellow students are working on a project that could rival what major automobile manufacturers are doing. The team's goal is to build an all-electric car with similar performance capabilities of gasoline-only counterparts, which includes a top speed of about 161 kph, a family sedan capacity, a range of about 320 kilometers and the ability to recharge in about 10 minutes. They hope to complete the project, which they chronicle on their blog, by the third quarter of 2010. Each member of MIT's Electric Vehicle Team works almost 100 hours a week on the project they call elEVen. 'Right now the thing that differentiates us is that we're exploring rapid recharge,' Gogoana said during an interview. He said that many of today's electric vehicles take between two to 12 hours to recharge and he doesn't know of any commercially available, rapidly recharging vehicles."
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TFA says it is a 356 volt system that charges at 1000 amps.
a 500mcm aluminum conductor should move 1000A just fine.
The batteries in your cell phone and Blackberry are lithium polymer, based on lithium cobalt chemistry. These have the highest energy density of common commercially available batteries, but their safe charging rate is limited to somewhere around 1C -- that is, 1 amp per amp-hour of capacity.
The MIT batteries are lithium iron phosphate. These unfortunately have much lower energy density than lithium cobalt polymer cells (not in the least because there's no polymer version available; the cell are in a metal casing). But they have a high power density and they can take charge rates around 4-5C (for the regular cells; they don't have the specs on the automotive cells on their website). That translates to much shorter charge times.
Watch the video. He explains that they are hooked up straight to the MIT power plant, and are thus able to dump huge amounts of power ("20 homes" worth) into the thing. They're pushing the envelope on the rapid recharge stuff.
Dear Anonymous coward #1 and #2:
It's not a division by zero error, because electric cars are not perpetual motion machines. When the EPA or similar organizations compare EVs to regular cars, the electricity used by the car during the efficiency test is converted to the equivalent gallons of gasoline burned, and the EV is given an "MPG" rating. Therefore no #DIV0 error.
Bottom Line: ACEEE.org found the GM EV1 is no better than a ~50mpg Prius or Civic.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's not a mispronunciation. The "jiga-" pronunciation was the one formally promoted in the US from the late 50s to the 80s. It is still, in fact, a correct but unusual pronunciation in English.
It comes from the Greek "gigas" (not bothering with unicode here), and if you've ever heard a gamma spoken in native Greek, both "jiga" and "giga" are off, but "jiga-" is a little closer. Think of ordering a gyro.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky