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Ultracapacitor Bus Recharges At Each Stop
TechReviewAl writes "A US company and its Chinese partner are piloting a bus powered by ultracapacitors in Washington DC. Ultracapacitors lack the capacity of regular batteries but are considerably cheaper and can be recharge completely in under a minute. Sinautec Automobile Technologies, based in Arlington, VA, and its Chinese partner, Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Company, have spent the past three years demonstrating the approach with 17 municipal buses on the outskirts of Shanghai. The executive director of Sinautec touts the energy efficiency of this approach: 'Even if you use the dirtiest coal plant on the planet [to charge an ultracapacitor], it generates a third of the carbon dioxide of diesel.'"
Exxon buys them out, or lobbies against the tech and throws campaign money to the folks that make the municipal decisions, as big oil does with everything else progressive that possibly endangers their energy monopoly.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Aren't these, in the end, pretty much the same as a trolley? The bus is really a mini-bus that holds 11 people. It uses 40% as much electricity as a trolley. If you expanded the bus to hold as many people as a trolley can, wouldn't the increase in size and weight (both bus weight and passenger weight) make it use more energy?
If so, then what's the difference between this and, say, a mini-trolley? I mean, hell, why not ultracapacitor golf carts or something?
http://www.tenjou.net/
people said i was crazy when i talked about this a few years ago. the best advatage of UC's is they don't melt when you discharge a huge current as batteries do, hello electric sports cars that kick the shit out of petrol engines.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Pretty neat. There's tons of other uses for this technology. Among other things, ultra-capacitors are probably the way to go for non plug in hybrids.
Why would you be dead at a red light? If you're not moving then you're motors are drawing power.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
if that cap explodes, i could see it being very very bad.
If the fuel tank explodes...
You can't take the sky from me...
For urban locations where stops are seldom more than a block or two apart this makes for lower infrastructure costs, as no over-street trolly cables are needed.
The ability to alter routes would also be fairly flexible because you could tie into the power grid anywhere you need to add a station.
But the amount of power you need to deliver in a short time means that the stations have to have either the ability to acquire and store a massive charge in the between-bus intervals, (their own ultra-capacitors) or the grid inter-tie would really have to be massive enough to dump that much power into the bus in a couple minutes, for as many buses as you need to send down the line in rush hour.
A shorted capacitor might be fearsome fireworks display.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I imagine the streets of many major cities may wind up getting traffic jams very frequently, so what happens if the bus gets stuck in such a one, and it takes an hour or more to get moving again (e.g. vehicular accident further down), or however long it takes to discharge the ultracapacitors? I suppose it may be necessary to install a backup engine that runs on conventional fuel, possibly just to run a generator which will charge the ultracapacitors sufficiently to get to the next stop.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
you visiting riots or something? I have never once seen a burning car at the side of the road
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
or even hydrogen at 142MJ/kg and you start to get some idea of why people are excited about "the hydrogen economy".
Call me when there's a cheap way to store 30kg of hydrogen at STP in a form that can easily be used and stored onboard in a vehicle for at least 4 weeks without losses.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
perhaps you should work on catching up?
the US doesn't build things anymore; when you stop designing and inventing things as well, you'll be truly finished.
For jokes like this is that I keep reading Slashdot.
For this very reason I hate mandatory seatbelt laws, if there's the possibility someone will burn to death they should have the choice as to whether or not they will wear a seatbelt.
If you don't wear a seatbelt, you may suffer additional injuries that prevent you from escaping a burning car. You will also be worse off in any accident that does not involve a car fire. A much better solution is to wear your damn seatbelt and carry one of these in the car.
? Call me old fashioned (and it won't be the first time) but I'll .
You just got troll'd!
OK, now state the energy-to-mass and energy-to-volume figures of the gasoline PLUS gas tank versus that of the hydrogen PLUS storage matrix. Fact is, petroleum or synfuel equivalent is the most volume-efficient storage mechanism for hydrogen yet devised - not even counting the contribution of the carbon content. One liter of gasoline contains a higher mass of hydrogen than one liter of liquid hydrogen.
State of the art hydrogen storage systems have a container mass 10x the mass of the contained hydrogen, versus around 0.1x for gasoline tanks. Compressing or liquefying the hydrogen saps a huge amount of the theoretical energy efficiency of the system.
When you add container weight, petroleum is the most MASS-efficient storage mechanism for hydrogen.