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Lithium Air Batteries Get Boost From IBM and DOE
coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy and IBM are serious about developing controversial lithium air batteries capable of powering a car for 500 miles on a single charge – a huge increase over current plug-in batteries that have a range of about 40 to 100 miles, the DOE said. The agency said 24 million hours of supercomputing time out of a total of 1.6 billion available hours at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories will be used by IBM and a team of researchers from those labs and Vanderbilt University to design new materials required for a lithium air battery."
Because this is a game changing technology, if it pans out.
i see subnotbooks with more than a day runtime comming
Lithium air eBikes are the way forward. Just need to get the big auto makers to stop seeding negativity towards "hippy geeks" who tend to ride them.
Well, because the DOE is bankrolling their computer time, does that mean the results will not be patent-encumbered?
Or are we in for more NiMH crap?
They use highly flammable metals to do this so we will have another round of explosive cars out on the highways, and being metals they will require some thought into the use of water to put the flames out at accidents. Would be great once the bugs and dangers are worked out.
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
For a battery of this capacity what kinds of charging time are we talking here? I know that the standard electric cars are something around 6-8 hours. To maintain an 8 hour charge time for something like that the current draw is going to have to be pretty darn high. I don't know if charging a car like this is realistic. Of course, you wouldn't need to give it a full charge every night for most people.
The controversy surrounds the fact that they tend to be expensive and use an energy-dense, highly flammable metal, to react with the readily available oxygen in the air.
TFA doesn't say if these lithium-air batteries are more flammable than other lithium batteries. "Controversial" should probably be dropped from the summary.
Absolutely a game changer. In fact, I got a real charge out of reading about them. The current methods are terminal. I was much more depressed before reading about these things. I think the technology really has potential. Hopefully they will cell, but they might have to amp up the advertising.
I'll have none of this airy-fairy stuff.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Current plug-in vehicles? Like, what a Chevy Volt or a hacked Prius? Nonsense. Try a Tesla Roadster, with a single charge range of 250 miles. Lithium-air might double the range then. But a factor of 5? No.
I do have one question though. How are lithium-ion batteries affected by increasing cell size? The Tesla Roadster currently uses a ridiculous number of very small cells in its pack, in a move that looks dictated by ridiculous patent licensing terms limiting cell sizes to those suitable for laptops in an effort to prevent the existence of something like the Roadster. That's what it looks like. But is there a technical reason to limit cell size? There is surprisingly little information available about how the performance of lithium cells change as they get physically larger (or smaller).
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From TFA:
"Because they use air that's pulled into the battery as needed, rather than store a second reactant inside the cell, lithium-air batteries could have an energy density of more than 5,000 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg)."
Anyone get the feeling that airborne lithium will soon be a pollution concern? At least with all that lithium around, depression should be a thing of the past!
Energy-dense storage media have been the missing link in a lot of relatively clean energy generation schemes. For example, both solar and wind power are challenged by the need to store power for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Tbh with the Tesla breaking 500km the main obstacle for Electric Vehicles is no longer storage capacity of the batteries but rather the recharge time and battery price. LiFeP batteries have short recharge times ( 5 minuets or so ) and are starting to come down in price, so the big issue right now is designing an electric interface that can safely deliver the 200kW or so that would be needed to charge the a Tesla-equivalent 50kWh battery pack in less than 15 minutes. The standard proposed in Europe supports up to 43kW so there's some way to go still, but theoretically if you just developed the EU's proposal to support 100kW then using 2 cables would get you down to a 15min charge time.
It's a bit of an engineering problem to make such an interface safe for the average commuter to use, but it seems to me it is now fairly clear that batteries will be future energy carrier for personal cars. Hydrogen no longer has any advantages over batteries since it is has a low energy efficiency and even worse refueling problems than electrics, not to mention the infrastructure challenges. There is still no good way to produce biofuel at the scales required, and even if you could you would have to set up a new infrastructure from scratch, and they would likely still result in more pollution than the batteries. With fast charging batteries on the market now flywheels have also lost their advantage of being able to "charge" very rapidly and their low energy density and high cost makes them unlikely.
Basically eventually battery price will come down enough, and the Oil price will rise high enough, that electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol. It's now just a matter of time, maybe just a few decades, before the majority of cars produced will be electric.
Can the US Gov hold patents? Is that legal?
If anything, I'd say it will either be unencumbered by patents (some open license format) in the best case, or IBM will get some kind of limited patent as part of their "cut."
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo
So I can go 500 miles but what kind of speeds will I be experiencing? There's a difference between doing 40mph and 80mph through the Nevada desert.
> Can the US Gov hold patents?
It can and does.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...But what exactly are they planning to accomplish with a supercomputer? What exactly are they looking for? Can they somehow brute-force search different models looking for ones that work?
And why can't they use a cloud instead? LiAir@Home FTW!
Gasoline at 50MJ/kg is pretty much the most dense energy storage possible in this universe excluding nuclear energy. (Hydrogen is 150MJ/kg, and might beat gas, but it needs to be in liquid form. Same range anyway) It exclude the weigh of the oxygen as well.
This is kind of a fundamental limit as to how much energy can be stored in *any* system using potential energy of the electric field of matter. That includes (nano)springs, batteries and small flywheels (flywheels bigger than the earth with relativistic speed could exceed this limit)
You may get 2x better efficiency in an electric motor, but I can not see how a battery can approach this value. A gas tank probably weighs 5% of the fuel it holds, and to build a battery where all infrastructure to support the (very) active material only weighs a few percent of the battery wold be very hard even if you find such a chemistry.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Well, besides devoting 0.024/1.6 = 1.5% of the time on one supercomputer at one national lab on this problem, how else is the DOE serious about this? And after the 1.6 billion hours, does the computer self destruct? Just curious. Science reporters love big numbers, don't they?
Currently hooked on AMP
Last I heard was lithium was a precious metal--and 50% of the world's sources were in one country (So Am).
Also, last I heard was precious meant expensive and rare...
" And after the 1.6 billion hours, does the computer self destruct? Just curious."
Same. 24 million hours? There's only 8,765 hours in a year, so what is that, about 2,500 years?
So I googled it. Apparently supercomputer hours aren't people hours, they're processor-hours, so 1 processor working for 1 hour is 1 processor hour. 24 million hours means (# of processors) * (# of hours) = 24 million. For example, (24,000 processors) * (1,000 hours) = 24 million. So it could be done in 41 days, not 2,500 years, if they have 24,000 processors working on it.
Not sure if I like this method of measuring processor usage since a project that took a million hours in 2001 wouldn't take a million hours in 2010 but that's what's in the article.
Oh and to answer your question: no, it probably doesn't self-destruct but it'd probably be replaced since I'd imagine if 1.5% is anywhere near my hypothetical 41 days then that'd put 1.6 billion at about 7.4 yrs.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
One advantage of gas is that when you use it, the car gets lighter. However, you're just counting energy density, forgetting energy efficiency. The car, specially on daily commuting, wastes a lot of energy. Braking, keeping the car on while not moving (like in traffic jams or lights), heat, there's a lot of energy that could be harvested or not wasted at all with electric cars.
I know you are right about that, but it really confuses me. I for one consider it a conflict of interest since they aren't private enterprise. Another thing I'm confused about is who exactly owns it? I have heard arguments that technically the companies that funded the inventors owned it because of that, and if that is the case wouldn't any patent held by the U.S. government be owned by any and all citizens that pay taxes? I don't expect anyone to help me here since the whole idea of patents is kind of confusing to me. People get them on carefully worded solutions to problems, or get a patent for merely discovering some kind of genetic sequence that was already there (genes, vitamins, etc..). Pathetic really. I'm just wondering how well they will hold up prior art when over 100,000 inventions will be dumped into the public domain this year alone. Don't need patent reform, or need to get rid of them. If they hold up their end then we just need to invent it before anyone else can patent it. =) Keep watching the PDI website.
Ummm... No it's not. It may be one of the best energy densities that we've found yet for relatively-safe, convenient, and stable common compounds, but it's nowhere near "the most dense". Most rocket fuels, explosives, and the class of more-efficient combustion products (such as hydrogen) are all better. They just have this annoying tendency to release their energy unexpectedly, all at once, or both.
But you don't need heavy gas engine in electric car...
Also, there are denser energy storage mediums than gasoline. Some are practical (diesel), some are not (lithium hydride + fluorine).
Oh and to answer your question: no, it probably doesn't self-destruct but it'd probably be replaced since I'd imagine if 1.5% is anywhere near my hypothetical 41 days then that'd put 1.6 billion at about 7.4 yrs.
It's much more likely that the supercomputer is capable of 1.6 billion processor hours per year (or month?) and IBM is gonna be using 1.5% of that capacity. When IBM is done, that 1.5% will be freed up and can be used for something else.
Gasoline at 50MJ/kg is pretty much the most dense energy storage possible in this universe excluding nuclear energy.
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric). And comparing any of them to nuclear energy is laughable.
This is kind of a fundamental limit as to how much energy can be stored in *any* system using potential energy of the electric field of matter.
No, it isn't. Nor is beryllium. Energy doesn't even have to be stored in chemical bonds (see, for example, digital quantum batteries).
You may get 2x better efficiency in an electric motor,
Try 4x in typical driving conditions.
but I can not see how a battery can approach this value.
It doesn't need to. A motor the size of a watermelon propels the Tesla Roadster from 0-60 in under 4 seconds. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light and the engine is heavy. In EVs, the motor is light and the "fuel" (the battery pack) is heavy. It's a reversed paradigm. You have to compare the mass and volume of the engine + fuel to the mass and volume of motor + fuel. And with current battery tech, you'll find that EVs are about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to matching gasoline cars. But batteries have increased nearly 5-fold in energy density the past 21 years, and show no signs of stopping.
Noone ever goes walrus!
and... hopefully soon...
However engines are only about 30% efficient, and very heavy. In contrast, electric motors are light, so you basically swap the weight of the engine and everything needed to keep an ICE running (coolant systems, alternator, etc.) with the weight of the battery. The battery has to mass less than the *engine*, not the fuel, since the fuel tank and the electric motors are pretty close in terms of mass, for cars to have the same mass they have today.
The issue here, is how much of the 50MJ/kg is actually converted into mechanical energy via the combustion process, and how much of it is expelled as waste thermal energy out of the tail pipe, and leaked out of the metal skin of the engine?
Since an electric engine is not a thermal engine, it does not have to obey carnot efficiency. Nearly all of the thermal loss comes directly from the resistance of the materials in the battery pack, and in the coil windings and power leads to the motor.
The pedant will argue that the power plant that generates the power which charges the battery pack is a carnot heat engine (Steam turbine in nuclear plant, Steam turbine in coal plant, with exception of water turbine in hydroelectric.), and thus suffers the carnot efficiency limit, in addition to the compounding losses of resistance in trasmission, charging, and operation (making it always net lower than direct gas combustion.) This however totally ignores solar power(Not a carnot heat engine), Wind power (also not a heat engine, unless you get REALLY pedantic, and say that wind is just a natural thermal imbalance in the atmosphere, and subject to carnot efficiency from the sun's heat, which is really stretching it.), and hydroelectric power (also not a heat engine). Also, it does not apply the same way to a geothermal plant, despite being a heat engine (Hot steam, geothermal heat source), since the plant does not burn a fuel (compares apples to oranges.
Thus, the REAL issue is not how much energy is stored in the "fuel", but how much energy in that fuel is actually used to do work. A black hole contains an absurdly high amount of energy per kg, but you cannot get any energy out of it, making it worthless, etc.
Researching lower resistance + higher capacity + lighter weight battery packs, along with the use of very low resistance/superconductive coil windings would do much to push an electric engine above the maximum efficiency of any heat-based engine, simply by reducing the amount of heat produced, potentially by orders of magnitude.
That is to say, you don't NEED to carry around 50MJ/kg of energy, if you get better economy out of your storage system: You can carry more water in a tincan than you can in a 55 gallon barrel with holes poked in the bottom, using the same number of trips. The reason is because the tincan doesn't leak nearly as much as the 55 gallon drum does.
THAT is how an electrical motor can beat a heat engine's efficiency. (assuming you arent filling the tincan using leaky 55 gallon drums, of course; using a coal/oil/nuclear power plant to charge the battery defeats the purpose, since the second law demands that you could never beat direct application using indirect application. The transmission system will ALWAYS incur a loss in addition to the losses of the direct generation at the power plant.)
Thus, what the pedant needs to do is stop thinking in terms of oil being the gold-standard, since that creates circular logic. (If Oil is the gold standard, you can never beat oil.) Instead, you should look at the total effiency as the standard, and aim to beat that. That can actually be done.
The difficulty of delivering such a large amount of power in such a short time would be bypassed if the battery packs were designed to be easily swapped in and out.
Regards;
I'm holding out for 1000 miles per charge, and no, I am not being facetious. I think THAT will be the real game changer, and here's why:
One thousand miles is pretty much the limit on what you can drive in one day - that's getting on the Interstate and just rolling, with minimal stops, for about 12 hours. I don't know about anybody else, but I find that's pretty much the limit for me.
Now, let us consider a car with 400 mile per charge range - that's about what most gas or diesel cars can get on a tank of fuel. You have to refuel about 3 times a day, more or less. Right now, the average gas car can refuel in about 4 minutes from the time you pull up to the pump to the time you pull away (and that's assuming a slow pump and a big tank).
OK, first, consider what happens when you extend the refuel time from 4 minutes to 16 minutes - which is still a pretty fast charge time for an electric vehicle. No matter what, a refuel/recharge station on the interstate is going to have to service the same number of vehicles per hour, so if you increase the refuel time by 4, you have to increase the number of refueling sites (analogous to the number of gas pumps) by 4, and thus you have increased the land required for the station - roughly by 4 as well (I'm assuming that all the people that are waiting 16 minutes for their car to charge are going to go into the store, so the store gets bigger too). I'll leave the cases of longer charge times yet to the reader.
OK, now, no matter what the charging time is, assuming electric vehicles don't get much more efficient, you are going to have to deliver the same number of watts to the station, and that is a LOT of watts. (again, if each car takes X watt-hours of energy, and a station has to service Y cars per hour, then the result is the station needs X*Y watts of power, no matter how long a charge takes.) Go watch your average interstate gas station (or hell, ANY gas station), and record how many cars an hour it services. Now, look at how many watt-hours you need for a 250 mile Roadster to charge up (and then multiply by 400/250 to get the energy for something with the same range as a gas burner). Work out how many TENS of megawatts the station is going to need - you are pretty much talking a substation dedicated to the station.
OK, but how does that magic 1000 miles change anything? Simple - instead of adding all the electric car infrastructure at filling stations, you instead can add it at motels and homes, AND you can increase the charging time to about 6 hours or so. You spread out the load across a larger number of sites, and reduce the power per site. If I can roll up to a Motel 6, get my room, plug my car into a post (and lock things so that the annoying kiddies cannot unplug my car during the night), swipe my card on the post, catch 6-8 hours of sleep, and have my car ready for another day's driving, I'm all set. Likewise, if I can charge my car at home, over night, and know I have enough energy to meet the day's needs - not just for a typical short run commute, but for anything, even the first leg of a cross-contry trip - then I am all set.
Now, several people are likely thinking (and getting ready to reply) "Then have 2 cars: an electric commuter and a combustion-powered long haul car." That would be great in some places, but where I live owning more than one car gets very expensive even excluding the cost of the car itself - tags, taxes, insurance all go up. I've run the numbers, and economically it makes more sense for me to buy gas than to buy another car.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Gasoline has a lot of energy per volume, no doubt. But an IC engine has a maximum efficiency burning that gasoline of about 40%, real world efficiency is around 20%. Electric motors are 90% real world efficient. Now assuming your 50MJ/kg is correct, all your battery has to do is match 11MJ/kg and it will equal gasoline assuming everything is equal. As noted in another post its not equal, the electric motor weighs almost nothing compared to the IC engine, as a result you need even less energy. According to the article the batteries being researched will be capable of 5.6MJ/kg. That's halfway to the equal comparison. This isn't even considering that cars are designed for 300+ miles per fillup but the average daily use is less than 40milies and the median is less than 20miles.
Electric energy can propel your car for $0.03 per mile. If gas taxes were taken out (I used my states gas tax, yours could be several cents different either direction), you are paying roughly $2.30 per gallon and if you car gets 35mph per gallon you are paying $0.06 cents per mile, that's HALF the cost.
There are so many people that don't realize how game changing the Chevy Volt is. Give it a battery pack that can sustain it for equivalent miles to a gas tank (currently it's 40mph on pure electricity with a gasoline generator backup) at the same vehicle weight and the gasoline IC engine will fade into history. This doesn't even factor in how much funner it is to drive a car with electric drive train, the power and torque curve are identical where in an IC engine they are offset significantly. Car and Driver LOVED the Volt and Tesla Roadster because they are a blast to drive and cheaper to drive than a gas car. It's a win-win for everyone if the battery tech advances to the stage that you can get similar miles from battery pack as from gasoline.
All rocket fuels and explosives are much worse. Typically 10% of gas. This is mostly due to the fact that these fuels must include the oxidizer, i.e. oxygen. But even excluding that, they are worse than gas. TNT, one of the best explosives, have 8MJ/kg, the same as household garbage. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density/
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Good points!
However, to be fair, you cannot just compare the weight and cost of a gas tank vs. a battery, but, ultimately, you have to compare (gas tank + Motor + radiator + exhaust system + drive train + brakes) vs. (Batteries + one electric motor per wheel).
Plus, electric motors and batteries are almost ideally scalable, meaning a 20kW version will not cost and weigh much more than a fifth of a 100kW version.
Therefore, affordable electric lightweight vehicles for personal transportation at moderate highway speeds (100km/h or app. 65mph) seem doable to me at the same cost as a midsized sedan today, but much cheaper to operate. Imagine no Oil changes, no brake jobs, no timing belt replacements.
You probably won`t be able to use them to haul a trailer with two cows to the county fair, but they will be perfectly adequate to drive to the organic farm 25 miles out of the city to buy two quarts of milk and a dozen apples. Incidentally, that is what most SUVs were used for before they were traded in for a Prius last year.
If, after economies of scale have been at work for a couple of years, we get a battery with 10kWh of useable capacity and 4x5kW peak electric wheel motors for $10.000, then that would translate into a Smart-Car sized vehicle with >100km/65m range with fuel costs of app. 3 Cents per mile vs. fuel costs of 12 cents per mile for a 25mpg at $3/gallon "cheap" car like a Dodge Neon sold for $10K until a few years ago.
If you drive both for slightly over 100k miles, you break even, especially as the much lower maintenance on the electric car would much more than offset the interest for the initially higher investment.
This is good news for people with a home in suburbia. If gas prices continue to rise, they will still be able to afford a car to commute, albeit they probably wouldn't want to drive to disneyland with the family in it.
So I pray to the George Clooneys of this world: Go buy Teslas and a couple of Volts for the kids, so the kinks get worked out quickly, and I can afford a then reliable and cheap Volt V5.0 in 10 years time!
Chevron again, just like the last consumer grade, transportation viable battery technology......
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric).
Hydrogen was included in TFA comparison.
No, it isn't. Nor is beryllium. Energy doesn't even have to be stored in chemical bonds (see, for example, digital quantum batteries).
Energy is still stored in the electrical field in matter. A quantum battery needs a lot of infrastructure to handle the forces, so at least 50% of the weight will be wasted. (compare to the weight of a clamp holding a spring.)
Try 4x in typical driving conditions.
No, A small VW diesel has up to 40% efficiency. An elelctric car may have 90%, but you can only use 60% of the battery without damaging it in a few cycles, so overall, 2x is conservative.
It doesn't need to. A motor the size of a watermelon propels the Tesla Roadster from 0-60 in under 4 seconds. In gasoline cars, the fuel is light and the engine is heavy. In EVs, the motor is light and the "fuel" (the battery pack) is heavy. It's a reversed paradigm. You have to compare the mass and volume of the engine + fuel to the mass and volume of motor + fuel. And with current battery tech, you'll find that EVs are about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way to matching gasoline cars. But batteries have increased nearly 5-fold in energy density the past 21 years, and show no signs of stopping.
You are partially correct. A brushless electric motor can have very high intermittent power density. maybe 10x of a gas engine. It is only limited by cooling. For continous power its power density is the same as a gas engine. Maybe a hybrid combination can beat either. It is actually quite complicated to cool an electric motor. Think 100kW power, and 10kW heat. That means liquid cooling with pumps. radiators, and a much bigger motor to accommodate water cooling. Find an electric motor that had higher energy density than a gas engine for continous output, and I will stand corrected, and learn something new.
Here is a 220kg gas engine rated for 200kW continuous and 330kW peak: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_993#Turbo_S
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Only if you ignore the worldwide copper shortage...
No sig today...
So it could be done in 41 days, not 2,500 years, if they have 24,000 processors working on it.
Ok, but that's still an awful long time for 500 miles.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Electric energy can propel your car for $0.03 per mile. If gas taxes were taken out (I used my states gas tax, yours could be several cents different either direction), you are paying roughly $2.30 per gallon and if you car gets 35mph per gallon you are paying $0.06 cents per mile, that's HALF the cost.
$2.30 per gallon is dirt cheap, compared to prices here (Belgium). Gasoline here is about €1.40 per liter, that's almost $2 per liter or roughly $7.50 per gallon. The difference in electricity prices is much smaller: with a separate installation that works only during the night you can charge your car at €0.09 per kWh. Regular daytime prices are around €0.18. Judging from this list, that's not too different from prices in the U.S. ($0.0764 in North Dakota, $0.2028 in Connecticut, $0.2379 in Hawaii)
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
I've heard people raise the concern that we're just going to swap running out of oil for running out of lithium. Can anyone knowledgeable comment on this?
In particular, what is the feasibility of extracting lithium from sea water?
Here's a little background info from Wikipedia: Lithium production,
Sea salt composition (which looks very pessimistic for sea water extraction.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Not even close. For example, beryllium blows it away in both volumetric and gravimetric energy density (and hydrogen blows beryllium out of the water in gravimetric comparisons, but sucks at volumetric).
Hydrogen was included in TFA comparison.
Nice try at changing the subject away from the fact that you're quite simply wrong about gasoline being the most energy-dense or nearly most energy dense substance in the universe. It's not even close. If you really want to find the most energy dense chemicals, you need to look at metastable solids. Cubane and nitrogen rings, for example. And there are some theoretical ones that may be even higher, such as triplet helium. These things way, way outclass gasoline in terms of energy density.
Energy is still stored in the electrical field in matter. A quantum battery needs a lot of infrastructure to handle the forces, so at least 50% of the weight will be wasted. (compare to the weight of a clamp holding a spring.)
1) "Still"? Chemical batteries don't store energies in electrical fields.
2) You're trying to bond energy released in a chemical reaction with tensile strength. Tensile strength != energy. And no, they're not related. A beryllium cord has a *lot* less tensile strength than a carbon nanotube cord (orders of magnitude), but releases significantly more energy when it burns.
No, A small VW diesel has up to 40% efficiency.
"Up to" != "Average usage". Duh. Diesel cars average about 25% efficiency in typical mixed usage. Engines only get their peak efficiency within a narrow power band.
An elelctric car may have 90%, but you can only use 60% of the battery without damaging it in a few cycles, so overall, 2x is conservative.
Wrong on so many different levels.
1) Efficiency has nothing to do with pack capacity. You're equating the two. 90% *efficiency*. Versus 20% *efficiency*.
2) The Tesla Roadster uses over 90% of its pack's capacity. Most li-ion BEVs are in the 75-90% DoD range. Not 60%. The Volt uses 50%, but only because A) they're taking an extremely conservative approach, and B) it's a small-pack PHEV.
You are partially correct. A brushless electric motor can have very high intermittent power density. maybe 10x of a gas engine. It is only limited by cooling. For continous power its power density is the same as a gas engine.
First off, you're confusing DC and AC motors. All AC motors are brushless. Brushless is a category of DC motors. Secondly, no. The Tesla Roadster can do anything but track duty without a liquid cooling system. With a liquid system it could easily due track duty. And even with just air cooling, it beats the hell out of non-sports cars in sustained power output, despite having an engine much smaller than even non-sports-cars that run on gasoline. And furthermore, how important is track duty to the average person?
It is actually quite complicated to cool an electric motor.
No. You can buy motors with the cooling already in place.
Think 100kW power, and 10kW heat.
First off, 100kW power is something you'll only ever get during very high acceleration or extremely high speeds. Cruising power is more like 10kW, meaning 1kW heat. Secondly, since gasoline cars average about 20% net efficiency, 100kW of gasoline power output equals *80* kW of heat that you need to get rid of. It's much, much easier for the EV.
Find an electric motor that had higher energy density than a gas engine for continous output, and I will stand corrected, and learn something new.
The very one we're talking about. The Roadster's motor can do 2/3rds of its peak output as sustained. And peak output does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
Note that the Roadster's motor is hardly the most power dense electric motor out there. Look at the PML Flightlink in-wheel motors used in the Lightning GT, for example. Each in-wheel motor is rated for 120kW peak and are.. well, the size of a wheel.
Noone ever goes walrus!
Us open source nuts might be better able to do the needed computing than the big name labs could hope to do.
. .
Great, we will replace an oil shortage with a lithium shortage.
Some experts believe the huge increase in electric cars will actually strain the world’s lithium supplies in a few years; as with peak oil
beryllium=Baaad, very baaaad.
That is the same a people hours, if you have 24,000 people, it would still take only 1,000 hours.
wouldnt producing 100kW of gasoline mechanical power output necessitate the production of 400kW of heat, if 20% of input energy is going into mechanical, then the other 80% is heat? of is it 500kW of heat energy of which 20%, 100kW, is diverted to mechanical work, with the remainder being unutilised heat (from a heat engine point of view)
although i must say ive never fully understood, if combustion changes number of particles greatly then the pressure change is significantly due to change in number of particles from gas hydrocarbon + o2 to gas co2 (lets say). and does this then mean that the carnot limit doesnt really apply to say an otto cycle ice because they, partially, use this change in particle number due to the chemical reaction to do work and are not simply heat engines, being something that sits between high and low temp reservoirs, and the efficiency limit might be higher.
eg. could you imagine an engine that is based off some hypothetical chemical reaction where the particle number is increased but there is (thought experiment) no enthalpy. and does example prove the above hypothesis, that when you include particle number and ice is not limited by the carnot ceiling???
One of the many reasons we don't burn it in our cars ;)
I often like to joke, when people boast about the sort of mileage they get in their diesel cars and don't seem to understand that diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline and has a lot more pollution emitted per gallon, that I could modify my car to burn a fine beryllium slurry and easily get over 100mpg, and wow, wouldn't that be an eco-car -- 100mpg, right? :)
Not all fuels are created equal. ;)
Noone ever goes walrus!
I for one prefer the dual Lithium Argon technology. Imagine the commercial pitch on that, the LiAr LiAr car, sounds about right.
Metal air batteries - like Lithium, but also Aluminium and Magnesium, for example - offer a proven technology for storing energy. Many renewables are intermittent, or located in places without energy demand. Take a wind turbine. You can connect it to the grid with a (usually verty expensive) line and manage its variable productivity, or you can hitch it to a bucket of electrolyte, and occasionally harvest a billet of metal.. Ocean thermal is one of the few renewable technologies that is both reliable and ona scale that matches real world energy demand. However, hot water over a thermocline is chiefly found near the equator, where energy demand is, on the whole, low. So smelt to metals in situ, move these (safely, in a non-toxic form) to the industrial centres, "burn" it to oxide and generate electricity. Now collect the oxide, send it back and re-smelt it. This is a carbon-free technology (Aluminium is approaching zero carbon with direct reduction crucibles) and it is safe, proven and ready for the oven. BTW, if Lithium takes off, buy shares in Bolivia, which has a huge fraction of proven reserves.
The efficiency of a theoretical engine is dependent to T1-T2 as well as the compression ratio. Diesel engines run at high compression ratios, and this is a contributing factor for the high mileage as compared to petrol cars
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You have missed some fundamental understanding of physics and chemistry. The chemical binding energy in matter is (simplified) from the electrical field around each individual atomic nucleus and its interaction with electrons including all chemical reactions. Regular springs as well as nano springs also use this field to store energy. Capacitors also use this field, but typically by introducing extra charge.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
The very one we're talking about. The Roadster's motor can do 2/3rds of its peak output as sustained. And peak output does 0-60 in under 4 seconds.
Some of these motors are more or less experimental, and I could not find the numbers you claim. Can Roadster can perform at all in high power a car race where more than 10kW continuous power is required?
The Porsche engine I mentioned is actually tuned to 1,100h.p for racing, but then it only lasts 100 hours or so. That is 4kW/kg. The Prius has a Toyota Brushless AC NdFeB PM motor at 50kW and 183kg or 0.27 kW/kg. The best I could find was the Ford F150 HEV Brushless DC wheel hub motor at 2kW/kg.
Very small motors for RC cars like Himax HC6332-230 Brushless DC motor has 3.19kW/kg, but heat management does of course not scale.
For some reason it seems to be "established" that electric motors have better continous power to weight ratio. They do not.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCk0lYB_8c0&feature=related
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
Not sure if I like this method of measuring processor usage since a project that took a million hours in 2001 wouldn't take a million hours in 2010 but that's what's in the article.
Usually the value of a cpu-hour depends on the current cluster hardware. At NERSC I think they revalue the cpu-hour annually when they allocate time for the next year. http://www.nersc.gov/hypermail/all-announcements/1013.html http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/accounts/mpp-charging.php
As anyone tried fuel-cell using fuel? That may be pointless but...
strange, ibm surely has it's own supercomputers to do this stuff.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Look how much time and fuel we would save with the wars much closer to home. Hell, with the WarOnDrugs we already have a paramilitary presence in most of the countries we'd want to invade (for their own good of course). We also have a lot more people in the military with Spanish speaking skills, and lets face it, it's a lot easier for an English speaker to learn than Arabic. I see Lithium as a much more cost effective non-renewable resource that we can ass-rape the world to get than oil.
The average car has a tank-to-wheel average efficiency in normal combined city/highway driving of about 20%. Your average li-ion electric vehicle has a plug-to-wheel average efficiency under the same conditions of about 85%.
For a proper comparison of one fossil fuel to another, you would need to combine this 85 percent with the tank-to-plug efficiency of a coal power plant. Granted, there are economies of scale in both efficiency and emissions from generating numerous families' power in one place, but heat engines in general still have inherent inefficiencies.
they're called subways, electric trains, and now there is personal rapid transit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit. just slap a 10% monthly tax increase on emissions engines and fuels, and suddenly every driver, company, and person will be interested in electric everything, enough people to make anything work overnight. mechanics will install electric engines, overhead road power will magically be installed, the limited power of current batteries will suddenly be good-enough, trains and rails will be built, people will move closer to their jobs, buildings will be build closer to work places, nuclear power and other power generators will be built, urban population densities will increase, bicycles and skateboards will get used, i don't see any adapting problems. "the economy will suffer" is only if you're scared of change or in the pocket of oil companies, everyone else get to work and will be fine. combustion engines will become as important as vinyl records, and that's it.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Sorry, I didn't make my point clear. First, I meant that it seems like using 1.5% of capacity at one lab for a month or even a year would not match the "DOE is getting serious" tone of this article. Second, the reporter just made it sound like 1.6 billion hours is all ORNL is ever going to get, period, like the computer somehow vanishes after that point, showing again that technology reporters are not good at reporting technology.
Currently hooked on AMP
So, to be concise, nearly everything we do on our daily lifes consist of different arrangements of electrical charges. And, besides nuclear forces and gravity, we have no energy storage technic that doesn't rely on electrical fields.
The original statement is tecnicaly correct, but I still fail to see how it is limiting.
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No. You can buy motors with the cooling already in place.
My understanding is that its not technically difficult either. You can use convective cooling inside the motor using a electrically neutral (mineral) oil, much like they do for transformers. This combined with air flow can offload considerable heat and without any moving parts or significant increase in weight. The only requirement is that up remain up.
It basically means that the energy difference between matter in the highest and lowest normal state, or enthalpy, has a hard limit. Entahlpy for 2H2+O2->2H2O is -242 kJ/mol. Here, mass of hydrogen is of course 1g/mol, so you get -242kJ/g.
C + O2-> CO2 has an entahlpy of -393 kJ/mol, but C is 12g/mol, so you get 32.75 kJ/g
There are long lists of enthalpy, and nothing gets close to hydrogen. Consider Carbon the best infrastructure to carry hydrogen in a liquid stable form.
(excluding gravity near black holes, relativistic speed and strong force (nuclear power), Anything else that tries to store this much energy in matter just tears it apart. Its a hard limit.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Seriously.
No brain, no pain.
No. Bond energy released in combustion is not equivalent to tensile strength.
Let's be more specific. The energy released from burning graphite (basically equivalent to SWNTs in terms of bonding structure) is about 32.8 MJ/kg and 72.9 MJ/l. So that's energy density. By the calculations within the digital quantum battery paper, the SWNTs with a 10nm anode tip won't fail until the capacitor hits 62 GJ/m^3 (62 MJ/l). But there is another issue: they note that while they use 62GPa as the tensile strength for carbon nanotubes (the best nanotubes we've tested so far), the actual theoretical limit is about 300GPa. Most nanotubes we've produced have defects along their length.
Now, obviously, adding a whole bunch of other bulk materials to the battery lowers the battery's total energy density significantly. But the key point is that the energy stressing the CNT anode without breaking it can be notably higher than the energy released from burning said anode. Not even counting the mass of the oxygen for combustion.
Furthermore, this is energy released as electricity, not heat. This means ~4 times more work done than if it were delivered as heat. And it also means a more power-dense drivetrain, which is the *real* issue; a drivetrain that takes up less mass and volume means more mass and room for batteries.
Noone ever goes walrus!
Boron slurry = even better than beryllium.
RC cars have insanely good brushless motors. A motor smaller than fist can output 8kW... That is well above and beyond that specific motor's intended range & best efficiency range, but we are talking a 15-20euro cheap chinese motor here, and yes i've seen it happen, and even driven. In this case it's cheaper to just buy bunch of cheap ones, than a good one, due to the dirty conditions (sand doesn't do so good for bearings)
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But i doubt an EV will never really replace the feeling of an otto engine, the sounds, the feel of when you hit the power band etc. But i guess that mostly pertains to those who enjoy cars (and motorcycles) beyond the daily commute, or trip to the relatives way up north.
EV is way better performing however, simpler machine, but i bet even after almost all cars in daily use are EV, people will still race and build regular gas guzzlers.
As for the feeling, the weaknesses of otto engine probably makes it just that much more fun!
That being said, i would gladly take immediately a tesla roadster as my daily commute vehicle, no questions asked.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Long time since I did this so maybe you help me with the calculations for the quantum capacitors.
Trying to find materials with high permitivity and high dielectric strength, the best candiadates i could find was
- barium titanate 5 MV/m, Er=10,000
- teflon 60 MV/m, Er=2.1
- SiO2 1000 MV/m, Er=3.9
Energy density for a cap is u=1/2*Er*E0*E^2, E0=8.85E-12
The best I could find was SiO2: u=1/2*3.4E-11*1E18=17MJ/m^3
These are insane densities already. 1 million volt across 1mm of insulation!
Sheet of SiO2 1mm thick, 1000m^2, and 1MV. C=34E-12*1000/.001=34uF, 34.5As at 1MV, so energy is 17MJ/m^3.
Same energy for all thicknesses is 17MJ/m^3.
The force on 34 Coloumb in a field=1GV/m is F=E*q=34GN or 34MPa (maybe 1/2 since the charge is on two plates)
With 62 GJ/m^3 you need unobtainium or similar material to resist 4 billion volts/mm and a pressure of 100GPa. That is similar to the pressure in the center of the earth, and it may turn carbon like nanotubes into instant diamonds.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org