New Material Transforms Car Bodies Into Batteries

MikeChino writes "As battery manufacturers race to produce more efficient lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, some scientists are looking to make the cars themselves a power source. Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery. Once perfected, scientists hope the substance will replace standard car bodies, making vehicles up to 15 percent lighter and significantly extending the range of electric vehicles."

Comments

Good

[2names]

I really hope we get this electric car thing figured out soon because I am just about sick of following smoke belching vehicles every day.

Re:Good

[maxume]

You just need to learn how to be a leader.

Re:Good

[Jeng]

Even once they do perfect the electric car I would imagine there is no getting rid of the internal combustion engine.

Diesel powered vehicles will slowly turn to bio-diesel options and gasoline powered engines will slowly turn to ethanol power.

Electric is good for basic commuting where the route will be basically the same day after day, it is not good for if you do not know how far you will drive a day. Although the long recharge time is part of it, the main part is that you do not want to buy more battery than you are going to be using since the battery will be one of the most expensive parts of the car.

A larger gas tank costs almost nothing. The infrastructure is already in place for bio-diesel and ethanol and most cars can be converted. Electric cars will fill a niche, and that is all.

Re:Good

[Rei]

I really hope we get this electric car thing figured out soon because I am just about sick of following smoke belching vehicles every day.

The tech is here. Modern batteries can rapid charge in minutes (given adequate cooling) and yield hundreds of miles of range. The issue is cost. For most EVs, battery packs are generally limited in size by price, not volume or weight. And not just battery cost that's the problem; quality AC drivetrains are expensive as heck right now. You can't even use a lot of mass-produced accessories with EVs if the conventional accessory requires a gasoline engine to be running. The good news is that it's all about volume. Your typical LFP or manganese li-ion pack combined with an AC drivetrain uses almost no rare or expensive raw materials. You have lithium salts ($4-8/kg), phosphoric acid (in the case of LFP), iron powder, a porous plastic membrane, graphite, etc in the battery pack; your motor optimally uses copper windings, but can also use aluminum; the inverter also uses copper or aluminum, plus things like silicon carbide for thyristors; etc. The expenses are primarily the huge amounts of labor and capital costs per unit because of very low volumes and because of the lack of production process refinement.

BTW, the article summary is wrong (and partly the article, too). What they're talking about is not a battery; it's a capacitor. Which means that even if the whole body is made of the stuff, it's not going to be enough energy capacity for reasonable range. Plus, you have to consider how it'll change your vehicle's weight, structural strength, etc. There is always a cost-benefit analysis to consider.

Still, it could potentially be useful for making less-critical structural elements (say, the bellypan) to use for buffering (rather than energy storage).

Re:Good

[Rei]

Biofuels are not a long-term solution. Corn ethanol is over two orders of magnitude more land-intensive than solar thermal. Algae is just under one order of magnitude more land intensive. Plus, biofuel creation requires water, fertilizer, processing, etc. And the combination of needing "lots of water" and "lots of sun" can be rather mutually exclusive, as the sunniest places in the country are desert. Solar thermal is closed loop.

If your goal is to turn solar energy into propulsion, pure electric is the way to go.

Although the long recharge time is part of it

That's what rapid charging is for.

the main part is that you do not want to buy more battery than you are going to be using since the battery will be one of the most expensive parts of the car.

Indeed, the real issue is price. But that will fall significantly with mass production. And the operating cost advantage will remain, so eventually, even if sticker shock remains an issue for prospective buyers, seeing a lease price that's significantly cheaper than a gasoline car's lease plus the cost of gasoline that month should eventually drive the point home.

Furthermore, the main point to oversized gas tanks is to make it so that you don't have to fill up too often in your daily lives. Filling up is, after all, a pain; who wants to drive out of their way to pay for the privilege of pumping carcinogens in the middle of a blizzard? One of your average EV driver's favorite benefits is the fact that you start each day with a full charge. You don't even have to think about it in your daily life. The only time range comes into play is when you take long trips. But what's the point of having 700-800 miles on a long trip? Dear god, if you drive 700-800 miles without stopping to rest or eat, please don't do it when I'm on the road!

Lastly: In 1989, a new top of the line battery hit the market: the nickel metal hydride cell. It boasted 45Wh/kg energy density. Today, just over two decades later, commercially available li-ion cells boast up to 220 Wh/kg -- almost five times higher -- plus an order of magnitude higher power density. This trend shows no signs of slowing down; rather, it appears to be accelerating. So take that into account when talking about range for the future.

Re:Good

[Architect_sasyr]

A larger gas tank costs almost nothing. The infrastructure is already in place for bio-diesel and ethanol and most cars can be converted. Electric cars will fill a niche, and that is all.

Grazing costs almost nothing. The infrastructure is already in place for pasture and oats, and most horses can pull a cart just fine. The aw-toe-mo-beel will fill a nice, and that is all.

Sometimes, for no reason at all (!!), some things just become huge. The car was reliant on reliable and obtainable fuel, and roads, and the world dealt with them just fine - I don't see why, when the option becomes viable and enough of the group-think follows it, electric cars will not follow the way of their predecessors.

Re:Good

[Sir_Lewk]

Modern batteries can rapid charge in minutes (given adequate cooling) and yield hundreds of miles of range.

There is also the issue of having an electrical grid that can handle that. Charging a battery in minutes with enough power to get you hundreds of miles takes a non-trivial amount of power, no matter how good your battery is.

Re:Good

[Rei]

There is also the issue of having an electrical grid that can handle that. Charging a battery in minutes with enough power to get you hundreds of miles takes a non-trivial amount of power, no matter how good your battery is.

You don't draw it from the grid. You draw it from a battery bank. The battery bank is in turn trickle-charged from the grid.

And in case anyone's curious, yes, they do make extremely high power chargers. TARDEC got one last year that does 800kW. I don't know how much that one cost, but ones in the ~250kW range are typically ~$125k-ish (and about the size of a vending machine). That may sound like a lot, but then again, a gas station generally costs $1-2m to build, and you have to pay for tear-down at end of life (tearing down a charger is a net gain, from scrap). Plus, expect prices to fall over time.

Chargers that big generally require that their connectors or even their cables be cooled. Which makes me wonder when we'll see the next logical step in that evolution -- having the charger provide coolant for the battery pack instead of the EV providing it. After all, why make the EV haul around a powerful cooling system when your charger already has one and is already bringing coolant all the way to the vehicle? All the vehicle should need is a connector for the coolant and ducting for it to travel through. If you use something like supercritical CO2 as a coolant, you won't even have to worry about coolant contamination or residual coolant being left over in the system.

The current fast-charging pseudo-standard, TESCO, doesn't do that, though. But in the future, I expect we'll ultimately see it.

Re:Good

[mweather]

Electric is good for basic commuting where the route will be basically the same day after day, it is not good for if you do not know how far you will drive a day. Although the long recharge time is part of it, the main part is that you do not want to buy more battery than you are going to be using since the battery will be one of the most expensive parts of the car.

Why not just make the batteries swappable at service stations? Then the only range that matters is the distance to the next service station.

Re:Good

[c6gunner]

As the electric parts of the car were responsible for said fire, it seems resonable that electric cars will burst into flames more often than gas burning cars. Therefore, it can be logically deduced that electric cars will result in much more smoke than the fossil fueled alternatives.

In what universe?

My microwave oven leaked and caused me to be exposed to some radiation. As the microwave oven was responsible for the radiation, it seems reasonable that houses with microwave ovens will release more radiation than houses with thermonuclear reactors. Therefore, it can be logically deduced that we should all use nuclear reactors to cook dinner. Ipso facto, etc, etc.

Look on the bright side: your train of logic has done an amazing job of demonstrating the "garbage, in garbage out" principle.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Algae is just under one order of magnitude more land intensive.

Algae grow in water, you fucking moron.

Re:Good

[vlm]

You don't draw it from the grid. You draw it from a battery bank. The battery bank is in turn trickle-charged from the grid.

The problem is, a typical gas nozzle runs about a megawatt. Theres 20 of them at my local quickie-mart or whatever its called. Sometimes all are in use. Often half are in use. Even in the middle of the night at least one is in use. "Trickle Charge" is still going to be a couple megawatts, and in an area without that kind of service.

I admit the whole "fast charging" thing is pretty bogus. The furthest I've ever driven in one day was 500 miles and it was a torturous living hell. I dream of having a car that can't do that, so I have the perfectly socially acceptable excuse that my car simply can not go 500 miles per day. What a darn shame I'll be unable to sit in my car for 8 hours. Drat. Boo F-ing Hoo Hoo.

Re:Good

[Jeng]

Why not just make the batteries swappable at service stations?

Too many variables. How much charge is in the current battery, how much wear and tear are in the battery you just got versus what you just gave, what happens when you get a partial dud, how many batteries can be swapped out a day, the physical labor of swapping batteries, what do you charge/how do you come to the cost and how does that make you competitive with your competition.

I thought it would be a smart idea to change out the electrolyte instead of the whole battery, but it wasn't actually all that smart either.

Re:Good

[obarthelemy]

You're overlooking 2 things:

1- for daily commutes, you start each day with a full battery, which is more convenient than having to do regular trips to the service station.

2- for longer trips, batteries could be swappable, making longer trips possible with not much more pain than currently. that means
2a- coming up with an easy and standard way to do it (government regulation may be helpful, if it can prevent market fragmentation), and
2b- re-thinking ownership, because people will be leery of swapping their brand new battery for someone else's clunker. A yearly battery lease may be the way to go. It would alleviate the battery price problem, too.

Re:Good

[Jeng]

Corn ethanol is over two orders of magnitude more land-intensive than solar thermal.

You'll make your point better if you don't bring up the worst possible case. Corn ethanol is only done for political purposes because it makes no economical sense.

Ethanol from cellulose based waste looks promising. Always good when a waste stream can be turned into a productive product.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol#Cellulosic_ethanol

Bio-diesel will probably be bigger than ethanol though.

Re:Good

[Rei]

The problem is, a typical gas nozzle runs about a megawatt. Theres 20 of them at my local quickie-mart or whatever its called. Sometimes all are in use. Often half are in use. Even in the middle of the night at least one is in use. "Trickle Charge" is still going to be a couple megawatts, and in an area without that kind of service.

Oh, certainly -- your "gas station" has to be able to "average" the amount of power it feeds out, plus losses -- there's no way around that. Of course, running counter to this is that since the vast majority of charging is done at home (and to a lesser extent, work), you don't actually need that many rapid chargers nationwide. Most of the lower-end rapid chargers (~40kW is sort of the cutoff for what's considered rapid charging) don't typically use battery banks, and these are typically installed just one charger per location to spread the load around (although the charger may have multiple connectors on it; when two EVs are hooked up, each charges at half-rate). There are very few of the higher power rapid chargers out there right now, so it's hard to draw generalizations, but one would expect you'd average several per location to better take advantage of a common battery bank. Probably nothing like the 8-16 pumps at your typical gas station. Gas stations load so many pumps into each location because of the not inconsiderable expense of excavation to install the fuel tanks, plus fuel delivery costs.

While studies suggest little to no need for new macro-scale infrastructure for mass adoption of EVs, there may be some local infrastructure improvements required, esp. if rapid charging for long, daytime EV trips takes off.

Re:Good

[Rei]

I mentioned the worst and the best. Do I really need to spell out all of the midpoints?

Cellulosic ethanol is estimated at up to 1,500 gallons/acre/year. At 30mpg, that's 45,000 miles/acre/year.

Ausra's proposed 177MW Carrizo solar thermal plant was to be situated on 640 acres. That's 277kW/acre. Assuming a capacity factor of about 0.3 (clear skies, heliostat), that's about 727,000,000 Wh/acre/year. At 250Wh/mi, that's ~2,900,000 miles/acre/year.

Re:Good

[couchslug]

That would lock in permanent battery form-factors in the infancy of car development where we should not commit ourselves.

Re:Good

[Rei]

Typically tanks of water, you anonymous coward. Exposed to air, your optimal fuel-producing species end up being attacked by predators and diluted by species that produce less (or no) fuel.

Re:Good

[Smooth and Shiny]

He can't lead in a Prius. Seriously... it can barely keep up with itself, let alone other traffic.

Re:Good

[Rei]

there is a limited supply of Lithium and other elements used in these batteries.

No, there isn't. Not in a practical sense.

Re:Good

[musicalmicah]

Biofuels are not a long-term solution. Corn ethanol is over two orders of magnitude more land-intensive than solar thermal. Algae is just under one order of magnitude more land intensive.

I have a hard time parsing sentence construction like this and actually had to look up order of magnitude to confirm that you are saying that corn ethanol uses 100 times more land than solar thermal (for the same output?), while algae uses 10 times more land than its solar counterparts. Is this true or am I misinterpreting you? If so, could you provide a citation, because that's a pretty huge amount.

Re:Good

[Rei]

What really matters is what the resulting cost is.

1) Land use absolutely *does* matter. As does water use, fertilizer use, etc. It matters for wildlife habitat (incl. rainforest), for food production, for algal blooms, for countless things.

2) From a cost perspective, solar thermal wins there, too. EVs are really cheap to run. Even if cellulosic ethanol could manage to sell for the same price as gasoline (and note that 30mpg ethanol is notably better than 30mpg gasoline, in the above calculations) -- say, $3/gal -- it would be 10 cents per mile. Even if you had to pay 20 cents per kWh for the solar thermal (most next-gen solar thermal is predicting less than that), rather than the US national average for electricity of 10 cents per kWh residential (and notably less for industrial power), that would be five cents per mile.

Re:Good

[gyrogeerloose]

Cellulosic butanol is way more exciting than cellulosic ethanol.

Fuckin' A! Whenever anyone even mentions cellulosic butanol I can barely contain my enthusiasm! ;-)

Re:Good

[Fred_A]

There is also the issue of having an electrical grid that can handle that. Charging a battery in minutes with enough power to get you hundreds of miles takes a non-trivial amount of power, no matter how good your battery is.

A simple fix would be to build more roads going downhill instead of blindly following the contour lines.
It would save a lot of power !

Re:Good

[Skal Tura]

Li-Ion isn't even the best, LiPo can deliver more per Kg, and higher peaks without voltage drop off, thus being the #1 choice for RC models. Altho, they are restrictively expensive, hazardous to handle, can't take temperature variations and only lasts for couple of years.

As for Biofuels: There's methods to use WASTE for making biofuel, they are doing that here in Finland, and sell 85% bio-ethanol, 15% gasoline fuel, made from biowaste. Downside is it's not as energy dense, thus you consume more along with the fact that many gaskets can't use them. The plus-side is that an engine designed for biofuel can have better compression (or higher boost pressure), burns very clean, and smaller engines can be made more powerfull due to the ethanol compression characteristics.

Biofuel made from waste solely is not taxing to the environment, quite the contrary, and does not require extra landmass. Algae based can use waste aswell.

Growing corn etc. for biofuels is the stupidest thing ever. Also, corn is far from the best to use for it. It's just that the corn industry is so large, so much supply, but not enough demand, they have to keep it afloat somehow.

Also, the land mass etc. problems for biofuels is just propaganda. Biofuels can be made in small areas aswell, and when waste is used as the source, there's no problem with it. Besides, water is plenty... This planet is mostly water afterll

Re:Good

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I thought it would be a smart idea to change out the electrolyte instead of the whole battery, but it wasn't actually all that smart either.

Look at Vanadium Redox batteries - where the battery is essentially a fuel cell sized for the power and would stay with the car, while the electrolyte is pumped through it from/to separate storage and the tankage is sized for the energy capacity.

Swapping electrolyte on such a system would be quite practical. (And you could be credited for the state-of-charge of the partially depleted electrolyte you traded in.)

Re:Good

[mysidia]

Uh, we should want them locked in as soon as possible.

New form factors can be developed, as long as they get standardized.

It's car manufacturers that want proprietary formats, so they can charge a boatload for proprietary replacement parts (VS pennies for commodity replacement parts).

It's like saying "Let's not lock-in computer ABIs or processor specs in the infancy of OS development" (today, in 2010)

Better to stick with proprietary OS APIs and proprietary network libraries, so users have to buy software specifically licensed against this computer's spec.

And so hardware manufacturers can make a boatload selling the only OS that will work with their hardware, or selling the only hardware that will work with their OS (rather)

E.g. HPUX good, Linux bad.

Ultrix/NonStop OS good, VxWorks bad.

Mac OS good, DOS bad.

AIX good, BSD bad.

OSF/1 good, SysV bad.

NeXTSTEP good, Windows bad.

iPhone OS good, ChromeOS bad.

Atari DOS good, BeOS bad.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear god, if you drive 700-800 miles without stopping to rest or eat, please don't do it when I'm on the road!

I'm sure some semi-truck drivers have done it. For us regular drivers, who stop and rest after 350 miles, will the car be recharged in 12 hours? That depends on how standardized, and available charging is. The average motel today probably would bill extra, if it were even possible (big parking lots, no outlets, etc.) or if unattended charging was allowed.

But, I'm not trying to be a kill-joy. I'd love to have an electric car or motorcycle with a range of between 40 and 80 miles. I'm an electronics engineer, so I'd even have fun building my own solar and wind power to charge it.

On that note, I've recently done some comparisons between rechargeable batteries and capacitors.
To summarize: batteries win with normal approaches (low cost and complexity), but high voltage capacitors have the best performance and greater usable energy capacity. Technically capacitors should outlast batteries. And, in theory, a high voltage capacitor is simpler to build than either a supercap or battery, so the cost could be lower in mass production.

I used the SI unit Joules, instead of Wh, because it's easier to visually compare numbers greater than 1, as opposed to using enginnering notation for milli, micro, nano, and pico.
The following information doesn't take into account usable energy, because that's dependent on how the things are used. A capacitor will outperform a battery in high current usage. Capacitors can also be totally discharged to 0V without being damaged and batteries cannot (most battery Ah ratings take that into account).

Convert Watt-hours to Watt-seconds (Joules)
E=W*3600

Convert battery to Joules
The product of voltage V, amp hours Ah and 60 squared, is Joules E (watts per second)
E=V*A*3600

Convert capacitor to Joules
Half of Farads multiplied by the square of Voltage
E=0.5*F*V^2

Fun math:
One Kilowatt Hour is 3.6MJ (3,600,000J, 1000Wh*3600)
A single AA NiMH is 10.4KJ (10,368J)
A L-ion 3.7V 4Ah is 53.28KJ (53,280J)
A 16V, 100F capacitor is 12.8KJ (12,800J)
A 12V 40Ah battery is 1.728MJ (1,728,000J) (Two 12V 40Ah batteries are nearly 1KWh, 3.456MJ)
A (real) 6.5KV, 9500uF capacitor is 200.7KJ (200,700J) ~ a 1x1x2 foot sized industrial capacitor
A (theoretical) 26KV, 9500uF capacitor is 3.2MJ (3,200,000J)
A (theoretical) 300KV, 1000uF capacitor is 90MJ (90,000,000J, 25KWh)

All the capacitors are physically bulkier than batteries, typically twice the size or worse for a given amount of Joules.

Recently pulled from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(electricity)
Secondary Battery Chemistries
NiCd 1.2V 0.14 MJ/Kg
Lead Acid 2.1V 0.14 MJ/Kg (0.1232 MJ/Kg, found for real battery)
NiMH 1.2V 0.36 MJ/Kg
NiZn 1.6V 0.36 MJ/Kg
L-ion 3.6V 0.46 MJ/Kg (0.635 MJ/Kg, found for real battery)
*Zinc-Air 1.55 1.35-1.65 MJ/Kg
(*electrical or mechanical recharging is possible)

Aluminum-Air is similar to Zinc-Air, but I don't much have information on it.

Interesting bit of information about capacitors (as battery substitutes)
A 1V, 2F capacitor is 1J (Linear)
A 2V, 1F capacitor is 2J (Exponential)
A 1V, 10F capacitor is 5J (L)
A 1V, 20F capacitor is 10J (L)
A 10V, 1F capacitor is 50J (E)
A 20V, 1F capacitor is 200J (E)
High voltage capacitors are capable of storing more energy than high farad capacitors. Because an increase in voltage is an exponential increase in energy, and an increase in farads is a linear increase in energy.
Supercaps are safer to work near, cheaper, and physically smaller (but heavier) than high voltage capacitors. Unless I'm mistaken, the highest voltage capacitor type is a vacuum capacitor (vacuum is the dielectric) hence it being potentially more lightweight than any other type of capacitor.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for mentioning solar thermal energy instead of photovoltaics.

One other solution that has not been considered is the use of solar thermal energy to synthesize gasoline and diesel fuel from carbon dioxide. Sandia is working on it with their "CR5 thermochemical engine". It's estimated at 150,000 gallons/acre/year of REAL, drop in replacement GASOLINE - not ethanol, not diesel. At 24 MPG (U.S. average), 3,600,000 miles/acre/year. It is clear that thermochemical engines will beat biofuels in efficiency.

Of course, the real question is cost and rare element usage. No one likes to talk about that.

Re:Good

[ScrewMaster]

This trend shows no signs of slowing down; rather, it appears to be accelerating. So take that into account when talking about range for the future.

All good points, but you gloss over the whole issue of "rapid charging". Dumping the energy equivalent of a 20 gallon tank of gasoline (roughly the same as 2000 sticks of dynamite) into a compact mobile storage system in a matter of minutes is a non-trivial engineering effort. It's an active process: chemical changes are occurring, thermal losses are being dissipated, whereas filling a tank is rather passive in comparison and inherently safer. We'll have to reduce I^R losses considerably before that happens anyway. Face it, a liquid-fueled system make a hell of a lot of sense from a distribution perspective: the only question is whether that liquid needs to be gasoline. And, frankly, I'd rather be sitting astride a tank of relatively safe fossil fuel than I would a couple hundred kilowatt/hours of battery pack. Those things are not safe, and cannot really ever be made safe, and the lower the internal resistance the more dangerous they become when damaged.

Furthermore, the existing power grid in the U.S. is not in any shape for a nation of pure electric vehicles. It simply was not designed for that purpose ... hell, we can barely handle all our air conditioners. Fact is, we have neither the generating nor distribution capacity, and such a buildout would be hideously expensive at this point. Maybe if we hadn't spent a couple trillion dollars on Iraq, and another trillion or so in bailout funds we could pull it off, but I doubt it's in the cards now.

Re:Good

[Eclipse-now]

No no no! These are not real objections when the company sells you the car, but maintains ownership of the battery! "Physical labor" of swapping batteries? Are you serious? Don't tell me you haven't seen the Better Place battery swap automated station? http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/video-better-places-automated-electric-vehicle-battery-switch/

It sounds like you need to spend some time here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place Just like in the "olden days" the King's messenger didn't wait overnight for the horses to rest & recharge their 'batteries', but swapped them out, Better Place has come up with the battery standards that are so good Tokyo is trialling TAXIS out on this Battery-swap system, and they'll NEVER get a chance to just sit still and charge for 8 hours! I can't believe there are slashdotters that don't know about Better Place, especially when HSBC just invested $350 million in Better Place and the CEO is all over "The Economist" podcast. They're coming to San Francisco, Hawaii, Tokyo, Canberra... and at a price / km at about half the price of oil, it's simply going to CHANGE THE WORLD people!

Re:Good

[crispytwo]

All we need are two brushes on the bottom, and a slot to put the car in

voilà, no batteries needed!

woot!

Re:Good

[TheRaven64]

Note, however, that the land just needs to be somewhere where there is sunlight, it does not need to be good farmland. There is lots of desert space in the middle of the USA that would be ideal for algae farms but terrible for farming conventional crops.

Re:Good

[Rei]

And where do you get the water to produce the algae in the desert? Even when you use enclosed tanks, some of the water still ends up as fuel, and some gets wasted in the fuel production process.

Re:Good

[Rei]

You are actually getting %50 sunlight to hydrogen efficiency at a 0.3 capacity factor with those engines

That sounds about right.

The Mobil M syngas to gasoline (also called methanol to gasoline), is %86 percent energy efficient

That sounds about right as well. And then there's the difference in electricity/gasoline to kinetic energy efficiency for the vehicles themselves.

1kW/m^2 * 1 acre * 1 year = 127,706,349 megajoules.

As I mentioned in my last post, it doesn't work that way. Take a look at what solar farms actually look like up close. Notice all the empty space on the grounds? You have to space them out or they'll shadow each other at any point other than noon and you will have spent a lot of money on hardware that's being used suboptimally. There's also roads and other wasted land. So if you're calculating based on solar input, you need to multiply not just by capacity factor, but a spacing factor as well. Or, conversely, if you want to assume full shadowing, you can't just use the numbers from an existing solar thermal plant; you'll need to calculate that one from 1kW/m^2 as well.

Probably the easiest way is just to compare the efficiencies. Solar thermal plants will generally get you somewhere between 30% and 50% generation efficiency, depending on the tech used (the latter case being the high temperature molten salt plants). Electric motors + inverters will generally get you somewhere in the range of 85-90% average efficiency. Li-ion packs are very efficient (96-99%). Transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficiency. I'm not sure what sort of distribution losses you'd have for your fuel -- I'd wager somewhere along the order of 5-10%. Gasoline engines operate in the mid-30s percent efficiency in peak conditions, but only average about 20% in typical driving conditions. So, putting it all together, you get 23-41% system efficiency vs. ~8% system efficiency. So overall, the gasoline comes off a bit better in the calculations than my first impression, but obviously it's not going to beat out just using electricity.

Still, there is potential if they can do it affordably. That's a heck of a lot more land efficient than biofuels, even algae, and probably cheaper than algae too (the tankage requirements kill it for algae). Still, the hardware costs seem bound to be a lot higher than for solar thermal electricity costs, just judging from a manufacturing complexity perspective.

Also, Rei, are you an energy researcher or something??? You make a lot of really good comments here on /. about energy.

I work in the EV industry, so it's part of my job to stay on top of various battery and fuel technologies. :) My company develops software to provide accurate range calculation to vehicles (including terrain, weather forecasts, etc). While we launched it for EVs since they have particular need for it, it can work with any kind of powertrain, present or future (unless the laws of physics up and change on us!), so I need to stay on top of things. Also, my father works in the oil industry (he's actually the CEO of one of the US's largest refiners), so I get diverse perspectives.

Re:Good

[Rei]

High school? I never would have guessed. And usually it's glaringly obvious. :)

That's cool that you work in the EV industry. That must be some accurate software to include weather forecasts in vehicle range.

Oh, it has to be! :) Weather -- in particular, temperature -- plays a very large role in EV range. For example, as Lutz recently noted, while he had been getting 40+ miles on his Volt in city driving warmer weather, during Michigan's recent cold snap, it got only 28 miles. We download and parse NWS forecasts (GFS MOS MAV, GFS MOS MEX), then interpolate between them (both geographically and temporally).

It's a neat field :)

I'm a homeschool highschool student who reads about these matters for fun. I experiment, unsuccessfully, with attempts to build batteries.

I'm curious as to what exactly you mean by this. Are you building battery packs or individual cells? If battery packs, what kind of cells are you using? And if building cells, what chemistry? I'm curious how high-tech you're going -- I assume somewhere between "potato battery" and "lithium ion" ;).

Have you heard of LISICON membranes? They're really neat. They let you use an aqueous electrolyte on one side and an organic on the other while still allowing lithium ions to cross. Plus, they're resistant to dendrite damage if you use a metallic lithium anode (when metallic lithium plates, it tends to form dendrites which can pierce traditional membranes). LISICON membranes are used in Li-air and nickel-lithium cells.

Lithium-sulfur cathodes are also pretty cool. A team from the University of Waterloo had a really clever approach to . They wicked molten sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon, then functionalized the surface with polyethylene glycol. This keeps the lithium polysulfides, which tend to be soluble and escape the cathode, trapped inside the pores (they're hydrophobic). They got some really amazing results. The paper is "A highly ordered nanostructured carbon-sulphur cathode for lithium-sulphur batteries". Again, like with li-air and nickel-lithium, probably a wee bit outside of one's capability to build at home -- but still neat. :)

One of the craziest concepts I've run into is that of a "digital quantum battery" (actually capacitor). The paper is a bit dense, but basically, the idea is to print an array of nanoscale vacuum-tube capacitors (lithographically, like with computer chips). When you get that small, quantum effects help keep current from arcing, so they can run them up to huge voltages (by capacitor standards, at least). The electric fields can be made so intense that you can put so much mechanical strain on the electrodes that one needs to be made out of a carbon nanotube for optimal performance. :) And of course, it'd be all nontoxic and have pretty much limitless cycle life.

Modern battery research is pretty fascinating. While the odds of any one tech panning out are low, the odds of every battery tech not panning out are almost nil. Did you know that some of the li-ion batteries starting to hit the market now have silicon anodes instead of graphite? This is brand new, as of January. So forget everything you ever heard about the maximum theoretical energy density for li-ion batteries. Silicon ups it significantly; it can hold as much as 10 times more lithium in the anode.

Even if you're just building battery packs, rather than individual cells, there's a lot that can be done there. I've been tempted myself to mess around with that. In my "ideal" charging setup, cells are separated by a corrugated aluminum foil that acts as a heat sink, with forced air being able to be blown through the channels for cooling. For extreme rapid charging, I'd have the charger itself provide coolant, with the charger cable being actively cooled by the coolant it provides to the vehicle. Coolant would be supercritical CO2, due to its low viscosity

Can't Wait.

[cohensh]

I can imagine it would make a multi-car pile up quite exciting. Just another effort to make real life more like a Michael Bay movie.

Re:Can't Wait.

[Adriax]

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ricer

Another wonderful fantasy

[Whuffo]

According to TFA their plan is to make the body panels act as one plate of a huge capacitor. I can't even begin to list all the technical flaws in their proposal; just reading it made my head hurt. They really should run their promotional pieces past a real engineer before spreading them all over the net.

Re:Another wonderful fantasy

[jollyreaper]

According to TFA their plan is to make the body panels act as one plate of a huge capacitor. I can't even begin to list all the technical flaws in their proposal; just reading it made my head hurt. They really should run their promotional pieces past a real engineer before spreading them all over the net.

I have visions of car crashes involving brilliant blue flashes and passengers exploding from the sudden discharge of electricity. Then again, we're already driving around in steel coffins filled with gallons of explosively flammable liquid so there's not much left to lose.

Re:Another wonderful fantasy

[LenE]

Not only that, but the use of carbon fiber for the plates brings other hazards with galvanic corrosion and much difficulty in preventing shorts. CF is really good at destroying metal fasteners. Throw it in a wet environment like a wheel well, roof or hood, and the problems erupt in very little time.

This is a funding trial balloon. You can imagine lots of uses for something when you make a small swatch hooked up to alligator clips in the lab, but the practicalities of implementing this "technology" in the real world will never be solved. At least without more funding. This university is not interested in making body panels out of this material. They want someone with money to come by and fund their research for access, so they can make body panel capacitors.

-- Len

Re:The new material? DiHydrogen Monoxide

[dfsmith]

Are you crazy? Dihydrogen monoxide kills over 4000 people a year in the US alone!

Re:The new material? DiHydrogen Monoxide

[nicknamenotavailable]

Are you crazy? Dihydrogen monoxide kills over 4000 people a year in the US alone!

Replace the 'dihydrogen monoxide' with 'hydroxyethane'.
It might not improve things, but it seems like more fun.

Slashdot does it again!

[TimHunter]

Once again, in less than 30 minutes the Slashdot crowd finds multiple fatal flaws in the results of years of work by highly-trained educated people. And frequently without even bothering to RTFA! Is there nothing we can't do?

NOBODY expects the Slashdot Community! The chief weapon of the Slashdot Community is presumption...presumption and arrogance...arrogance and presumption.... Our *two* weapons are presumption and arrogance...and cynicism.... Our *three* weapons are presumption, arrogance, and cynicism...and an overweening sense of entitlement.... Our *four*...no.... *Amongst* our weapons... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as arrogance, presumption...I'll come in again.

Re:Slashdot does it again!

[Monkeedude1212]

Is there nothing we can't do?

Find a date for Valentines day?

Re:Slashdot does it again!

[Anonymous Coward]

This year it's February 14.

Thank you, thank you.

Re:Slashdot does it again!

[Jeng]

You remember the story about someone wanting to power a car off of hydrogen that is produced by burning magnesium in water?

Some ideas are just so stupid that they are put on the main page for us to poop on them.

Why is this one stupid?

Cost is first, this is built on top of carbon fiber which is already pretty damn expensive without also turning it into a battery. Yea, one day they may bring the cost down, but it is not in the reasonable future.

Kaboom is second. Its not just about energy storage, its about where you store the energy. With electric powered cars and petrol powered cars the energy is stored in a safe spot in the car, the body of the car is about as unsafe as you can get.

Link to original article

[chinmay7]

Why do I have to click through two blogs with fluff to reach the original article on PhysOrg? - http://www.physorg.com/news184585514.html

I can only imagine...

[E. Edward Grey]

ME: Can you help me out here? I scraped a concrete barrier while trying to park my car.
REPAIR SHOP: Sure we can. That will be seven thousand dollars.

neat idea

[wizardforce]

The idea is a very interesting one and the problem isn't so much the risk of electrical shock (done correctly there isn't one) but the cost of the material and the ease to which the material can be replaced if it ever fails. With normal car batteries, replacing them is easy. Just unhook the +/-
from the battery and lift it out. With the car body acting as a battery, if something fails, the entire material must be removed. This sounds to me to be fairly expensive as well as having to replace the material which its self may have a fairly significant cost. Over time that will be less the case but the problem of replacing a faulty "battery" remains.

premature discharge

[jimbolauski]

The problem I can't even fathom how to solve is the premature discharge problem, imagine the insulator being worn by vibration between the two panels or an accident. To make it safe the panels would need to be divided into cells that have 1 V max, how the hell do you divide up a solid panel into so many small pieces cheaply.

REAL link to original article

[argent]

Physorg is a tarpit. Here's the REAL original article.

http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_5-2-2010-10-26-39

Re:Problem with that

[nacturation]

Car batteries want to be 200 to 300 volts.

Car batteries don't like being anthropomorphized.

It's a capcitor!

[reg106]

The device is a capacitor that can also support mechanical load. The first hint is that they call it energy storage, but never actually call it a battery (though it may "replace a battery"). In the linked video, they are using a custom device (indicated by the Imperial College in the upper left), that is also labeled as capacitor charge-discharge indicator. The storage device appears to be two sheets of carbon fiber mesh held together with a "multifunctional resin", i.e. a nonconductive material with a high dielectric constant that is also capable of supporting a large mechanical load (or rather, binding to the carbon fiber so that it supports a large mechanical load, i.e. a composite). The idea of using ultracapacitors to replace batteries has been around for a long while. Ultracapactiors usually use esoteric materials and have problems with leakage over long periods of time, but have met with success in some applications. The military has funded a lot of research for ultracapacitors to replace batteries for the electronics on missiles, an ideal application since missiles potentially sit on the shelf for years, and then need to function precisely for a very short period of time. (the cap would be charged as part of the launch procedure.)

In the example mentioned in the video (GPS case made of the material), I'm not sure why it would reduce wiring, since the capacitor would still need to be charged, just as if it were being fed by the cars electrical system. I suspect there are some real advances in the work, but the interesting features don't come through in this video for public consumption.

The scientists are working with Volvo

[copponex]

Read the article.

Researchers from Imperial College London and their European partners, including Volvo Car Corporation, are developing a prototype material which can store and discharge electrical energy and which is also strong and lightweight enough to be used for car parts.

Now, take your foot out of your mouth, and enjoy the following quote:

"When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities." -David Hume

I'm living proof that slashdot is mostly full of arrogant people who enjoy misinformed and cynical deconstruction above all else.

Re:The new material? DiHydrogen Monoxide

[Hognoxious]

Dihydrogen monoxide is a gateway drug. Most adults who are addicted to hydroxethane drank DHMO when they were children.

Bonus

[HangingChad]

Researchers are currently developing a new auto body material that can store and release electrical energy like a battery.

And it would make the neighbor's dog peeing on my car a pay-per-view moment.

Re:Problem with that

[vlm]

Hardly the 200-300 volts that you're thinking are required.

He's anthropomorphizing it when he writes "Car batteries want to be 200 to 300 volts".

Real engineers know you can gin up a set of equations to optimize an overall system. Not surprisingly, an electric cars optimum voltage and current end up suspiciously nearby, yet somewhat below, industrial heavy equipment and diesel electric traction motors of the same power rating. Lower it a bit because the power levels are a bit lower (plenty of 3000 HP locomotives, not many 3000 HP electric cars... yet). Also lower it a bit because insulation requirements are a bit stricter for morons. Lower it a bit for temperature derating, run the car in death valley, etc. Also lower it a bit for battery reliability, plates shorting, vibration etc. You end up in the 300ish volt range for "car power levels"

Similarly, your average electric motorcycle should be happy around 60 volts. Which is suspiciously close to where they seem to be.

You don't get it.

[gr8_phk]

You can't do shit with 12 volts. Hybrid cars use at least 150V, and electric cars (which I'm working on at this very moment) will be using 200-400V batteries (depends on the application). Voltage conversion is roughly 90-95 percent efficient, so throw away 10 percent of your range right there. However, we typically convert the high voltage down to run the low power stuff. If you wanted to do a 12V car and wanted to get 100kW you'd need over 8000 Amps DC. And yes, we're running motors around 110kW as traction motors plus or minus 30 percent (I'm not telling). One horsepower = 746 Watts, but I just figure 0.75kW.

BetterPlace

[Cyberax]

BetterPlace (seriously, that's a company name) plans to do exactly this: http://www.betterplace.com/solution/charging/

They're planning to install battery swapping stations in Israel first.

Re:Lighter is not always a good thing.

[Rei]

Ugh, don't get me started on bumpers. My (now) wife got into a 5mph accident that caused $3k worth of damage to our car. She hit a jacked up pickup that was still within the legal range; his bumper wasn't even close to ours. His trailer hitch cut right through the hood and engine compartment.

It's unfathomable to me that we mandate bumpers but don't require that they meet up.

Re:Lighter is not always a good thing.

[pclminion]

Uh, the problem is not the lightweight vehicles. The problem is the HEAVY ones.

Megatron is pleased!

[jameskojiro]

As they can round up the autobots (especially that prick bumblebee) and convert them directly into energon cubes!!!!!