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Electric Car Goes 375 Miles On One 6-Minute Charge
thecarchik writes with this quote from AllCarsElectric:
"We all know that battery packs are the weakest link in electric vehicles. Not only are they heavy and expensive, but they take a long time to recharge and on average can only provide around 100 miles per charge. A German-based company has changed all that with a new vehicle capable of driving up to 375 miles at moderate highway speeds. ... It doesn't end there. The company responsible for the battery pack, DBM Energy, claims a battery pack efficiency of 97 percent and a recharge time of around 6 minutes when charged from a direct current source. Unlike the small Daihatsu which was heavily modified by a team in Japan earlier this year that achieved a massive 623 miles on a charge at around 27 mph, the Audi A2 modified by DBM Energy was able to achieve its 375 miles range at an average speed of 55 mph."
It is possible that the charger "Cheats" too--
It might contain a very large capacitor array that allows for the boost charging speed, at the expense of the recharger itself requireing several more minutes, to even several hours to "recover" afterward. (That is to say, the charger itself is a glorified high-voltage regulator attached to a very large ultracapacitor bank. The rapid discharge rate required by the battery's charging station would neccessitate such a solution if 150kw service was unavailable/inpractical. When the battery pack is attached, the capcacitor bank discharges to fill the battery, but then the capacitor array has a required recharging period before it can be used again; a process which could occur while the driver is on the road.)
Such a "cheating" solution would pose a significant risk should a short occur inside the charger though.
Solar photovoltaic and fuel cells generate direct current. Usually they go through an inverter, that loses 10-25% of the energy (as heat, and burns out the part for replacement about every 5 years). A battery like this would mean keeping that energy without losing it. Leaving a battery charging at home while driving the car around, then swapping it into the car when the car returns home - or reverse the positions for batteries charging at work or at whatever daytime destination. That battery can also power household devices, like the many devices that really consume DC, which waste power running from wall current into rectifiers.
This kind of device could improve not only transit energy, but also residential (and commercial sites that reverse the locations).
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make install -not war
Fall 2011 for around 27,000$ after tax break. Or so says Mitsubishi.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
74kwh in 6 minutes is 740 kilowatts. They said specifically that this could be achieved with a "DC current source", so they clearly aren't talking about a standard 220V outlet. More likely, to actually achieve this you'd need a large capacitor as suggested by a post above. 74kwh supercapacitors are damned expensive, so I doubt if anyone would put one in their house.
What would be practical, though, is for a bank of supercapacitors to be located at a gas station. There could be six, eight, or however many different capacitors, and when you pull up to the "electricity pump" it would connect you to one of the charged ones. Then the capacitor would go back to charging from a ~30kw mains circuit (for about 3 hours). If all the capacitors were drained, a big red light would turn on at the pump and you would have to wait for one of them to finish charging (or get a partial charge).
Even if the gas station *did* have a 1 megawatt feed line, this kind of huge instantaneous load spike would not be nice to the electrical grid, so capacitors would be the preferred method of implementation. The gas stations could even wire them up to feed power back to the grid if it needed stabilization, or it would be the one place you could charge your phone when a storm knocks out the neighborhood.
This is, however, trading reliance on oil as a fuel source for reliance on lithium as a storage medium. Admittedly that's more conducive to recycling, but while I'm no expert on batteries, I'm pretty sure it's not trivial to turn a dead, degraded cell into a shiny new one.
It's a shame we haven't managed to get particularly far with hydrogen as a storage medium - it can be produced straight from fossil fuels to ease the transition, and then produced directly from water once we get the power generation infrastructure up to scratch. No reliance on a non-renewable power source or storage medium.
Doesn't have to be batteries. Flywheel storage would be a perfect solution to this problem - replace the underground fuel tanks with a flywheel storage bunker and spin it up when there is energy to spare.
According to this German article and another German article. The engine uses between 8-15 kWh in normal use.
The trip was 605 kM (377+ miles) at 130 kM/h (81 MPH) or 90kM/h (56 MPH). The 130 in one article seems wrong, and a commenter posted a correction. So, likely it was 90 kM/h.
At the end of the trip the battery pack still had a 18% charge, but the inventors say the range is 600 kM (
So charging to 97% in six minutes required a 79% charge or 90kWh or about 0.9 MW in 6 minutes.
You could drive it for more than 375 miles on a single charge, depending on how deeply you want to drain the battery. Still, who wants to drive more than 7 hours a day. Now if you had just three available stations. you'd be able to drive then entire North-South distance of the US (in 29 hours - I've done it in 21). With seven stations, you'd be able to drive across the US (in 56 hrs ). 377 miles on a "tank" is fairly standard. that's about the range in my cars. There are certainly better ranged cars. The one thing the article breezes over, is that over 55 MPH, you'd likely see polynomially decreasing range.