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Israeli Firm Makes Kilomile Claims For Electric Car Battery Tech
cylonlover writes with this tantalizing excerpt from GizMag "Israel-based company Phinergy claims to have developed metal-air battery technology that promises to end the range anxiety associated with electric vehicles. The company's battery currently consists of 50 aluminum plates, each providing energy for around 20 miles (32 km) of driving. This adds up to a total potential range of 1,000 miles (1,609 km), with stops required only every couple of hundred miles to refill the system with water."
From TFA (I know, but there were no comments yet ;-):
The company says the aluminum plate anodes in its aluminum-air battery have an energy density of 8 kWh/kg, but the batteries are not rechargeable. Once the energy is expended, the plates, which add up to around 55 pounds (25 kg) per battery, need to be replaced. However, the company points out that aluminum is easily recyclable and that swapping the battery out for a fresh one is quicker than recharging.
That makes it a lot less appealing, I would say...
a fuel cell, not a battery.
"The company says the aluminum plate anodes in its aluminum-air battery have an energy density of 8 kWh/kg, but the batteries are not rechargeable. Once the energy is expended, the plates, which add up to around 55 pounds (25 kg) per battery, need to be replaced. However, the company points out that aluminum is easily recyclable and that swapping the battery out for a fresh one is quicker than recharging."
Oh I see, so one anxiety is traded for another...
Boycot israeli products
Kilomile? Yes, let's combine two units of measure arbitrarily.
maybe it comes with free kugle
Sounded exciting, clicked the link, but it is NOT RECHARGEABLE. As in, you have to throw the aluminum battery away once you've used it. Even the company say it's a "range extender" to use alongside a lithium battery, and as for the 1000 miles, I don't see any evidence for that in the article.
So the battery supposedly has a 1,000 mile range, but you have to stop every 100 to 200 miles to refill it with water? ... So it only has a 100-200 mile range. And on top of that, it's a disposable (recyclable) battery, not a rechargable one ... pros and cons to that, but it does require an infrastructure of replacement battery stations. Certainly better in my opinion than a charging station, but at least charging stations exist.
In the end, if the aluminium can be recycled completely to make new batteries, then, this has potential. Depends now on cost, safety, ease of maintenance and most of all performance. You can do 1000 miles.. at what average speed?
Their mileage seems a little off. The total kW/h in this seems to be 200 at the weight of the battery (25kg @ 8 kW/kg). The chevy volt would only go about 750miles on that much juice. (36kWh/100 miles)
I thought that this technology had been suppressed by "Big Oil"?
If this works as well as it is claimed to, then be prepared for an aggressive change in US policy towards Israel!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
About BDS
Not a battery, just a fuel cell.
with stops required only every couple of hundred miles to refill the system with water.
Then the system has a range of a "couple of hundred miles" and not 1000. It has a *charge* for 1000 miles, but the car's range is only as good as your worst stat.
Who the fuck came up with that dumb word? Someone needs a nice hearty punch in the dick for that.
"You do realize that whenever one of you assholes boycotts some Israeli company, I make sure to buy 2 of whatever they're selling"
That won't work. Firstly he wanted to draw attention to this BDS Israel boycott, and he succeeded, and you helped him. Pro Israeli mod's used their mod points to drive it to -1, but you are at +2 and it flags the comments for others to read. I would never have read his comment if you weren't there flagging it.
Secondly, each time you buy two, you're wasting your money. It's always easier for him to avoid any Israeli products, because they don't have an exclusive on anything he wants. He doesn't go without, he just chooses a competitor's product. You on the other hand, end up paying twice, and have to buy the Israel product, even if there was better or cheaper ones.
So to him its a triple win, 1. he boycotts Israel, 2. he got you to promote his comment, and 3. you end up being punished for your counter boycott by paying at least double.
Plus you flag yourself as irrationally pro-Israel in any future discussion, which will prevent you from appearing to be any sensible balanced viewpoint on Israel.
Consumers don't want this. They want something to recharge at home during the night without having to visit "stations" in order to refill water or aluminium. Also, we already have a distribution system for electricity and gas, there will be no costly third aluminiumbattery-system.
640 miles should be enough for anyone.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
There has been a claim of "revolutionary battery technology" from some US energy lab every month- carbon nanotubes, lithium air, etc. But few have ramped up to daily production road use. And few have gone bankrupt with $100s millions US DOE grants along the way.
I really, truly hope one of these claims becomes reality one day. I would like a 1000-mile electric car in my garage that costs the same as a petro car.
Seriously, this looks like a great way to range extend electric cars by putting it on a small tow-able trailer, or something that plugs into the rear similar to the trailer hitch carriers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I love the units used in the summary title. Kilomile? A better statement would be Megameter.
Well, better than that, any company that works with Israel on any product I automatically avoid too.
Sometimes it's a bit harder, but just reading Engadget, the Israeli company is always there trying to promote themselves, so it's relatively easy to avoid them. So when choosing a console for example, the XBox Kinect (licensed from an Israel company) meant I opted for the PS3 instead.
I know it doesn't have a direct measurable effect, but it makes me feel like I'm doing something positive. Taking a little time each day to choose one product over another, and understanding that each time I do it, a few dollars less make there way into Israel.
Sometimes I have to do partial rejects. I turned off Google autocomplete search, it was developed in Google Israel (and besides it use to annoy me that the autocomplete was sent to Google, if I typed it in before switching to DuckDuckGo to do the actual search).
2)Price wise, the cost to replace 55 pounds of aluminum is about equal to gas. Maybe a little lower if you get paid back some for the used aluminum. Not much, but at least a small gain economically. Pollution wise it is worth it.
3) Range of a gas car is normally around 300 to 400 miles. (http://solarchargeddriving.com/editors-blog/on-evs-a-phevs/706-whats-your-gasoline-cars-range.html) Range of a car using this technology should easily be the same (just because some idiot thought they need to refill the battery with water every 100 miles doesn't mean a good engineer can't install a large spare water tank to refill it on the go.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If the battery were slung under the vehicle (as an another Israeli firm called Better Place proposes), then it could even be swapped out just by driving the car on to a ramp where a robotic arm extracts and replaces it in minutes. Also the battery is for exceptional situations so that 1000 miles might deplete very slowly since drivers would rely on rechargeable cells for the most part. So you might only have to do this once a month or once every half a year depending on your driving patterns.
Of course could be lots of reasons that this is a terrible idea. What's the energy cost of producing a battery and recycling it? What's the cost of building out an infrastructure? How many batteries would a car need to haul around to justify the additional range it supplied? Does the battery degrade when it's not in use or when it's used just once? Would other metal-air batteries be safe or cheaper to use? And so on.
So when did the definition for battery require the ability to recharge? Does that mean all these batteries I have are actually lies?!
It takes a lot of energy to refine aluminum. The battery is not rechargeable and requires recycling every 1000 miles. This does not sound workable in the long term. A car using this battery will also require another battery like Lithium Ion for situations where one needs a burst of energy or when one wants to take advantage of regenerative braking. This solution seems half-baked to me.
Israel does not force Judaism on its citizens. You may be thinking of Hamas in Gaza, which has been enforcing Islam and intimidating people to convert to Islam. They have religious police enforcing dress codes and most recently segregated all schools by gender, including private schools.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The dead sea scrolls prove Jews were living in the area over 2000 years ago. They were there first and were violently displaced by invaders and deported from their own land... so basically, you are ignorant of the history.
I read years ago about a proposed "zinc economy" for batteries. You'd pump in little zinc pellets, the reactor would produce zinc oxide and electricity. You'd pump the zinc oxide back out. The station would use another electric reactor to refine it back into pure zinc.
Obviously it's messy. I assume this process is too. A nice bonus with the zinc system is that you can put the exhaust on your nose at the beach. The possible toxicity of excessive zinc and aluminum being spilled can't be ignored. It's not as bad as powering your car with benzine; but there are still considerations. Aluminum plaques are noted in Alzheimer's patients. AFAIK there is no definitive study linking environmental exposure to Al and dementia; but that doesn't mean it can't happen.
Yes, but unlike a beer can in this case the aluminum is probably being converted back to bauxite (or something similar) within the battery as it delivers power, so recycling it will require reinvesting all that energy again. Actually rather ingenious if the efficiencies work out well - aluminum is both energy dense and stable, and the recharging/refining process has already benefited from many decades of industrial scale optimization.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Do you boycott China products because of their child labor & pollution? Do you boycott Palestinian products because Hamas won't let girls be in the same classroom as men?
Actually seems pretty similar to gas to to me, except that you're replacing the tank as well as the fuel.
The one improvement I could see is using something like ten 5-plate batteries rather than one 50-plate battery and, insofar as possible, draining them sequentially. That way you could replace just one or two spent batteries to "top off the tank" after using a couple hundred miles of range extension. By coordinating with the rechargable battery that wouldn't seem to be too difficult even if you would normally need most of the batteries in parallel to provide peak power - just have an "optimized range extension" switch on the dash that would drain your weakest extended battery(s) to manitain cruising speed and save the rechargable for when a little extra "oomph" is necessary.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Brawndo! It's got what batteries crave! It's got electrolytes!
Heck Yeah! It's just too bad that trickle-charging is almost useless for range extension - if your car consumes 10kW to maintain cruising speed then even if you can provide a 1kW "trickle" you'll only extend your range by about 10%. The real benefit is just that you don't need a charging station to recharge when parked.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
He does not claim that is the definition. In fact he refers to it as a battery himself, as in "you have to throw the aluminum battery away once you've used it". He is just complaining that it is not a rechargeable battery.
For decades Iceland has been contemplating ways to export their cheap geothermal electricity, and aluminum batteries are one such idea. I'll leave it to someone not on a mobile phone to do a detailed search, but here is one link: http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=765&first=3858&end=3857 The gist of Slashdot's linked to adver.... uh, article, is they think they have improved the process. Of course it appears they do it in their own custom built demonstration vehicle. There are ways to make custom built gas cars get almost that range on a tank of gas, but they aren't anything most of us would want to drive, and wouldn't pass US safety standards. So although this is probably good news, it also probably isn't as exciting or new as the marketing hype.
Who the [...] came up with that dumb word [kilomile]?
Probably a techie, used to using prefixes to indicate power of ten scaling factors when talking about large or small counts or measurements.
But it's a perfectly valid construction. Quantities measured in non-metric units can also be expressed in base 10.
Assuming you CAN count in base 10, of course. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Oh I agree it's technically valid, but how can you say it without feeling shame? I should change my second sentence there, too. They need a kilopunch in the microdick. Topical!