The atomic weight of the reactants is not the only factor. The theoretical energy density (Wh/kg) of an aluminum-ion battery is twice that of a lithium-ion battery. While the aluminum atoms weigh almost 4 times lithium atoms they also release 3 times as many electrons. The atomic weights for the other reactants make up the rest of the difference; aluminum-ion batteries lack the heavy cobalt.
As other posters have pointed out, the cost of the lithium is not significant. Cost reduction will come from other things like economy of scale.
But extracting either from seawater does not really make any sense. Some mid-east countries desalinate so they can pursue idiotic schemes to grow wheat in the desert, when they could just buy wheat for far less.
This can make sense from a national security standpoint. Japan for instance subsidizes their agricultural sector because if they imported all of their food, it would make them more vulnerable to interdiction and trade politics. The middle east countries are paying a premium to gain a secure source of food.
- Lithium batteries age with the number of cycle they go through. It happens really often that a laptop is drained all the way down to 0% or nearly 0% (lithium batteries hate that). Whereas most of the daily commute Tesla cars are subjected to are short trips that only eat a fraction of their charge.
- The more violent the discharge rate, the faster the lithium battery will age. Under heavy load, a laptop battery will get completely drained in hour or two max. On the other hand, given its range and typical speed limitation, it would take at least 4-5 hours to drain completely a Tesla. i.e.: overall the Tesla eats up much more total power than your laptop (obviously), but each of the cells is put to less stress as it needs to deliver a much lower peak current.
The number of cycles and depth of discharge matter but there are other things as well. One of the lithium battery wear out mechanisms is related to peak cell voltage where higher voltages cause lithium plating which damages the cell. The cells wear out just sitting there when fully charged. Life can be extended by charging the batteries to a lower maximum capacity. For instance a 0.2 volt difference in peak voltage may yield only 75% of the capacity but 4 times as many charge and discharge cycles.
Oddly enough double layer capacitors (supercapacitors and ultracapacitors) have a similar wear-out mechanism where lowering the peak voltage by 0.2 volts raises the operating lifetime by 10 times.
This behavior explains why charge balancing based on the peak cell voltage is important with lithium batteries and double layer capacitors.
Motors should be more reliable than engines and transmissions but I have changed more wheel bearings than engine and transmission bearings. I have little doubt that Tesla makes a well designed and reliable electronic drivetrain but I expect companies like GMC to build carefully crafted junk when they get around to it.
And by inspired do you mean reverse engineered? No way is inspiration enough to develop an OS in 3 months.
How much experience do you have with CP/M? Its application programming interface and data structures as well as the mass storage data structures were very well documented before the 8086 became available. I have no difficulty in believing that someone who was already familiar with them could write an implementation in 8086 assembly within a period of months.
I had the same thought they did initially, which is that convection of air was responsible for their thrust. That will not happen in vacuum, so that idea is right out.
The two sources of experimental error that first occur to me are interference with the signal conditioning for the load cell and the Lorentz force.
They could also have been working together to answer the question "Where is the line in the sand between interrogation and torture?"
We know where the line is based on the torture techniques we use and continue to approved of; they include simulated drowning, pain, sleep deprivation, isolation, and starvation or malnutrition. Some or all of these are things we prosecute as war crimes except when we do it.
If law enforcement and national security had not been unconstitutionally seizing and searching everything they could call third party data then there would not be a push for ubiquitous encryption. There was a group at the NSA who pointed out that this would happen damaging their ability to do lawful intercepts if they were caught. Since they were willing to lie about what was going on and break the law before, why would we trust any government only backdoor scheme or what they say now?
It does not matter how any government backdoor system is implemented. They will abuse it sooner or later.
Directv's internet is so bad, that I don't see how AT&T could make it worse.
They could outsource services like email to Yahoo. They could block protocol 41 to prevent customers from tunneling IPv6 without paying for it. They could transparently proxy DNS and HTTP.
Back in the late 1980s, the W6FXN 2 meter repeater on Buzzard Peak (145.460 MHz) above Cal Poly Pomona was setup to repeat the tone modulated seismic signal from one of the seismometers maintained by USGS (Running Springs on 162.8090 MHz?) when significant tone deviation was detected. Depending on geometry, this provided 5 to 10 seconds of warning to Orange County for earthquakes which were mostly located closer to Los Angeles. There were proposals at the time for extending this idea but as far as I know, none were implemented.
They are not *that* heavy unless you want to drop them from orbit. By the time you have enough mass in expensive batteries, you have orders of magnitude more energy storage in the batteries themselves.
I wonder if someone can scale the mechanism up for an RV fridge and make a propane based water chiller. This way, power needs would be a lot less (mainly to move air through a heat exchanger), as the propane would be the energy source for the refrigerator. Bonus points in using the Einstein cycle where that uses ammonia, butane, and water.
Certainly this can be done. There are even prototype solar powered refrigeration systems.
Inefficiencies are not the largest problem; power density, energy density, and economics are. Pumped hydroelectric storage independently scales its power and energy density and it is its large scale which makes it economical. Batteries are expensive. Using gravitational storage with a solid mass and not a fluid is just dumb unless you have gravity control and probably not even then. Large scale flow batteries have the same advantages as pumped hydroelectric storage but I am not sure about their economics.
The costs of large scale storage systems make just building more power plants an attractive option.
If the process can be operated in a way similar to aluminum refining, then it can be tuned to use excess power raising the average power level without raising the peak power level. Aluminum refineries are often located where excess variable power is available for this reason. This also fits well with the solar power supply curve which peaks significantly before the evening demand curve.
Side A: But if you're in the office while everybody else is in, you can work more efficiently, as everybody else is there to answer your questions. Side B: Some of the best engineers I've worked with worked nights. Some of them slept under their desks and rarely showered, but none of the 9-5 people came close to their performance
Side C: Being their after hours allows productive work to be done without interruption whether that is by people or sound.
At one place I worked, the boss had the phone system set to ring through to the phone in the lab where I worked so he could hear it. Having my phone ring every few minutes destroyed my productivity so I responded by coming in later and later and staying later and later but it was not enough.
8 bit and maybe 16 bit alternatives to ARM where higher performance is not necessary are still both cheaper and lower power but the infrastructure advantage of ARM is making even that difficult to ignore and I would not want to run an IP networking stack on anything smaller. I suspect the largest advantage 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers have at this point is that they are available in packages that ARM is not but should be. The ARM manufacturers seem to be playing a game of market segmentation which is hurting them at the low end.
The crown jewels of the TI programmable calculators is the firmware and not the hardware. HP had a similar thing going and wrote an emulator running on ARM to emulate the Saturn 4 bit CPU from their earlier calculators maintaining backward comparability.
Slashdot Mirror
The atomic weight of the reactants is not the only factor. The theoretical energy density (Wh/kg) of an aluminum-ion battery is twice that of a lithium-ion battery. While the aluminum atoms weigh almost 4 times lithium atoms they also release 3 times as many electrons. The atomic weights for the other reactants make up the rest of the difference; aluminum-ion batteries lack the heavy cobalt.
As other posters have pointed out, the cost of the lithium is not significant. Cost reduction will come from other things like economy of scale.
This can make sense from a national security standpoint. Japan for instance subsidizes their agricultural sector because if they imported all of their food, it would make them more vulnerable to interdiction and trade politics. The middle east countries are paying a premium to gain a secure source of food.
The number of cycles and depth of discharge matter but there are other things as well. One of the lithium battery wear out mechanisms is related to peak cell voltage where higher voltages cause lithium plating which damages the cell. The cells wear out just sitting there when fully charged. Life can be extended by charging the batteries to a lower maximum capacity. For instance a 0.2 volt difference in peak voltage may yield only 75% of the capacity but 4 times as many charge and discharge cycles.
Oddly enough double layer capacitors (supercapacitors and ultracapacitors) have a similar wear-out mechanism where lowering the peak voltage by 0.2 volts raises the operating lifetime by 10 times.
This behavior explains why charge balancing based on the peak cell voltage is important with lithium batteries and double layer capacitors.
Motors should be more reliable than engines and transmissions but I have changed more wheel bearings than engine and transmission bearings. I have little doubt that Tesla makes a well designed and reliable electronic drivetrain but I expect companies like GMC to build carefully crafted junk when they get around to it.
It was not hard to find references to this but nobody has been able to reproduce it or find the code or strings in the source or executable.
How much experience do you have with CP/M? Its application programming interface and data structures as well as the mass storage data structures were very well documented before the 8086 became available. I have no difficulty in believing that someone who was already familiar with them could write an implementation in 8086 assembly within a period of months.
Electrodynamic propulsion works but conservation of momentum still applies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
The two sources of experimental error that first occur to me are interference with the signal conditioning for the load cell and the Lorentz force.
We know where the line is based on the torture techniques we use and continue to approved of; they include simulated drowning, pain, sleep deprivation, isolation, and starvation or malnutrition. Some or all of these are things we prosecute as war crimes except when we do it.
You can add years of thuggery by Baltimore law enforcement:
https://www.themarshallproject...
Having had UPS destroy properly packaged shipments and then disclaim all liability, any insurance they provide is useless.
If law enforcement and national security had not been unconstitutionally seizing and searching everything they could call third party data then there would not be a push for ubiquitous encryption. There was a group at the NSA who pointed out that this would happen damaging their ability to do lawful intercepts if they were caught. Since they were willing to lie about what was going on and break the law before, why would we trust any government only backdoor scheme or what they say now?
It does not matter how any government backdoor system is implemented. They will abuse it sooner or later.
I assumed that Scotty (and the others) had transhuman enhancements.
Why should you pay to educate their children?
They could outsource services like email to Yahoo. They could block protocol 41 to prevent customers from tunneling IPv6 without paying for it. They could transparently proxy DNS and HTTP.
Back in the late 1980s, the W6FXN 2 meter repeater on Buzzard Peak (145.460 MHz) above Cal Poly Pomona was setup to repeat the tone modulated seismic signal from one of the seismometers maintained by USGS (Running Springs on 162.8090 MHz?) when significant tone deviation was detected. Depending on geometry, this provided 5 to 10 seconds of warning to Orange County for earthquakes which were mostly located closer to Los Angeles. There were proposals at the time for extending this idea but as far as I know, none were implemented.
This just gets back to the problem of economical power storage. Until battery energy per cost drops, a power plant is more economical.
They are not *that* heavy unless you want to drop them from orbit. By the time you have enough mass in expensive batteries, you have orders of magnitude more energy storage in the batteries themselves.
Certainly this can be done. There are even prototype solar powered refrigeration systems.
Inefficiencies are not the largest problem; power density, energy density, and economics are. Pumped hydroelectric storage independently scales its power and energy density and it is its large scale which makes it economical. Batteries are expensive. Using gravitational storage with a solid mass and not a fluid is just dumb unless you have gravity control and probably not even then. Large scale flow batteries have the same advantages as pumped hydroelectric storage but I am not sure about their economics.
The costs of large scale storage systems make just building more power plants an attractive option.
Many jurisdictions charge you a fee which may be equal or greater than the fine to contest the fine.
If the process can be operated in a way similar to aluminum refining, then it can be tuned to use excess power raising the average power level without raising the peak power level. Aluminum refineries are often located where excess variable power is available for this reason. This also fits well with the solar power supply curve which peaks significantly before the evening demand curve.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/...
Side C: Being their after hours allows productive work to be done without interruption whether that is by people or sound.
At one place I worked, the boss had the phone system set to ring through to the phone in the lab where I worked so he could hear it. Having my phone ring every few minutes destroyed my productivity so I responded by coming in later and later and staying later and later but it was not enough.
8 bit and maybe 16 bit alternatives to ARM where higher performance is not necessary are still both cheaper and lower power but the infrastructure advantage of ARM is making even that difficult to ignore and I would not want to run an IP networking stack on anything smaller. I suspect the largest advantage 8 and 16 bit microcontrollers have at this point is that they are available in packages that ARM is not but should be. The ARM manufacturers seem to be playing a game of market segmentation which is hurting them at the low end.
The crown jewels of the TI programmable calculators is the firmware and not the hardware. HP had a similar thing going and wrote an emulator running on ARM to emulate the Saturn 4 bit CPU from their earlier calculators maintaining backward comparability.