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500 Miles on a 5-Minute Recharge?
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Sep 25, 2006 02:04 PM
from the sure-just-get-in-the-electric-missile-launcher dept.
from the sure-just-get-in-the-electric-missile-launcher dept.
ctroutwi writes "In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering UltraCapacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultracapacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately $9 of electricity and then drive 500 miles."
Related Stories
[+]
Lockheed Signs with EEStor to Use New Ultracapacitor 50 comments
Over a year ago, we discussed a start-up company, EEStor, that was making incredible claims about their new power source. Later, EEStor made waves with its bold predictions and secretive policies. Now, Lockheed Martin has decided to give EEStor a chance. The two companies signed a deal this week to use the new energy storage units in Lockheed's products. The folks at GM-Volt interviewed a Lockheed representative about the deal. The representative had this to say regarding EEStor:
"We've visited their facility. We were very impressed. They are taking an approach that lends itself to a very quick ramp-up in production. We've seen a lot of their testing and efforts to measure the purity of the powders that they use, and the chemistry. Well be working with them very closely this year to develop prototypes in certain pursuits."
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Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid? (Score:4, Insightful)
How about a system in which cars connect to electric lines along the highways, like they use for electric busses and trollies, and use ultra-capacitors to get from the highway to your home? The capacitors could charge while you are on the highway, and then you would only need enough charge to go 5-10 miles.
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Funny)
Behold the future. [rides4u.com]
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Informative)
> is gonna take one HUGE ass line..
Worse. Imagine a 'gas station' of the future with a dozen 'pumps' hammering away. Imagine the electrical feeder line that will be needed going into the station. Now imagine a city, where 'gas stations' are usually on at least one, perhaps two corners of any major intersection. Now imagine one out on a lonely stretch of Interstate. All hammering away at the electrical grid by the Gigawatt/hour. Where do we get all that additional electricity? With all the major upgrading of infrastructure, increase in power station fuel costs, etc. required I wouldn't expect electric rates to remain constant, that $9 will become $50 by the time it moves from early adopter status to mainstream.... and any remaining savings on the gas bill will be more than offset by the higher electric bill.
If we start a major program of building nuke plants NOW we might be able to get ahead of the demand curve but we will still be looking at a major upgrade of the distribution grid. Everybody will have a megavolt line running through their neighborhood.
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:4, Insightful)
60 Megawatts is the kind of power that is transmitted over towers. There is no easy way to transmit that kind of power unless you have superconductors.
Agreed that you can trade-off volts for amps - but any way you slice it you have a big problem at those power levels.
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Informative)
5 minutes = 1/12 of an hour. So required current to transfer that much energy in five minutes would be 4909 amps.
Of course, the recharging stations might be very high voltage. High voltage transmission lines are routinely 110 kV and up. At 500 kV, transferring the current might only take 11 minutes. Don't know that I'd want to play around with voltages like that!
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Insightful)
Although this still doesn't address the safety issues.
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:4, Interesting)
Or alternatively, why not have a standard cartridge for the capacitors so that all you do at the 'filling' station is swap a (partially) discharged unit for a fully charged one? The station could (pardon the pun) charge you for the difference between the energy levels in the returned unit and the supplied one.
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Funny)
Pfft. That will barely get you to the store.
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole idea behind an ultracapacitor is that it stores significantly more energy than a regular capacitor.
Linky:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultracapacitors [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ultra-capacitors for a different type of hybrid (Score:4, Insightful)
How about a system in which cars connect to electric lines along the highways, like they use for electric busses and trollies, and use ultra-capacitors to get from the highway to your home? The capacitors could charge while you are on the highway, and then you would only need enough charge to go 5-10 miles.
I would find a car that does not have a 300+ mile range to be totally unacceptable. Your idea of having the car be attached to a power line is not very practical because there are not many roads that have these kind of power lines. Also, if you have ever watched the bus driver connect and disconnect a bus from these lines, you would realize that this is not a solution that would work for private cars due to the larger number of cars on the road. It would block traffic in an unacceptable way. The reason why busses run on these kinds of lines is typically because of air pollution - often the buses have to go through tunnels where the exhaust would cause huge problems. Also, busses run in major cities which have a legal requirement to reduce pollution to meet EPA requirements.
Busses go on a few known routes over and over. Private cars have a different requirement - they must go on any road for 300+ miles at a time. They must not block traffic.
If someone has developed a storage system for electricity that allows $9 of electricity to be transferred into the storage unit in 5 minutes - that is a huge advancement over the current technology. It would do a lot to make electric cars practical.
Parent
How much electricity? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll say the same thing here that I said on tribe.net when this came up.... How much electricity is "$9 worth"? Is that at 4 cents per kWh, or 25 cents per kWh? Electricity is found at both thos prices, and every price in between, in different places in the US, and I want to know how much electricity this car uses, not how much it costs some undefined person at some undefined location.
Re:How much electricity? (Score:4, Insightful)
-matthew
Parent
Re:How much electricity? (Score:5, Informative)
What kind of service will allow you to suck down $9 worth of electricity in 5 minutes?
Good point. Let me slap some math on it.
At $0.25/kWh, $9 is 36kWh. You would have to pass 432kW of power. At 120, 240, 480 and 600 volts, this would be a current of 3600A, 1800A, 900A and 720A, respectively.
At $0.04/kWh, it is much worse. At that price, $9 buys 225kWh, which, to pass in 5 minutes, requires a power of 2.7MW. At the same voltages as above, this would be 22.5kA, 11.25kA, 5.63kA and 4.5kA, respectively.
Hell, even at 13.2kV, this would be a fairly big current, somewhere between 32 and 205 Amps.
I'll take the slower charge, thank you very much.
Parent
Re:How much electricity? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How much electricity? (Score:5, Funny)
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Great Scott! (Score:5, Funny)
1.2 Megawatts (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:1.2 Megawatts (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:1.2 Megawatts (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:1.2 Megawatts (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be terrified to even stand near such a fueling station, let alone use one or install it in my home.
Imagine the mortal dread of having your 1.2 megawatt car running low on power during a rainstorm.
For all it's potential energy, at least liquid gasoline is relatively stable and safe. Gasoline car crashes generally only cause explosions in the movies. Unless it's an old Ford Pinto, or a truck being tested on NBC's "Dateline."
Parent
Re:1.2 Megawatts (Score:5, Funny)
What would car crashes look like in the movies in the future with these cars?
A blinding light, a loud "BZZZZZT!", and a mess of welded metal with organic matter fused to it.
Of course the good guys would be able to cut themselves out or break away and the bad guys would have their limbs and face in various places of the ex-vehicle.
Parent
Re:1.2 Megawatts (Score:5, Informative)
It only becomes a powerful explosive in vapor form. Cars force tiny trickles of it at a time into vapor with carberators or fuel injections systems. Otherwise, the stuff is just as safe to be around as pretty much any flamable liquid, including vodka, paint thinner, lamp oil, etc.
The kind of wattage we are talking about to charge these cars, however, is the sort of thing utility companies typically put barbed-wire fences around to keep people the fuck away from it.
Maybe you could rig up a system where I park my car on a conveyer belt, and go inside the station for a nice cup of coffee while it is pulled into a fully-automated charging station and then rolled out to be boarded when it's done.
Parent
Re:1.2 Megawatts (Score:4, Insightful)
Recharging 100,000 watt-hours in 5 minutes = 1,200,000 watts.
So the answer is, collectively, the mains feeding 27 households.
I'll let someone more familiar with the NEC spec how thick the conductors have to be.
I doubt that the company will be able to fulfill their claims.
Parent
Re:1.2 Megawatts (Score:4, Interesting)
That is to say:
(energy in 1 gallon of gasoline * 16 gallons * efficiency of most cars) / ('reasonable' voltage * 'reasonable' amperage) = 12 minutes.
That is to say:
You could fill your tank without being rediculous at all, although at much higher energy levels than you would have at your house. At your house you could safely draw:
1.3 * 10**8 joules * 16 *
if you had a special outlet installed in your garage. (this is about the same as a big AC unit) and so you could recharge each night.
Moving things around we get:
(((220 volts) * 60 amperes) * (10.94 hours) * (.11 U.S. dollars)) / (1 000 * (watt * hour)) = 15.88488 U.S. dollars
So you could recharge this thing for about 15 dollars a night, assuming you completely discharge it. Since you can reasonably charge it yourself you can either buy electricity cheaply near a power plant or if you are the only one around with one of these cars you can just charge it yourself. Good deal, safe buy.
This assumes 100% efficiency, so scale it up by 1/efficiency to get a more accurate number. As long as efficiency is more than about 40% it is cheaper than gasoline. And of course it pollutes less (or at worse if you have coal it pollutes somewhere else, which is better for 99% of people, who don't live next to an old coal plant).
Finally, the complexity of an electric car is much much much less than a gasoline car. No exhaust, no belts, no cooling system (except for the electric ac), no transmission really, no power steering or brake fluids, no oil, etc etc.
A washing machine and an electrical generator are about equivilent in complexity to an electic car and a gas powered car respectively. With an electric car you can expect to repair it every few years for about 400 dollars a pop, just like a washing machine breaks every few years for about 60 dollars a pop ($5 if you repair it yourself, or about $30 for the electric car). Electrical generators are complicated and break down all the time, and are expensive to buy and maintain, just like gas cars.
Plus electric cars will be much lighter, as much as 40%. That directly leads to efficiency. Plus with no engine, instead of wasted space you get an extra trunk, or the car company can redesign the car drastically (assuming batteries/whatever are arranged along the floor of the car for optimal low center of gravity).
Finally, the only limit to the HP of an electric car is the size of the motor(s), and so you could have anywhere between 200 and 800 HP in a standard car.
Where do I sign up?
Parent
Re:These posts are ridiculous (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Hate to see this car in an accident (Score:5, Insightful)
shocking news (Score:5, Funny)
This is simply shocking news.
Re:shocking news (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:shocking news (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:shocking news (Score:5, Funny)
Great joke. We should induct you into the Comedy Hall of Fame.
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Re:shocking news (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:shocking news (Score:5, Funny)
That comment was truly the joule of this entire discussion!
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Re:shocking news (Score:5, Funny)
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Just don't let Sony make them (Score:4, Funny)
You need 4000 Amp line (Score:5, Interesting)
Energy content of gasoline is 45 MJ/Kg. That means you are storing 1.35e09 Joules of energy. You are charging it in 5 minutes? So dividing by 300 seconds, the Power rating for the charger is 4500000 Watts or 4.5 MW. If you try to charge it from your friendly neighbourhood 110V line, the amp rating for the plug is drum roll please, 40909 Amps
Now think when you are pumping 25 gallons of gas into that Hummer in 3 minutes, you have a 8 MW device in your hands!
Gas + engine = 15-20% efficiency (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Wikipedia article on Ultracapacitors>, they have a cycle efficiency of 95%. [wikipedia.org]
I don't want to work that into your calculations, but it amount of energy needed to drive a car X miles is far less that what is contained in a tank of gas that will drive you X miles.
Parent
Unlimited Miles on a 1-Minute Recharge (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unlimited Miles on a 1-Minute Recharge (Score:4, Interesting)
1- Try going 500 miles in a municipal transit system.
2- Some of us get motion sickness, you insensitive clod!
Parent
That's all well and fine, but (Score:4, Interesting)
So in the meantime I'm building a weedeater bike with parts I get at Curb*mart. Some people call them a "Mow-ped"..
Strap a 21cc weedeater motor on the back of an old bicycle and you can get 400+ miles per gallon. YMMV..
One guy traveled 1,000 mile on 3.5 gallons of gas. I'm going to put a big basket on it and that's how I'll be going to the grocery store. I'll use the car only when it's not feasible to ride the mow-ped, I think I can almost live without the car, maybe only having to resort to it once a month or less.
The mow-ped, built from stuff people throw away is helping to keep stuff out of the landfill, helping to reduce pollution and is a poke in the eye to the uberglobalists that insist we all buy brand new cars every year and constantly fill them up with hyperinflated, over priced gas..
I'm not a good little consumer. I want to keep my money. I'm tired of the fat cat profiteers on Wall Street getting fatter from the sweat of my brow, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
Time to fight back..
Lawn products (Score:5, Insightful)
What goes in, must come out...quickly! (Score:4, Informative)
Should this become the path the energy comsuming manufacturers take (cars, laptops, tools, etc), anyone who is not familiar with electronics, please tatoo the following thought in your mind for your own sake:
A capacitor can discharge at an equally alarming rate as this charge time suggests. To take a phrase from Mohamar Khadafi in the eighties, you cross this line, you die.
Seriously - discharging a capacitor will kill you instantly without the proper safeguards in place. Get into a choice car-accident where this connection is made and kaboom! It will explode - if you are the connection, you will die.
A tank of gasoline has nothing on a charged capacitor. Just ask any poor fool who has mucked around with the innards of a television set shortly after unplugging it.
Not a particularly new idea, but a good one (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the ultra capacitors haven't been quite ultra enough yet. I'm no expert on capacities of capacitors, but you're limited by size/surface area in the capacitor and 'they' seemed to 500 miles is quite a claim, and unless they have a specific car, it's not a usefully specific claim. And if they do have a vehicle, it's best to make sure it's not a lightweight go kart like an Elise (or the new Tesla car, which is an Elise), as those cars tend to not please typical automotive tastes.
There is still potential out there to make much more effective capacitors. I believe MIT students/professors/people of some sort came up with a Carbon Nano-fiber fuzzy capacitor that multiplied many times the surface area inside a capacitor on which the charge is built up by making the charge holding surface out gagillions of those little fibers. That sounded like a hilariously expensive proposition to me, but perhaps it's not as expensive as my imagination makes it out to be, or it could even inspire others to find similar and less expensive ways to make significant advances in the field of ultracapacitors.
At the very least, companies who make outrageous claims like this one bring awareness to different technologies and methodologies such as capacitors vs. batteries. I'll be interested to see if/when someone brings a capacitor driven car to market, be it these guys, or BMW, or whoever.
Power vs. energy (Score:4, Insightful)
Up to now the advantage of ultracapacitors over batteries has been power density, not energy density. Power == energy / time. Getting energy in and out quickly in modest quantities is wonderful for cars: you can keep up with the spectacular pulse of energy from a panic stop (do the math, you'll be amazed) and power a quick acceleration to freeway speeds. But they've not stored as much energy as a battery so far. You can get a farad cheap, but they've been limited to low voltages (e.g. 3.6) and energy storage is linear in capacitance but quadratic in voltage.
If these people are storing as much total energy as a battery pack they've made a breakthrough.
Parent
Information From The Patent (Score:4, Informative)
The patent applied
and received is US Patent: 7,033,406
Feel free to yank the patent off the USPTO web site.
Issue Date: April 25, 2006
(Hopefuly they are not 24 days late.)
Unit described in the patent:
Weight = 336 pounds
Capacitance = 31 Farads
Peak Voltage on the capacitors = 3500 V
Energy stored = 52 KwH
Size of Unit = 1 cubic foot (its in there read the fine print)
The patent also describes an energy distribution system that includes "fuel stations" that use the same capacitor storage, and charges capacitors at the fuel station during graveyard shift. (double conversion losses, but that can be argued, and there are MUCH better ways to do this)
The "ultra fast charging" as per the marketing/media blurbs are commented on in the patent, "if sufficient cooling for the charging and wire interconnect is avaialble...." so the guy writing the patent was aware of the issues with the resistive losses in the system.
The capacitince structures are a ceramic technology, using special dielectrics. A lot of content there on the chemistry and fabrication technology.
Not sure if this is vaporware or the "next big thing" - we shall see.
Jerry
Re:From oil to coal..... (Score:5, Insightful)
The advantage of electricity remains, even if you are still polluting with your power generation facilities.
It is easier to institute stricter pollution control measures at centralized power generation facilities than it is to implement equivalent levels of pollution control in vehicles all over the country. Even very "dirty" methods of producing such power can always be upgraded over time to be less polluting anyways, or possibly even migrate towards emission free power generation. Also, this migration does not have to be instantaneous either, as an incremental change is often much more economical and practical than a single large change anyways. This sort of upgrading would be completely impractical for individual automobile.
Also, it reduces dependancy on foreign oil.
Parent
Re:I*V=P (Score:5, Insightful)
Current and voltage?
You can figure it out if you're willing to make educated guesses.
Assuming 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour (price in my state), $9 of power is about 145 kilowatt-hours. This energy is delivered in 5 minutes according to the article. 145 KWh / 5 minutes = 1.74 megawatts AVERAGE charging power.
But that's AVERAGE. Because this is a capacitor (albeit an "ultra" one), it charges in an exponential fashion. The peak charging power during the first few seconds of charging is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than 1.74 megawatts. How MUCH higher depends on the impedance of the charging system.
The real value missing here is capacitance. If we knew that, we could work out peak charging currents for given fixed charging voltages, or vice versa. According to Wiki, the "largest capacitance" of an ultra capacitor is 2.6 kilofarads. Using this as a reasonable but arbitrary number, we can set the total energy equal to CV^2 / 2 and figure out the charge voltage: 633 volts.
Okay, so we have a capacitance of 2.6 kilofarads, a charging voltage of 633 volts, and a charging time of 5 minutes. Further, we have to assume some percentage charge on the capacitor -- it never reaches 100% charge because it charges exponentially, so let's say it charges to 99%. We can use that to figure out the impedance of the charging system using the equation for a charging capacitor: 1-exp(-t/RC)=0.99. Let t = 5 minutes, C = 2.6 kilofarads, and we get a charging impedance (value of R) of 0.06 ohms.
Whoo! Now you can compute the peak charging power (at the very beginning of the charge cycle), which is V^2/R = about 6.5 megawatts. That's 10550 amps. And some of that power is lost as heat in the (very large) wires you'll need to do this -- what fraction of the total is lost as heat is left as an exercise for the reader ;-) But suffice it to say, that heat loss will be at a MAXIMUM when the wire resistance is equal to half the charging impedance, so it implies that the resistance of the wire has to be a lot less than 0.03 ohms.
Feel free to work through it using your own numbers pulled from your own butt, if you want.
Parent
Re:I*V=P (Score:5, Informative)
That requires some fat-ass wires.
As most homes in the US have a 200A electrical service, this represents the power draw of approximately 25 homes loaded to capacity. Further considering that the National Electrical Code requires that continuous load of a circuit be 20% less than the rating of the circuit (typical peak load would therefore be 160A), and that average peak load will probably be closer to 100A, this battery will represent to the electrical system a load equal to 30-50 homes!
I guess it's time for everyone to build nuclear power plants in their back yards.
Parent