Posted on 09/04/2007 10:37:19 AM PDT by 300magnum
AUSTIN, Texas - Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.
An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.
By contrast, some plug-in hybrids on the horizon would require motorists to charge their cars in a wall outlet overnight and promise only 50 miles of gasoline-free commute. And the popular hybrids on the road today still depend heavily on fossil fuels.
"It's a paradigm shift," said Ian Clifford, chief executive of Toronto-based ZENN Motor Co., which has licensed EEStor's invention. "The Achilles' heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary."
Clifford's company bought rights to EEStor's technology in August 2005 and expects EEStor to start shipping the battery replacement later this year for use in ZENN Motor's short-range, low-speed vehicles.
The technology also could help invigorate the renewable-energy sector by providing efficient, lightning-fast storage for solar power, or, on a small scale, a flash-charge for cell phones and laptops.
Skeptics, though, fear the claims stretch the bounds of existing technology to the point of alchemy.
"We've been trying to make this type of thing for 20 years and no one has been able to do it," said Robert Hebner, director of the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics. "Depending on who you believe, they're at or beyond the limit of what is possible."
EEStor's secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material.
The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.
Batteries rely on chemical reactions to store energy but can take hours to charge and release energy. The simplest capacitors found in computers and radios hold less energy but can charge or discharge instantly. Ultracapacitors take the best of both, stacking capacitors to increase capacity while maintaining the speed of simple capacitors.
Hebner said vehicles require bursts of energy to accelerate, a task better suited for capacitors than batteries.
"The idea of getting rid of the batteries and putting in capacitors is to get more power back and get it back faster," Hebner said.
But he said nothing close to EEStor's claim exists today.
For years, EEStor has tried to fly beneath the radar in the competitive industry for alternative energy, content with a phone-book listing and a handful of cryptic press releases.
Yet the speculation and skepticism have continued, fueled by the company's original assertion of making batteries obsolete — a claim that still resonates loudly for a company that rarely speaks, including declining an interview with The Associated Press.
The deal with ZENN Motor and a $3 million investment by the venture capital group Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which made big-payoff early bets on companies like Google Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., hint that EEStor may be on the edge of a breakthrough technology, a "game changer" as Clifford put it.
ZENN Motor's public reports show that it so far has invested $3.8 million in and has promised another $1.2 million if the ultracapacitor company meets a third-party testing standard and then delivers a product.
Clifford said his company consulted experts and did a "tremendous amount of due diligence" on EEStor's innovation.
EEStor's founders have a track record. Richard D. Weir and Carl Nelson worked on disk-storage technology at IBM Corp. in the 1990s before forming EEStor in 2001. The two have acquired dozens of patents over two decades.
Neil Dikeman of Jane Capital Partners, an investor in clean technologies, said the nearly $7 million investment in EEStor pales compared with other energy storage endeavors, where investment has averaged $50 million to $100 million.
Yet curiosity is unusually high, Dikeman said, thanks to the investment by a prominent venture capital group and EEStor's secretive nature.
"The EEStor claims are around a process that would be quite revolutionary if they can make it work," Dikeman said.
Previous attempts to improve ultracapacitors have focused on improving the metal sheets by increasing the surface area where charges can attach.
EEStor is instead creating better nonconductive material for use between the metal sheets, using a chemical compound called barium titanate. The question is whether the company can mass-produce it.
ZENN Motor pays EEStor for passing milestones in the production process, and chemical researchers say the strength and functionality of this material is the only thing standing between EEStor and the holy grail of energy-storage technology.
Joseph Perry and the other researchers he oversees at Georgia Tech have used the same material to double the amount of energy a capacitor can hold. Perry says EEstor seems to be claiming an improvement of more than 400-fold, yet increasing a capacitor's retention ability often results in decreased strength of the materials.
"They're not saying a lot about how they're making these things," Perry said. "With these materials (described in the patent), that is a challenging process to carry out in a defect-free fashion."
Perry is not alone in his doubts. An ultracapacitor industry leader, Maxwell Technologies Inc., has kept a wary eye on EEStor's claims and offers a laundry list of things that could go wrong.
Among other things, the ultracapacitors described in EEStor's patent operate at extremely high voltage, 10 times greater than those Maxwell manufactures, and won't work with regular wall outlets, said Maxwell spokesman Mike Sund. He said capacitors could crack while bouncing down the road, or slowly discharge after a dayslong stint in the airport parking lot, leaving the driver stranded.
Until EEStor produces a final product, Perry said he joins energy professionals and enthusiasts alike in waiting to see if the company can own up to its six-word promise and banish the battery to recycling bins around the world.
"I am skeptical but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong," Perry said.
“When most fill ups occur at home(at night) there would be much fewer fillups away from home.. Who goes more than 500 miles daily?.. Not many I think.. “
Works great for people that remember to plug in at home, I know I’m thankfull sometimes for the emergency cellphone recharger in my case and the car charger.
And you might consider that many with apartments and condo’s have too many cars for their spots, IF they have them assigned, so they fight for the spots on the street.
-— I’m betting on Hydrogen
For all practical purposes, when somebody pulls an already charged battery off a shelf at Pep Boys it is just as much an “energy source” as petroleum is.
Taken at face value, somebody could mis-interpret your statement as saying that energy is somehow created when petroleum is used. It isn’t a philosophical issue, it is an issue of bad science. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, and petroleum, hydrogen, batteries, capacitors, et al are all simply carriers of energy.
If it is only used for making things instead of burning, then we also have a plentiful, cheap source. Eliminate gasoline as an end product and you wouldn't be able to make enough things to use the oil that we pump out on a daily basis.
A gas engine is about 25% efficient so let’s say that you can get 30mpg.
A gallon of gas is 120,000BTU so at 25% that is 30,000BTU.
A BTU is equal to 0.000392857 hp
So 30,000 times 0.000392857 equals 11.78 hp.
But that is SAE hp we need BHP so that is another 20%
11.7hp x 1.2 = 14.14 bhp
So depending on your driving habits and vehicle its going to be in the 8 to 20 range.
I was trying to get in the right order of magnitude and it is going to be a couple of thousand amps at what is legally considered low voltage or you increase the voltage to utility levels (12kV) which would get down to 100A. However then the recharge would have to be done by trained electricians.
The real kicker is that the cost of the electricity needed would be substantial. The electric utility charges not only for the amount of energy (kwh) used but also the peak current recorded (demand charge) and the demand charges are pretty steep.
Probably a good idea.
We've seen people pull away from pumps with the gas hose still in the car. Try that while attached to a 12kV, megawatt power source.
The math for recharge rate is easy, it holds 50 kwh. The voltage would get fairly low as the cap discharges so you probably would not be using the bottom 5 kwh if you could help it. So basically you would need to figure out how fast you can move 45 kwh.
The other question is can you really drive 500 miles on 45 kwh.
As I have mentioned before, an electric car is going to be significantly easier to push down the road than a gasoline car.
The other factor is speed. Air drag goes up by the cube of speed. Using your math, a car that gets 40mpg at 60 mph should be using about 6 hp at 50 mph. That matches my memory close enough.
A gasoline car has to be engineered for economy at different speeds. Electric motors also vary in efficiency based on rpm but vary much less than gasoline engines. They remain efficient at low rpm whereas gasoline engines are not very efficient at low rpm. The electric car will probably get a very large number of miles per kwh when tooling around town but people will get a suprise when they get on the highway and set the cruise at 80 mph. It takes a fraction of a horsepower to go 10 mph but probably takes about 50 hp to go 80 mph.
One question, a BTU is a unit of energy, hp is a measure of power, it’s been too many years since school, BTU equals hp over what time period?
What brought on all their false hopes and dreams this late in your career ?
I was thinking the same thing.
I can imagine just sitting back and watching the little metal disk in the meter spinning around about 500 rpm and starting to smoke
I'm guessing the Admin Moderators would love to get their zots on with these things.
I have no idea. I do so little work that if I quit they will have to fire two people to replace me !
Now that is damn funny .........I’m gonna use that one in the AM !
You funny !
Hell I am hoping that someone at the office is reading this so they can drop the silly notion of me actually doing some work and it being a semblance of what they expected.
Thackney and I used to work together. He can vouch for my laziness.
Don’t pull any punches thackman!
;<)
You are going somewhere without electricity but with cell phone towers? Where in the world is this place?
Lackadaisical is hard to write with a crayola ! (trust me I have tried)
...... They put that on yer performance report again ?
They hell, I put that on there !
The boss said he needed a report a couple of weeks ago. He stressed "by end of business". I took the afternoon off saw a movie and reported on it a week later. By then he had forgotten about what he wanted, thanked me and took his wife to the movie that night.
He asked my why I was late late yesterday morning and I told him it was because my email was down. He told me to get it fixed so I left for the day. Damned if my email wasn't working fine this morning.
I remember when you got that bonus for aksing him how much he’d save the company if he did everything hisself........yer one hell of worker my friend !
Management material written all over ya .
In five minutes? Doesn't seem likely to me.
Maybe it could but my impression was you plug this in at home and if it could draw that much power it will quickly pop your breakers. How do those numbers translate in KWHs, the measure we pay for in our electric bill?
They moved me into management years ago to keep me from actually doing anything.
I bought an original Monet on eBay from a first time seller using the company Amex and here I sit. Who knew that Monet used red pencils on a Big Chief tablet? The frame still has the Dollar Store price tag on it.
Moving people into management is directly related to our safety policy here......get em the hell away from the widgets !
There is the rub. No matter how many wafers of super conducting and ultra dielectric material used I don't see how they can slow down the discharge to the ten or so hours they claim. As Dr. Perry suggested, it would "trickle" drain on its own before the power can be delivered as intended. I would not put money on this one.
For twenty five years we have been told that the home fuel cell was also just around the corner.
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