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.
Mike
The main reasons you are buying gasoline by the gallon rather than the pint is that Engines and transmissions are heavy and inefficient.
A typical car puts about 15% of the energy in a gallon of gasoline into motion.
A battery, electric motor combination should be able to get close to 90% of the stored power turned into motion. Plus, the car would be lighter, use regenerative braking and have better aerodynamics (no need to dump a hundred kilowatts worth of heat out of a radiator).
Trying to correlate your MPG to how much energy is really needed to operate a vehicle is not simple.
“The bottleneck would become the electrical service to the stations. To recharge 500 vehicles per day would require 50kwh x 500 = 25mwh per day. 25mwh / 24 hour per day means an average draw from the grid at 480V of 2000A. That one service station would be drawing as much power as 1000 homes.”
Hey, I hadn’t run those calculations before. I used to do some stuff with the nuclear energy and debated the enviros all the time who were into the hydrogen economy. Many problems there as well. Nothing like hydrocarbon to pack energy for easy transport.
____________________________________________________________
Actually, While your numbers are the best I have seen so far there are a couple of other realities to consider. Most electricity at the neighborhood level is either at 5000V or 13000V. If you go to the next step it is at 69000V. We have transformers in various locations to get it down to 480V, but it would be easy to supply 5000V. Large facilities like large buildings often use 5000V motors to operate airconditioning equipment. This makes the cable quite small and the insulation around it quite large.
If the energy supply station had it’s own bank of capacitors it could be charging continuously then they could do an instant transfer at very high voltage to cars that came in for a refill. 50000W @ 5000V is only 10 amps, at 13000V it is only 3.8A and at 69000V is only .72A.
There is nothing impossible here once the right materials have been found. Some day all our cell phones, PDA’s Ipod’s etc will be charged with a coil that will charge a supercapacitor as we walk around near charging stations.
As far as charging overnight, I suspect that we will have a supercapacitor at home charging while we are away and when we get home it will dump a full charge to our car in a matter of seconds.
If this works there will be many type of alterternative energy that will be practical especially photovoltaics, windpower and wave power.
SuperBattery™ AC/Crank Generator for Cell Phones
http://www.qualia-tech.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=105
I don’t know how weatherproof this is, but you can always wrap it in plastic:
That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If GM owned it, they could put all of their competitors out of business. As it stands now, GM is the one going out of business.
US 7033406 (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7033406.PN.&OS=PN/7033406&RS=PN/7033406) - Electrical-energy-storage unit (EESU) utilizing ceramic and integrated-circuit technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries; Weir, et al. (April 25, 2006)
Abstract
An electrical-energy-storage unit (EESU) has as a basis material a high-permittivity composition-modified barium titanate ceramic powder. This powder is double coated with the first coating being aluminum oxide and the second coating calcium magnesium aluminosilicate glass. The components of the EESU are manufactured with the use of classical ceramic fabrication techniques which include screen printing alternating multilayers of nickel electrodes and high-permittivitiy composition-modified barium titanate powder, sintering to a closed-pore porous body, followed by hot-isostatic pressing to a void-free body. The components are configured into a multilayer array with the use of a solder-bump technique as the enabling technology so as to provide a parallel configuration of components that has the capability to store electrical energy in the range of 52 kWh. The total weight of an EESU with this range of electrical energy storage is about 336 pounds
'If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.'
In 1969, I met Clark and asked him if he thought his permanent Moon base and regular trips to the planets would really be reality by the year 2000 as shown in his movie.
He said yes.
I also have doubts about that one. Too high a CV (power) product in the case of a catastrophic event during charge or discharge raises the prospect of serious arcflash injuries where the vaporized component itself (supercapacitor, charging station, anything close to them) is converted to a conductive plasma that can cause extensive second and third degree burns, fires and even electrical explosions in case of a catastrophic failure. The maximum current to private residences is limited for just this reason. I’m not sure how a much higher charge rates would be permitted for an electric vehicle even if technically feasible.
“an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device”
no. A capacitor is not at all like a battery.
Capacitors by their nature lose their charge gradually. If this problem has been solved, then we have a breakthrough.
When some arabs or government folks show up and smash their labs we’ll know this has some promise.
And Tesla’s experiments with lighting should be revisited.
struck by lightening? a moose once bit my sister.
A capcitor is nothing but a sandwich of 2 metal plates seperated by a thin insulator. Capacity is increased by 3 factors: 1) Surface area of the plates 2) Thinness of the dialectric (insulator) 3) The insulating properties of the dialectric. So, the search is on for the perfect dialectric, which might be a layer only 1 atom thick and have a complete resistance to leakage or breakdown at high voltages. That matierial is UNOBTAINIUM.
The “Fischer Carb” is BACK! In a new incarnation—1000 MPG!
duly noted
BS METER PEGGED! Even an ultra-efficient capacitor with a huge storage capacity is going to require an amount of power (over time) from the "Grid" which will equal the usage of the car's electric motor(s)! A kilowatt (1000 watts) of power equals about 1.34 HORSEPOWER!
Assuming 100% efficiency (impossible), a mere 10HP electric motor running for ONE HOUR consumes about 7.46 KWH! A "5 minute charge" at the home would equate to approximately an 89.5 KW power drain at the home! Not impossible in and of itself but, a MAJOR refit of home feedlines would be required and the cables would be monsterous in size (not to mention the heat and current degradation!
I am certain that more technically proficient Freepers can come up with more exact figures but..., other than a super golf cart, I don't see it. Now, an OVERNIGHT charge at a more moderate power drain, stored by an ultra-efficient, light weight capacitor bank DOES hold great promise for moderate range lighter weight commuter automobiles!
That is 100wh per mile. There have been many cars built that used that little energy. Not an SUV, but people building electric cars dedicated to lowest energy use.
There are home-converted SUV’s carrying around 1500 lbs of lead-acid batteries that still use less than 400wh per mile.
Visit www.evalbum.com for examples of home electric vehicle conversions. Certainly purpose-built vehicles will be more efficient than those.
Even the GM Impact (EV1) used only 160wh per mile for cruising at 55mph. And it carried over ten times as much weight in batteries as the EESTOR cap would weigh. Removing 1000 lbs of batteries from the EV1 might yield 100wh per mile.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.