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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.
High voltage means the possibility of sparking. Everyone in the car in an accident is killed by lightening? Sounds like more work is needed.
Please Freep Mail me if you'd like on/off
We’ll see...I’m skeptical, but any movement towards not funding the ME...is great, imo. The faster the better.
batteries suffer from self discharge also.
Oh! aw right 30 minutes you ol poop.. and cables the size your FINGER.. for enough energy to get you home.. Where a charge could happen in a couple of hours..
Capacitors are generally durable. Even if eestor is as good as they claim, it will not be used in airplanes, it is not close to the energy density of jet fuel.
Li ion batteries are generally good for 500 recharges, capacitors should be good for hundreds of thousands of recharges.
Yes, I was thinking this - and they claim to be able to transfer that amount of energy in 5 minutes from a charging station to the car.
I'm dubious even before I perform any calculations.
Thanks for the good info ! I didn’t realize 5000V was prevalent in neighborhoods unless it was an industrial area or a substation.
I was thinking about retrofitting existing neighborhood gas stations rather than building from scratch, so I wasn’t considering how easy it would be to get high voltages to them. 480V is easy. High amps though. And you are right about charging the vehicle — the EESTOR caps can be charged at (I think) 30,000V. Meaning a low amp, small cable at the “pump”.
Home charging doesn’t really seem like a problem to me. Yes, without a cap bank it might take 5 hours to fully recharge your 50kwh pack. But not many people are going to deplete a whole 50kwh every day. Most days you’d be topping up only 10kwh and be done in an hour. The inconvenience of an hour might not justify spending money on a separate cap bank in the garage. Unless the cap bank in your garage was dual-purpose and actually storing electricity to run your house while buying electricity at off-peak rates.
What they fail to mention in the article is that this new type of battery violently blows up when exposed to eakemaniumdioxide !........:o)
Hope ya’ll are all well .........Stay safe !!
Thanks... I was not thinking of jet planes but prop planes.. of 'whatever" size..
eakemaniumdioxide? Isn’t that the same stuff that makes M-1 Garrands blow up too? DOH! :-)
Their press says 280 watt hours per kilogram. That's 10^6 joules per kg. TNT is 4.2 * 10^6 joules/kg. That approaches being impressive
Same goes for general aviation fuel.
Not to say that there won’t be electric planes. There is some potential for direct heat to electric conversion that will be 2-3 times more efficient than ICE. The fuel will still be hydrocarbons just converted into power more efficiently.
>a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline.
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these ideas come and go,
and i still pay $2.76 per gallon for gasoline.
I could see something like this being viable in a hybrid vehicle, where you could get along with a much smaller gas engine operating closer to peak more of the time, with the ultracap powering an electric motor to give the car peppier acceleration.
Emphasis on the first and last, of which we either have plenty or can make it quickly (assuming the will do to so is present - watch the will develop overnight as gasoline climbs over $5/gallon). Also, don't forget natural gas, of which we also have a lot. Our neighbors to north & south also have lots of oil, and it cannot be a bad thing to provide more money to their economies (where will they spend their dollars?).
“finish building my Interocitor.”
Hey! Hey! I got one of those. A white-haired old guy with a big, old forehead sent it to me. But, dude, the instructions are, like, totally alien. Send me your instructions when you’ve found your ultra-capacitor, Dude!
He had way too much faith in our politicians. Nixon had no interest in the manned space program, since it was a Kennedy/Democrat invention (in his eyes - it actually started under Ike). This was, IMHO, his greatest failing outside of the character flaws that did him in with Watergate. We DID have the technical capacity for the base and the regular trips, and we’d be far better off materially if we had done that.
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