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.
Don’t let the eco weanies scare you. We have plenty of energy resources, we just need the technology to unlock them.
Bingo.
And don't forget "net-metering"; every house a reservoir.
Of course, politically and media-hype speaking, guess who will get the credit.
And it would have to make the trip as Texans do - average speed of about 85 miles an hour with at least one stop for some jalapeno cheese snacks, a Slim Jim, and a 32 oz Dr. Pepper.
As a personal aside, I found Clark to be an egotistical jerk.
I've heard that. I met Asimov and he certainly seemed to be.
But I'll always revere Childhoods End, City and the Stars, and the Foundation deal.
End of diversion.
And when all the gasoline is gone, you simply develop a weapon that can instantly deactivate the capacitors.
6hp = 4.5 kw. In one hour, your car will go 55 miles. Your car consumes 4500/55 = 81 watts/mile.
Is there such a car? Kellis91789 doesn't think so. Kellis91789 says the GM Impact (EV1) uses twice that. Converted SUV's are using 400 watts/mile, 5X your figure.
The math is correct. It's the "how much power does it take to move a car 500 miles" that's in question.
You say 12 kwh (16hp). Another poster said 45 hp. Another, 6hp. For a car people would buy (not some three-wheeled, fiberglass experimental 2-seater), I'm guessing it's in the 20-30 hp range.
You're lucky it didn't weld your zipper together.
It does only take about 6 hp to keep a car going 55 mph. It requires more power to get to that speed in a reasonable time. It takes more power to go up and down rolling terrain. It takes more power to run the AC and radio.
That is why a car may require more power than 81 watts per mile. As they say YMMV.
A car could be produced that would require less than 50 watts per mile but you wouldn’t want to drive it. The impact was designed to provide more acceptable size and performance. Remember the converted SUV is probably using well more than a half ton of batteries, reducing weight will significantly reduce rolling resistance. A car that doesn’t need to radiated hundreds of kilowatts of heat can be made much more aerodynamic.
Also remember that a gasoline engine and transmission are also overcoming internal resistance when traveling down the highway.
Folks here at the office are actually expecting some work out of me lately.
Go figure!
My boss has never been that deluded!
Oil for making things will remain a must have technology well into the next two centuries. The Arabs have a plentiful, cheap source.
"A" car. What car can do 55 mph on 6hp?
“It’s amazing how many miss the point that petroleum fuels are both A) suitable for energy for transportation and B) an energy source. Energy storage systems such as the topic of this article are A) only (assuming this isn’t vaporware).”
Petroleum only looks like an energy “source” because its energy was stored there by an earlier process. Petroleum is no more an energy “source” than a battery is. Petroleum is a carrier of energy that has the energy bound up in its chemical structure just as electricity is bound up in the chemical structure of a battery or charge is contained by the dielectric in a capacitor. The only difference is that the energy in a battery or cap is easily replaced, while once released from petroleum it is very inefficient to reconstitute the chemical energy storage mechanism.
Petroleum fuel is a suitable carrier of energy in only one way — it is dense. In all other characteristics, it is seriously flawed. Combusting it requires consuming the surrounding oxygen and there is generally no containment of its waste products. It is a dirty, smelly, loud, and inconvenient energy carrier for transportation.
If I remember correctly it was an MG. Part of a physics project in college.
Just one example. Google "solar battery chargers" for more.
>>Petroleum is no more an energy “source” than a battery is.
I’m an engineer, not a philosopher. For all practical purposes, petroleum is an energy source in a way that an electrical storage system isn’t. We can play your game all the way back to “God/< insert your deity here>/The Big Bang is the ultimate source of all energy.” It still doesn’t make it useful for solving people’s day-to-day problems.
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