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.
http://wdef.com/blog/personal_power_grid_offers_next_generation_alternative_energy_today/08/2007
http://www.fuelcellsworks.com/Supppage7578.html
http://www.wpxi.com/station/13657446/detail.html
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20070710/135748/
http://www.theautochannel.com/F/news/2007/06/26/053126.html
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006979.html
http://www.h2daily.com/content/view/494/50/
Very good! So, when do you think the “Home Fuel Cell” that gets individual homes off of the common grid will finally arrive, 2025?
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It is not 50kwh.
At 15kw to go 60 mph.
To go 500miles at 60 mph it will take 8.3 hrs
8.3 times 15kw is 124.5 kwh.
Batteries discharge exponentially faster as load increases. So you might be able 500 miles at 30 mph using 50kwh but I seroisly doubt you will get anywhere near that at highway speed.
None the less, 45kwh in five minutes is still 900A at 600VDC. Which would mean 4 ea 500kcmil cables. I doubt many people would be able to lift the plug off the ground.
This recharge is not for the faint of heart.
Essentially this storage system is a super capacitor, which is fine by itself, but what happens in an accident and it shorts out? It will be a industrial size plasma cutter.
Probably never. Coal is much cheaper than NG.
A couple of points.
The eestor unit in question is 50 kwh. Whether you can actually drive 500 miles on it is another question.
Second, it is not a battery and will have different discharge characteristics.
Third, 5 minute charges are posible with either very high amperage or voltage. I’m not saying that it is practical.
They claim they have built in safety features to prevent catastrophic discharge for what it’s worth.
1. If it is 50 kwh then you won’t be going 500miles at 60mph. Frictional losses increase with speed.
2. I have been designing power systems for 25 years and elctricity in large quantities is dangerous period. As you pointed out you can either increase voltage or current (VxI=P). 600 volts is as high as you can go to be considered “Low” voltage. 120 volts is really as high as you can go without being almost always lethal.
Past 600V the standard choices are 4160V, 15KV, 30KV, 60KV, 110KV, 220KV and 500KV.
Anyway anything past 600V is pretty scary and that’s why I like electricians so much, I don’t have to touch that stuff.
The problem is that you have to make a good clean contact in air that it is not too dry and not too wet every time you charge. Once the contacts start to get fouled you will get increasing resistance and than comes the snap crackle Ka-pow!
The only way to make it safe is that the vehicle occupants get out and stand behind a concrete blast wall.
If they can be recharged as many times as claimed and only weigh 300 lbs, I think for local driving they will be recharged at home with 240v.
On the highway, battery swap stations could be automated and quick. No harder than driving through a car wash. The dead cells would then be charged in a safe area at whatever rate that makes business sense.
That would be safer. Though part of the change out would have to be contact cleaning. I would also think you could have diagnostics to monitor resistance.
Honestly, I doubt we will see all electric cars based on this design.
However, if they can produce the product at the price point they claim, we will probably see them in hybrid vehicles. Current batteries cannot accept current fast enough to make regenerative breaking very efficient. A 10 kwh cell that weighs 60 lbs and can basically accept and deliver power as fast as you need it would make for a pretty cool car.
Of course if you can blast out that much electric power it may lead to an all electric drive with an on board diesel generator to keep the cell topped off. Solves the rapid recharge problem for cross country driving. You wouldn’t need ad much storage. Could be plugged in at home to trickle charge for routine driving. And would be pretty efficient to boot.
I couldn’t agree more.
Watts is a unit of power. The car would consume (or transform) energy, not power. So, in one hour, this hypothetical car traveling 55mph might consume 4.5 Kwh, or 81 watt-hours/mile.
You are correct. I got lazy. It’s KW/MPH = KWH/miles
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