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.
Simple: there's already a good-sized market for that type of vehicle.
First, I think gas engines are only about 12% efficient. Second, I think an ultracapictor discharging would be a lot more spectacular than a gas fire.
I doubt that 1mv would do it -- but if a thousand amps is hovering around somewhere where I can touch it, I'm in the next room, thank you very much.
“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. “
OR, you could make your own railgun. Now That would be cool!
Schwarzschild would probably say there’s a mass-ive hole in such criticism and he and Compton would probably be on the same wavelength.
Not really. Someone has to produce the electricity for electric cars. Where do you think that will come from?
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Captured cow farts will be used to power huge generators.
If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. The odds are good this won’t be the revolution we need in technology. If it is, then great! Every once in a while, technology is discovered that does what was believed to be impossible. Here’s hoping this works.
Bump for later read.
I’ve been following this story for over a year. Fingers crossed.
Five hours with a 220V circuit drawing 50A, even with charging losses, which are much lower charging a capacitor than they are with batteries.
So you could recharge at home overnight easily.
The five-minute recharge would be done at a “gas station” and transferring from the station’s own bank of capacitors to your vehicle at very high voltages and low amperage. Low amperage means small cables, not “as thick as your arm” as someone else suggested.
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.
[but if a thousand amps is hovering around somewhere where I can touch it, I’m in the next room, thank you very much.]
Very true. The little capacitor in a common battery powered camera flash can be deadly.
Everyone can get a charge out of this.
Think of it as a lighting bolt on Quaaludes.
Dang! I thought you were the doctor in “Smokey and The Bandit”.
I hear ya,,
my personal opinion about this is magnetism is the best and the most feasible propulsion,,or if you were to put a gen. and mtr.end to end , with the gen.producing enough power to run the mtr and accessaries,,would it work,,something to ponder,,but what would we do with all these IC engines...??
That’s assuming 50kwh will power a car 500 miles.
I’ve seen several products described but the product I believe they are talking about is a 50,000 watt hour storage, maybe a 100,000 watt hour. Either way, it is not 80,000,000 watt hours.
“But the 5-minute charge is a joke, unless you have your own nuclear power plant. Others have offered some calculations and estimates of what it would require, so I don’t need to pile on.”
If you had a similar unit in your house for emergency backup, you would not need your own nuclear power plant. 5 minute recharge would be dangerous and would require significant engineering but is posible. A more likely scenario would be overnight recharging at home and unit exchange on the road.
I don’t see any magic, but a fair amount of hocus pocus here. Barium titanate dielectric (a type of ceramic) capacitors have been around for decades, and while it is true that they perhaps give such a high volumetric charge capacity that they could replace batteries under laboratory conditions where cost is not an object, the charge/discharge cycle improvement over batteries is more incremental than revolutionary, and to build such a large bulk capacitor that operates with acceptable reliability and temperature stability over the automotive temperature range amounts to a huge exercise in improving component reliability.
my personal opinion about this is magnetism is the best and the most feasible propulsion,,or if you were to put a gen. and mtr.end to end , with the gen.producing enough power to run the mtr and accessaries,,would it work,,something to ponder,,but what would we do with all these IC engines...??
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That sounds like over unity, otherwise referred to as “perpetual motion”.
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