true...the P.I. Lawyers, are linin'-up already. :/
Posted on 04/15/2008 8:03:29 PM PDT by Dane
Ultracapacitors: the future of electric cars or the 'cold fusion' of autovation? ZENN Motors says its electric car will cruise for 250 miles on a single five-minute charge. Skeptics cry shenanigans. By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Reporter Mark Clayton discusses the prospect of a new type of electric vehicle from Toronto-based firm ZENN Motors.
Ian Clifford wants to start a global revolution by building a practical, everyday car with no gasoline engine, no batteries, and no emissions.
While big Detroit automakers ponder a future plug-in car that goes 40 miles on a battery charge before its gas engine kicks in, Mr. Clifford's tiny ZENN Motor, a Toronto maker of low-speed electric cars, announced in March that it will build a new highway-speed (80 m.p.h.) model that goes 250 miles on a charge – and can recharge in just five minutes.
Having no batteries, the new "cityZENN" model will use a breakthrough version of a common electrical storage device called an ultracapacitor to store power from a wall socket, the company says. Fuel costs to operate it would be about one-tenth of today's gas-powered vehicle.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
very interesting. I hope it’s not all puffery. If it is good for large-scale projects as they claim, then I have a suggestion: install huge ultracapacitors near Orlando, Fla, the lightning capital of the U.S. Huge antennas can channel the lightning bolts to the capacitors. Once charged, they could power the entire city of Orlando.
And DON'T point at the Van DeGraff generator.
It's been a long time since I was a third grade science student, but I recall that one horsepower = ~700 watts. Let's say you need 100 HP for highway speeds, or 70,000 Watts of energy. You're going 240 miles @ 80 mph = 3 hours, so you'd need to discharge 70,000 watts for 3hrs. To put that into your capacitor in 5 min, you'd need 4,200,000 watts, which is enough capacity to run 2,800 hair dryers. That's more electrical capacity than 750 houses with 50 amp service have if you wired them all together.
Where have I gone wrong here?
I know I was.
/johnny
True, if you connected an ultracapacitor in parallel with a flux capacitor and the hit the shunt, you could wind up anywhere at anytime. :^)
The other thing to remember is that caps take the charge fast, much faster than batteries, so they can do regenerative braking MUCH better than batteries can. Best efficiency gain will be city driving where you spend half the time slowing down.
/johnny
Well. You’ll just have to have a SUPERCAPACITOR sitting at home, sucking off the house wiring at a low charge rate.
Then when you come home, you hook your supercap up to the home supercap, and ‘blink’, instant recharge.
There will be a male plug on the vehicle, sticking out of the front, and a female receptacle on the home supercap.
To excite the charging circuit you will drive the male plug forward into the female receptacle.
If charge does not take, back up and repeat insertion, until full...y satisfied.
Be careful not to overheat...your brakes.
Withdraw male plug from female receptacle, then light up a cigarette.
true...the P.I. Lawyers, are linin'-up already. :/
And the old guys there went through the discharge procedure before they removed the self-grounding wire.
Add a couple of diode bridges, and I think you need a patent attorney and some venture cap financing.
/johnny
LOL - exactly. The current that’d be required would fry every conduit in existence in current residences.
“I guess they would have to make the capacitor cases out of the same material as those black boxes ( really orange in color ) that are on jet airliners”
Darn it.
Now everyone will know.
if and when they do sell these cars with these high power capacitors, they need to have some kind of mental competency test to make sure the P.I. Lawyers don’t show up in droves just in case someone is stupid enough to actually touch those high powered capacitors in these cars.
I was going to suggest to just put a windmill on top of the car and recharge the capacitors while driving along.:)
I’ll see if this works.
[img]http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/12/flux_capacitor_replica.jpg[/img]
That's why you need the flux-capacitor.
Vger can re-charge a battleship in 5 minutes.
Vger
Well, suppose you expend 10 hp for 5 hours to go the 250 miles. Then to charge up in five minutes you’d have to draw 60 times the power, or 600 hp = 450 kw .
That’s like about a hundred electric kitchen ranges going full out.
It sure would take one hell of a capacitor to soak that up.
C = 2.7e+8 joules/V^2, so a 270 farad capacitor charged up to 1000 volts. LOL
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