Here I am plugged in at Lowes.
Posted on 04/22/2008 8:49:09 AM PDT by mjp
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. If that astounding claim is real (and there are many skeptics), it could revolutionize automotive travel by making all-electric cars competitive with gas-powered vehicles and easing the world's dependence on oil.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
If they hit 88 MPH, you are gone.
>>Heck, most people won’t want to mess with 480V 3-ph as a “plug-in” device. Any mistake in wiring or faults in the connectors and whoever is playing electron-pump jockey is dead as a wedge or has his hands/feet blown off.<<
That’s a bunch of hooey!
I saw Doc Brown in Back to the Future handle a wire as it was passing the full brunt of a lightning strike to the flux capacitor. He suffered NO ill effects!!!
You’d better get your facts straight pal!
Do I really even need to do this: /s
Exactly right.
Typical electric motor efficiencies (let’s talk single-phase motors here): About 85 to 88%.
Typical gasoline engine thermal efficiencies: 29% for the Otto cycle, more for Miller cycle engines (used in some hybrids).
Typical diesel engine thermal efficiency: 34% (for really old ones) up to 52% (for the largest engines used in container ships).
See why I’m constantly on a rant about how idiotic the American consumer and the Big Three are for continuing to use Otto-cycle gasoline engines?
In older electrolytic caps, it is the dielectric “paste” that dries up over time.
Modern caps don’t suffer quite the same problems in exactly the same way, but there are still many caps that use a paste as an insulator - especially high-capacitance caps at high voltages. Some of these go bad over time due to over-heating and “cooking” the electrolyte.
Oh man, don’t you know it.
I’ve seen relatively small caps fail in high-voltage power supplies. I’m talking a cap that is smaller than a 12oz soda can.
They have the explosive force of a M-80 or a bit more. Certainly makes you wash out your drawers when it happens in the HF radio amplifier 3’ in front of your face.
Oshkosh Heavy Equipment company is already building a diesel electric hybrid truck for the military that uses a diesel engine running at constant 1800 rpm (for maximum fuel fuel efficiency) to run an electrical generator that powers electric motors. The ultracapacitors are used to store energy to dump to the electric motors if the vehicle needs to accelerate quickly.
Why not? But whats the current and voltage. 100 amps of 230V for 5 minutes? Charging a cap (Capacitive reactance) has a huge initial surge that is usually mitigated with resistors and/or inductors. Not enough info to critique in either direction. Total energy stored has to be put into the ultracap. That's got to be very high to produce those mechanical specs using ineffic. electric motors as a drive.
100 amps out of a wall socket?............
It violates the law of common sense..........
Capacitors also never wear out.........
Sure they do.........
Ah yes, an easy solution! Simply place a lightning rod on our houses and we can charge our cars during thunderstorms! 1.21 Gigawatts!
Sadly, the laws of thermo aren’t taught enough.
If we could teach even the basic statements of the laws of thermo to everyone in grade school, there’s be a whole lot less gullible people on this rock.
As a result, “common sense” isn’t common enough.
Now if he had said you could SWAP OUT the capacitor for a fully charged one in five minutes, THAT I might believe......
“no emissions”
Wrong. The emissions are at the power generating station.
“50 miles on a charge – and can recharge in just five minutes.”
As other posters have noted, you can’t get that much power out of a home electrical system in 5 minutes.
A capacitor is not a battery. You can take energy out of a battery gradually. Even if you short a battery out, it doesn’t discharge instantly. A capacitor discharges instantly.
A capacitor has two plates. Each plate has a different voltage. The voltage differential is what gives energy, when the capacitor is discharged.
The article says that the voltage is instantly sent to ground when the car has an accident. Wrong.
The car is not connected to the ground. The “ground” is the car’s metal frame. Bring ear plugs for the bang.
Sounds like there are a lot of bugs to be worked out.
This was posted before.
>>1.21 Gigawatts!<<
Hey, that’s JIGAWATTS!
Well...Lets think about this;
You have a bank of EEStor UltraCaps in the Garage, charging continuously throughout the day. By the time you get home, the bank is fully charged. You plug into the bank, not the wall socket. The connector can handle, say 10,000 watts, and you charge in minutes from the bank, which then starts charging again.
Filling stations run on the same principle. There are semi trailers behind the station charging continuously, and you "fill up" from them. They in turn charge off the grid. When the trailer is full, it is brought on line, when it is discharged, it is taken off line and recharged.
Not magic, Not unrealistic. Not bogus (IF it works). Fantastic technology, and can make electric vehicles a reality.
And ho boy, what would happen if an ultracap gets shorted in an accident? That's gonna be some serous fireworks when all that stored energy gets rapidly discharged.
Take that one step further: you swap out the bank with a fully charged unit at home or the filling station.
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