Here's an interesting article that could make our precious oil industry upset.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070904/ap_on_hi_te/no_more_batteries;_ylt=AqK16QbuL9aQnPdE8Fi0.BojtBAF


Texas startup says it has batteries beat

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.
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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.

No, it makes us laugh. I'll be very curious to see what sort of vehicle they build around the battery/capaciter. To get 500 miles on a 5 minute charge suggests the vehicle will be very small. The amount of energy needed to move an object is the same wether the power comes gas, electricity or hamsters. The laws of physics always apply.

Let's see, 1 gallon of gasoline produces 132x6 Joules of energy which is about 36,000 watts of power. For arguement's sake say a normal car gets 30 miles to the gallon, so to go 500 miles takes 16.6 gallons of gas which is about 59,9999.97 watts. However, gasoline engines are pretty ineffecient at converting power to movement so let's give the electric car 50% bonus and say it'll take only 29,999.98 watts to go 500 miles.

Hmmm, to get 29,999.98 watts from 220 volt household current means you are pumping 136 amps through your wiring. That'll lead to some pretty fireworks.

Sidenote: these are back-of-the-envelop calculations. Can someone double check them?

-Blast, who smells of crude oil...

I get the impression that they are working harder on getting investor's money than on developing a startling new technology.

Hmmm... lets say you plug in your car for 5 minutes and it pulls 200 amps at 220 volts (you turn off everything else in your house or the main breaker will trip). That's 3.7 kWh or about $0.50 of electricity. Its also less than the energy content of 1/10 gallon of gasoline. I'd be more interested to see this car that can get the equivalent of 5,000 miles/gallon.

You could fill libraries with what I do NOT know about physics (in fact, they have already done so). But I do get the concept of a capacitor as a storage device, not an energy generation device. It cannot provide more energy than has been stored in it (unless somehow it has turned into a fusion reactor). So even assuming some of the claims about the super-efficiency of this device in storing and releasing energy are true, there is still going to be the limiting factor of putting sufficient energy (electric current) in it to begin with. Can the average household outlet supply enough current in 5 minutes to power an electric motor-driven vehicle for 500 miles? I don't see how.

While I'm hoping for something like this to work, I'm not very optomistic. Every year, there's a new "revolutionary" technology that promises to make gasoline cars obsolete, but I've yet to hear of anything ever coming from it. Most of the companies come out strong, filling the newspapers with all kinds of stories making wild promises similar to this one. But when it comes time for some unbiased scientific testing, they're suddenly quiet.

You'd think if they really get anywhere close to powering a car for 500 miles, that they would have already something smallrer in production, like a laptop battery that can last more than an hour. Kinda suspicious when a no-name company starts making claims like this.

The other posters seem to have the right skepticism and are correct in that this technology is a possible improvement in energy storage, not generation.
The one place where this new capacitor might be an improvement is acceleration/performance of the car. The batteries in an electric vehicle are a substantial fraction of the total weight, thus making acceleration and handling suffer. If the capacitor has higher energy density (that is, energy stored per weight) then you may be able to get equivalent distance and better performance out of an electric car with less weight in batteries.

Hi Blast,

Checked the arithmetic, its actually a lot more ridiculus than first indicated,

1 horsepower hour = 0.745 699 861 kilowatt hour

Therefore a typical family saloon may have 130 hp

Lets be conservative and assume 60hp continuously for a 55 mph journey

Therefore a 500 mile journey = 500/55 x 60 hp = 545.5 hphrs = 406.7 kilowatt hours

Power = Voltage * Current

Therefore Current = Power/Voltage

Current would be 406.7*1000*(60/5) / 220 = 22172 amps

Lets Assuming 95% load efficiency so lets add an additional 5% to the amperage

Total Current load for 5 min = 23281 Amps at 220 Volts

Hmm lets see the 5% energy loss during the energy conversion would be equivalent to 256091 Watts or 0.256 Megawatts. Darn those transistors are going to get mighty warm.

Total Power consumption for 5 minutes for each car is 5.12 Megawatts. A 1250 Megawatt Power station (huge nuclear) would be required for every 245 cars. Lets assume a contention ratio of 1:10. Therefore for every 2450 cars a new 1250 Megawatt power station would be required. For a city of the size of houston about 20-40 new nuclear powers station would be required for the peak rush hour load. (lets assume each car is charged every other 10 days)

Does anyone want to calculate the diameter of the copper cable for the 23281 Amp load at 220v

Hey Am_Feart_Liath_Mor,

YOWZAA!!! Suddenly I'm picturing cars powered by lightening bolts like in "Back to the Future"!

Note to self: invest in copper.

-Blast

Hey Blast,

That was almost spot on.

A typical lightning discharge has around 500 MJ

The energy for the car would be 23281 Amps * 220 Volts * 300 = 1,536,546,000J = 1537 MJ or about 3 average lightning strikes.

But the even a Deloran could go more than 166 miles on a full tank, so even this method is'nt was really that useful either

Great for time travelling though, Hmm I wonder if I could get some investors

This sounds like the 21st century version of the Fish carburetor.

(If you remember the stories about the Fish, you're really showing your age.)

For you youngsters, the Fish carburetor was supposed to give 50... 60...70 miles per gallon in a two ton family sedan. The story was that Detroit, in league with big oil, kept it from the American public.

Can anyone say: Cold Fusion?