Today's ceramic technology may yield a few joules/cc. These guys are claiming like 7000 joules/cc. It is a ludicrous claim that if there were any truth to would be huge news in material science. They are claiming a
100,000% improvement of energy density.
This ranks right up there with Newman's dynamotor.
BaTiO3 ceramic and multilayer capacitors have been around for decades. Smart guys at universities and in the industry would have done this by now if it were possible. The only thing supporting EERstor _is_ believers. And as human nature goes, there will be plenty of'm lining up.
That is right, and I think they mention using the silkscreen printing process to apply the active layers. There can be many processes that can apply the active layer thinner and more precisely, which is what happened to the electronic chip, so there is a chance that the 50 KWH ultracapacitor weight could be down to 10 pounds within 5 or 10 years.
Early electronic integrated circuit boards started out with hand drawn stencils, using silkscreen or other method to apply a mask to a substrate, then the copper was applied by some means over the area not covered by the mask. They were crude looking, the first had very few components on them, now I don't even know how many components they can put on one board or chip, it is in the Billions.
The secret will be cost per unit, and the profit to be made will be on small units up to 100 KWH, for vehicles and home backup systems. They can almost completely replace all other types of batteries when they are developed better and marketed properly.
I have a good gel cell, 12 volts at about 60 Ah, which might store 1 KWH, but if it were run down all the way 4 or 5 times, it would be destroyed.
So ultracapacitors are the biggest storage breakthrough I know of, the flow battery may not be useful for automotive use for some time.
There might be big front money for big installations for power plant or industrial use, by the profit money will be in the little guy market.
I think MIT and others also have developed different methods to make high capacity ultracapacitors, so the technology could move very fast.
I'm sure EEStor is looking for investors. You sound like the kind of believer that would invest without understanding the technology. Send them a check......
It looks like they already have more business than they can handle.
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There are some wild tales and supposed claims, but the truth is likely somewhere in between their dreaming and your pessimism.
Chances are any production would be taken by the military for quite some time.
And first use would more likely be for hybrid regenerative braking rather than plugin.
But this company seems to only be interested in offering plugin vehicles.
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This all seems too tame and isolated to be as great as it should be if true, although it might even be difficult to sell a gold bar for cash on Wall Street.
Somewhere in between? They have made a claim, see the patent. They claim three magnitudes the storage density with a technology that has been beat to death for decades.
Joe Fischer writes in article dated Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:20:54
-0400:
The words are synonyms.
In a nutshell, capacitors have a better power/weight ratio, and batteries have a better energy/weight ratio. Supercapacitors span the range between the two. On the other hand, fuel cells can hold even more energy than batteries.
Nobody wants to stop every 10 miles for a charge, even if it only takes a minute. If the claims of longer ranges seen on blogs around the Internet prove true, the manufacturer has made some kind of breakthrough.
-- spud_demon -at- thundermaker.net The above may not (yet) represent the opinions of my employer.
This is the problem with automobiles that use self-contined fuel sources. If you think the capacitor is a possible hazard, just imagine the same amount of energy stored in a flywheel! Or even worse, what if cars ran on gasoline? Could you imagine sitting on top of a huge tank of explosive liquid every day on your daily commute? One small fender bender and it could all go off right there!
That's why the only SAFE vehicles are electric cars that get their power off the overhead catenary wire like God intended.
Is it that you are not paying attention or that you have no clue what the issue is here? EERStor is _not_ claiming a patent on a supercap. There's is a HV BaTiO3 cap. What I wrote stands.
I have been a proponent of supercaps to buffer the cycles and surges on the batteries of an EV for years.
Go to Maxwell's site, calculate the energy density of a back seat full of their caps. Supercaps are limited to around 3 volts and E=CV^2/2.
If you can't do the math, you will never understand why caps can't be used for primary EV storage.
Battery packs for an EV will run several hundred volts. Don't touch the terminals.
You are clueless. It isn't voltage, it isn't amperage. It is Energy as a total quantity that counts.
No, nobody has done anything close to this and its doubtful that EEStor has done it either. They have a patent on their unit which describes how it is allegedly put together but some simple calculations illustrate that the claimed energy storage causes internal voltage gradients that are way beyond what anybody has done. This makes the whole thing dubious at best. Most likely it is a scam designed to bilk investors. It wouldn't be the first time that outlandish claims have been made for that purpose. There's more on this whole subject a couple of weeks ago in alt.energy, sci.energy and sci.energy.hydrogen including reference URL's and a discussion of the patent.
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