Do they have something that they’ve tested that you’ve seen which makes you want to work with them?
We haven’t personally tested their prototypes yet. Its something that we’ll work on together this year
Looks like 'hype', as usual. Nothing to see, yet! ... move along!
Actually they have been extremely hype free - and if anything secretive. I have been trying to get more information about them on the web, but it is very hard, other than maybe a couple of press releases and a patent. It is interesting that this came not from them, but the defense company.
Yes, hype by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control for some bizarre reason (you would have thought they would keep details like that secret?)... not hype by EEstor - as you say, secretive people, I wonder why? - but I can guess.
Why so defensive Xeroid? EEstor hasn't asked for a cent from the public or government, was funded by a highly respected group of investors and is now getting defense department contracts for its product. It seemed pretty obvious to me from the article that the Lockeheed Martin folks have seen the device work they just haven't been allowed to take one for themselves yet.
Oh! ... let's hope they have a viable product, available to the whole world, in the huge quantities required ... but, as usual for adequate alternatives to oil, they are not available yet (even to the military - who usually get stuff years before Joe Public.)
We have an urgent need for something like this - BTW ultra-capacitors are not new technology, but for any real capacity they are NOT low cost at present (low cost is the AIM of their R&D efforts and you shouldn't assume that they will actually be low cost when/if they finally hit the market (that doesn't matter for military applications maybe?) - there are many applications that need large amounts of energy in a short period of time (an example is intermittently used photocopiers that have to have their fuser rolls hot is one area I know quite a bit about.)
Military contractors have a history of throwing money (they have a lot of it, thank you Mr. taxpayer!)at a technology even if there is less than a fifty/fifty chance of it working. Witness the huge amount of funds thrown at the “Star Wars” program. Most of these experimental programs show no results. An article for Technology Review, published by MIT, show there are a lot of scientists who are very skeptical this new battery will work. The comments are interesting, while the scientists cite papers and explain why they don’t think the Eestore device is viable, the other comments throw around platitudes and wishfull thinking as to why it will. Maybe a new way to measure the acceptance of the reality peak oil - peak platitudes.
There is an obvious military use for these high voltage devices. As noted in the interview:
......In the situation where you are trying to store energy, transport it without discharge obviously thats very attractive in the utility grid load leveling (situation). If your talking about powering for example a high energy weapon that requires a short burst of energy a capacitor is a great approach to do that....
...We are basically working with them exclusively and in the homeland security and defense department’s markets...
One of the big problems with laser weapons is the high energy requirements over a short period of time. If these ultra capacitors are as good as described, think of IR lasers mounted on Humvees. There was a story about such a scenario while back. The IR laser is invisible and the comment went something like "the bad guy was standing in a group talking with his buddies and suddenly his head exploded". Such systems would also be of use in airborne applications, including lasers to intercept incoming missiles. They would be used for delivering a series of rapid pulses, then could be recharged over a few minutes from lower power sources, such as an APU. Then too, there are the potential orbital applications...
Why so defensive Xeroid? EEstor hasn't asked for a cent from the public or government, was funded by a highly respected group of investors and is now getting defense department contracts for its product.
I wouldn't be too sure about who funded all this research originally. There is a theory that it came out of weapons research in the first place.
I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but to me it has all the signs of investor fraud. The product capabilities probably violate the laws of physics. But hey those capabilities, are just what anyone who knows what the specs for energy storage mean would kill for this.
Yes, ultracapitors are really amazing devices. But in the real world they have limits. It would be great to combine UC with LiIon for all sorts of plugin technology, but the current cost is prohibitive.
Technology like this can provide a "step change" in some applications. Here is one:
Years ago, the railroads used to run their own power lines along the track, to power equipment such as signals, switches, interlockings, and road crossing barriers. THey did this because they were the only ones around needing power. As rural powerlines became ubiquitous, the railroads switched and started buying power from local utilities.
Today, the railroads are dependent on utility power for the bulk of their operations. THey have large battery banks at critical installations, and can survive limited duration power outages, but any extended outage slows them way down, since they fall back on manual procedures. (Engineers hand-cranking switches, going 15 miles per hour instead of 70+ MPH).
This technology is attractive not so much because of the capacity (that too) but because it can be rapidly charged. You can envisage a maintenance vehicle with onboard generator and storage driving down the track, and "topping off" these capacitors once or twice a day as needed. Getting rid of the power lines, dependency on (future) intermittent utility power, and vandalism/theft of powerlines is a huge deal.
Conventional batteries would take too long, requiring the maintenance vehicle to block the track excessively.
These things are 3500 volt systems (according to wikipedia). You need 4180v AC to charge them. Nobody's going to use them in personal cars or in remote RR locations. Quite possibly for load leveling and power factor adjustment though.
It's known tech for large stationary facilities, true. However, if people are worried about ammonia, compressed air, or liquid hydrogen tanks in cars they're not going to be happy with what happens when a 3500v capacitor discharges to ground after a crash. The passengers better be wearing their rubber suits.
The real point of the super-capacitor tech is, it's a great solution for practical IR laser weapons. No trajectory to compensate for, no more "doping" the wind, point and shoot. No smoke/dust/discharge to show the enemy where the IR pulse that just exploded the little kid's head came from. Easy to maintain/repair. Practical IR weapons frankly have it all over the venerable rifle/pistol. Even an efficiency much greater than alternate methods of killing large numbers of people like calling in "spooky" and getting 'em with the chain gun.
A US population raised on video games + IR weapons means a practical way to eliminate large amounts of the enemy without spending huge amounts of money and destroying valuable infrastructure.
So, you can expect these supercaps to be boosted "it's for better cars, um, coffee machines, er, whatever" lol.
Regular or extra crispy? I've thought that that giant laser airplane we are building might be the way to assassinate somebody who has too many collateral casualties around him.
These things are 3500 volt systems (according to wikipedia). You need 4180v AC to charge them. Nobody's going to use them in personal cars or in remote RR locations. Quite possibly for load leveling and power factor adjustment though.
The High working voltage is also a problem for energy extraction. Since the capacitor stores a charge as a DC voltage you need very high voltage switching gear to step it down. ie Very high voltage Mosfets IGBT.
Then the step down transformer needs to be very well insulated, which can be difficult with High Frequency transformers (need HF to reduce weight as size of the xformer). Then there is the problem of failure. HV DC will arc across a very large gap. If one of the transistors in the H-Bridge fails, it will be difficult to break the flow of current. You can't use ordinary breakers to break HV DC current flows. If the breaker fails, look out for a big bang.
We'll never see vehicles using these capacitors, the risks are too great for use in general transportation. Perhaps for Grid storage or UPS systems. I doubt these will be cheap.
There is nothing that shows that it will be at lower cost. There is simply a statement that it will be, but the drawing is a typical multilayer capacitor. Why in the world would it be cheaper? Absolutely not! Tell me what exactly will make it cheaper to manufacture?
The essence of this article is captured in one sentence: "They have an agreement to produce caps for Zenn electric cars but to date have not shown any prototypes. This has led some to suspect EEStor as not having the technology they report."
What follows is marketing to keep company alive. I've seen few start-ups many years back and they always talked about some unreachable idealistic goal as something that they have already. That's the only way that they could get money to continue going. Exuberant optimism. They also always portray some preliminary discussions with a larger company as a vote of confidence. The owner of the company has nothing to lose. In start-ups perception is everything, reality has no value.
I agree with you. There is nothing in the link that says anything about their technology, and you are correct that the drawing is just a generic drawing of a capacitor. There is more to a storage media that the amount of energy that can be put into it, including the rates of charge and discharge (both short and long term), and how deeply the thing can be routinely discharged. This quote leads me to believe there is a limitation:
How does Lockheed Martin feel about ultracaps and storage versus li-ion or NiMh batteries? Lockheed Martin doesn’t have a bias. One way or another its really just a function of what does the customer want. For certain applications being able to provide pulse power is really really important, in another its not so much really pulse power but continuous power. If you talk to the Army they are really interested in hybridized solutions. Suffice it to say that EEStor’s technology is a piece of some of these systems solutions that we come up with. We are a system integrator so we look at the EEStor technology as a building block or a tool in a toolbox to provide the best solutions for the soldier.
But don't worry, technology MUST save us - it must it must it must! Somewhere in all these happy horseshit developments is going to be the silver bullet that means we'll all be able to continue driveing personal automobiles - which is after all the only thing that really matters.
Somewhere in all these happy horseshit developments is going to be the silver bullet that means we'll all be able to continue driveing personal automobiles - which is after all the only thing that really matters.
That's the idea buddy. :) Don't worry though, feel free to move to the middle of the country get yourself some land and live off the land and be happy or move to a really poor country they don't have too many cars there. :) Either way I believe that future tech will bring a cleaner more advanced society for all (that want it).
Best hopes for silver bullets and driving personal automobiles.
So far the majority of the oil wealth that we have used went to transportation, much of it frivolous and wasteful. We even replaced our previous transportation infrastructure and reconfigured our communities to make personal automobiles a requirement and use as much as possible. Now the premise is that we should replace our automobile fleet, increase our power generation capacity (most of which will be coal), and rebuild out T&D infrastructure so that we can all continue to use personal automobiles. What does it take to get people to understand the incredible cost the automobile has exacted from all of us?
There most certainly will be EVs, and some may use caps for storage (it's a minor detail), but we cannot simply switch to EVs and have the car-culture go on as it has. If we cannot envision a world where humans are not wholly dependent on automobiles, then there really is no way to avoid the worst-case scenarios.
The claim by the historically wrong "theantidoomer" Actually wrong,
O Rly? Let see - given how you've been wrong so many times before - lets see if the trend continues.
I can go to many different stores and spend under $100 and get a lead acid battery.
I can NOT go to any store and buy these 'way way less expensive' eestore caps.
Historically, if something can not be bought it is considered expensive.
But go ahead and show the wal-mart web page, the battery plus, the .... web page that has the way, way cheaper EEstore caps you claim are cheaper.
(edit - your lack of response shows how, once again, you were incorrect theantidoomer. And how people who question the shipping status of EEstore are FAR more reasonable.)
Historically, if something can not be bought it is considered expensive.
Being unable to be bought makes them unobtainable, not expensive. ;) In the same vein, I believe EEstor's products are made from military-grade Unobtanium, as opposed to them being vapourware (as others have opined).
Traditionally more expensive, you mean. With EEStor we don't yet know so don't claim otherwise. If you research EEStor you will discover NO patents related to ultracapacitors. What you will find instead is several patents related to the manufacture of ultracapacitors.
I remain neutral about EEStor but the breakthrough they appear to be seeking is in scalability of manufacturing and in cost control. There's no way to evaluate that until they actuall get into production.
I agree. I remain neutral...They aren't hyping, sorta like Nanosolar. All private money. So I let them be, no reason to beat up on them.
However, in our internal process of searching for advanced battery technology here, we found that there claims are pretty hard to swallow.
The energy density is still very low...which may explain some of there early claims to be working on a battery-ultra cap hybrid. It isn't likely that we will see vehicles running on Ultra-caps only any time soon.
But, this raises the question as to the point of the ultracaps, in a Lead acid environment, it could provide high current spike capability, possibly NiMH(possibly), but for more current Li Ion (or derivatives) it appears to be unnecessary as many of these systems can spike in excess of 1000 amps instaneous.
But, I wish them nothing but success in the most genuine sense. Improving battery technologies can only help our transitions (in my best anti-doom face).
I haven't been here for a while, but having some experience with capacitors and capacitor discharge systems, I have to say that you guys are ....., even though you don't want to know the truth, you spew off a bunch of anecdotes about capacitors and continue on and on without any resolution to the discussion.
Truth is, the patents on manufacturing process for EESTORE ARE the most important bit, since the process is the product in this case. Supercapacity is achieved through science, whether using extra thin, gold layers, or through better dielectric materials for higher voltage, or by increasing the surface area (or effective surface area) of the capacitor. This latter is probably the process of EESTORE, in combination with a higher voltage dielectric. The first gen of gold caps were limited to low voltage because of the weight of dielectric and conducting layer materials. If EESTORE has come up with a better dielectric process to combine with a carbon/carbon black type material, then we will be looking at products that can make chemical batteries as we know them to be obsolete. Especially when considering the weight factor. (nanobots constructing monoatomic filament towers of carbon, covered with single layers of defect-free, monatomic layers of glass and carbon?)
In light of safety factors: in an accident, the capacitor might have some kind of frangible dielectric that shatters (see above), causing an internal discharge so that exposure to high voltages is minimized.
There is a lot of potential for this if they do it right.
I think you are right...there is a lot of potential (mind the pun).
But, the fact is that they haven't lifted the skirt enough to understand if their approach is anything more than research.
There are a substantial amount of applications for existing and new ultracapacitors, but long range vehicles is a reach with was available now, and with what they have 'stated' about their approach.
Best Hopes they sitting on Mr. Fusion, I certainly would love one.
On balance, more hype. Maybe worse. Their patent is here: 7,033,406.
This reads like a fairly typical process for making multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC), which have been around for years. Their wrinkle might be low porosity or other properties of the ceramic permitting higher breakdown voltage than usual, but the patent is well enough written to avoid really disclosing what they propose to accomplish, or how, except to raise the breakdown voltage. It hasn't been necessary to submit working models for years, so patents are sometimes written in a way that allows a patent holder who did nothing to sue the actual inventor years later when the patented item finally gets invented for real.
The money quote is found about 2/5 of the way down:
Stored energy E=CV.sup.2/2, Formula 1, as indicated in F. Sears et al., "Capacitance-Properties of Dielectrics", University Physics, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc.: Dec. 1957: pp 468-486, where C is the capacitance, V is the voltage across the EESU terminals, and E is the stored energy.
That formula has been known for much more than a century, and OTOH there are far more recent textbooks. So I can't imagine how or why they or their patent lawyer settled on a textbook from 1957, the last hurrah of vacuum tubes.
Not that it matters, this formula does not apply to barium titanate and other "high K" ferroelectric materials at high energy density. Ordinary high-K MLCCs that one buys at a distributor already show very substantial saturation effects when operated at rated voltage - that is, the capacitance at rated voltage decreases as much as 80% below the value marked on the reel. Making the dielectric less porous - so that it doesn't punch or arc through - is not going to solve this problem; it may even aggravate it slightly. It will allow the voltage to be raised, causing even more of the capacitance to disappear, reducing the energy storage to a small fraction of what investors might have concluded from the formula.
Because the process described in the patent is fairly conventional, it would still seem to involve spraying every one of hundreds or thousands of layers. This is not cheap. A conventional MLCC storing a few hundredths of a joule at a couple of kilovolts and occupying a 2220 (220x200 mils) package might cost fifty cents each in large quantities. Storing 52kWH, 187 million joules, might cost somewhere north of $3 billion with an array of such things. That's one hell of an expensive substitute for a gas tank. Before we can sell it, we need to cut the cost by a factor of around one million. Nothing in the patent seems to suggest a factor exceeding a few hundred even if "E=CV.sup.2/2" (energy is one half capacitance times square of voltage) and every other optimistic assumption proved true.
It's pretty clear to me, then, why they need a military sugar daddy. If they can accomplish production miracles and fabricate a 52kWH/180MJ pulse capacitor array for a million bucks instead of 3 billion, they'll have a pulse-laser or electromagnetic pulse generator (EMP) energy storage unit that the DARPA types will salivate over.
In the meantime, IMO, nothing here, move on. There appears to be a reason why, for the time being, they have no functional website, no engineering samples, no product specs, no nothing, just secretive whispers, shhhh, don't look behind the curtain.
Again you come here like the saviour, offering your anecdotes and hype as the antidote to the doom we luddites and others seem to be predicting. And yet again we have explained why there is nothing to your over zealous optimism.
Time again we the scientists and engineers who actually do this stuff, have tried to explain to you the limitations of technology - like my outburst here: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3448#comment-283788
and yet you persist on this madness.
I have been wondering what goes on in your head, what motivates you, and then I read this:
theantidoomer: feel free to move to the middle of the country get yourself some land and live off the land and be happy or move to a really poor country they don't have too many cars there. :) Either way I believe that future tech will bring a cleaner more advanced society for all (that want it).
So essentially your position is a dichotomy because you do not believe we should give up anything. A classic 'have-the-cake-and-eat-it'-syndrome familiar to anyone with children.
Not only is your position naive in the extreme by ignoring how many things we already 'give up' everyday with the real compromises we make in engineering, manufacturing and economics: the opportunity cost of every decision, the allocation of limited resources, the law of entropy. But you insist on placing immediate comfort over safe future, the familiar conveniences over the real costs and demands they require.
You lack the ability of moderating your expectation to match reality. And in order to justify your position to yourself, and deny the absurdity of your position, you are having to deal with superficial anecdotes.
This truly is the level of thinking for a five year old. However in my opinion you are more likely just a shill.
But for the benefit of others I would like to say a few words.
I work at the border of science and engineering, one foot in each. For people like us, problems like PO and GW, and I might add the inevitable collapse of our unsustainable monetary system, leave us with only two choices, in depth analysis, or total ignorance. Most of my colleagues choose the latter, understandably as they have invested their lifetimes into their careers and research and locked themselves into a certain lifestyle. Personally, if I'm having to perform objective analysis of problems in my work, its hard to do the opposite in my daily life. But for others it seems they can detach their personal lives from the side of the brain they use at work, and live the common irrational way of life, at least for now.
For the non-engineers and -scientists it's much easier. For them its all about religion. All they see is the cornucopia of technology at the shop window - the perception being that its all at least linear, if not exponential: everything getting faster, bigger/smaller, better every year, with no limits in sight. And why would they see any limits - they have no concept of what is a limit - energy, space and time - laws of physics are there for the theoretical physicists to 'break'. And even less so, they have no idea of the compromises done in engineering or the law of diminishing returns (engineering IS ABOUT making compromises!).
If you point out to them some shortage of a particular resource, they'll just state we'll figure out a way of making more from less, forever (forever meaning often their lifetimes). Similarly, as they have no idea how the monetary system works, they believe absolutely that money is no object in the way of finding and applying any number of solutions to all our problems.
Finally we come to the technocopians - the advocates for the status quo. Their motives stem from the various fears and delusions they have got from being confronted by greens and extremists on the other side (which I don't particularly like either). Or they have simply analysed PO far enough to have found something personally unacceptable to their wish of what the future should be. Hence they desperately defend their hopeless position with what ever means: assured rhetoric, logical fallacies, outright denial. TOD is a tough place for them since people here know their engineering and math. Here you cannot just bluff people with numerology or tech-jargon.
The reason I like TOD and have stuck around for now, is that here you have lots of oridinary people different walks of life, making extraoridinary efford in analysing the situation objectively and holistically. People who are not distracted by hype or narrow interests. And people who can see hope in the future without having to resort to irrationalities or denial. Having to let go of our current way of life is seen as an opportunities for a better, healthier and happier existance for man. In that, I think we are the true optimists.
Not sure if this very interesting news about EESTOR had been posted:
http://www.gm-volt.com/2008/01/10/lockheed-martin-signs-agreement-with-e...
Lockheed Martin Signs Agreement with EEStor
Looks like 'hype', as usual. Nothing to see, yet! ... move along!
Actually they have been extremely hype free - and if anything secretive. I have been trying to get more information about them on the web, but it is very hard, other than maybe a couple of press releases and a patent. It is interesting that this came not from them, but the defense company.
Yes, hype by Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control for some bizarre reason (you would have thought they would keep details like that secret?)... not hype by EEstor - as you say, secretive people, I wonder why? - but I can guess.
Why so defensive Xeroid? EEstor hasn't asked for a cent from the public or government, was funded by a highly respected group of investors and is now getting defense department contracts for its product. It seemed pretty obvious to me from the article that the Lockeheed Martin folks have seen the device work they just haven't been allowed to take one for themselves yet.
Oh! ... let's hope they have a viable product, available to the whole world, in the huge quantities required ... but, as usual for adequate alternatives to oil, they are not available yet (even to the military - who usually get stuff years before Joe Public.)
We have an urgent need for something like this - BTW ultra-capacitors are not new technology, but for any real capacity they are NOT low cost at present (low cost is the AIM of their R&D efforts and you shouldn't assume that they will actually be low cost when/if they finally hit the market (that doesn't matter for military applications maybe?) - there are many applications that need large amounts of energy in a short period of time (an example is intermittently used photocopiers that have to have their fuser rolls hot is one area I know quite a bit about.)
Military contractors have a history of throwing money (they have a lot of it, thank you Mr. taxpayer!)at a technology even if there is less than a fifty/fifty chance of it working. Witness the huge amount of funds thrown at the “Star Wars” program. Most of these experimental programs show no results. An article for Technology Review, published by MIT, show there are a lot of scientists who are very skeptical this new battery will work. The comments are interesting, while the scientists cite papers and explain why they don’t think the Eestore device is viable, the other comments throw around platitudes and wishfull thinking as to why it will. Maybe a new way to measure the acceptance of the reality peak oil - peak platitudes.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/18086/
There is an obvious military use for these high voltage devices. As noted in the interview:
One of the big problems with laser weapons is the high energy requirements over a short period of time. If these ultra capacitors are as good as described, think of IR lasers mounted on Humvees. There was a story about such a scenario while back. The IR laser is invisible and the comment went something like "the bad guy was standing in a group talking with his buddies and suddenly his head exploded". Such systems would also be of use in airborne applications, including lasers to intercept incoming missiles. They would be used for delivering a series of rapid pulses, then could be recharged over a few minutes from lower power sources, such as an APU. Then too, there are the potential orbital applications...
E. Swanson
I wouldn't be too sure about who funded all this research originally. There is a theory that it came out of weapons research in the first place.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2006/09/ultracapacitor-conspiracy.html
http://cryptogon.com/?p=255
I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but to me it has all the signs of investor fraud. The product capabilities probably violate the laws of physics. But hey those capabilities, are just what anyone who knows what the specs for energy storage mean would kill for this.
Yes, ultracapitors are really amazing devices. But in the real world they have limits. It would be great to combine UC with LiIon for all sorts of plugin technology, but the current cost is prohibitive.
Heh, enemy, you qualified that nicely.
"The product capabilities probably violate the laws of physics."
Sure it does !
So what's so surprising about that ?
This makes all the sense in the world to me.
"The new boss is same as the old boss."
They military-industrial complex is continuing to strengthen it's position for a post FF transition.
Goal: Present vested interests remain vested.
Technology like this can provide a "step change" in some applications. Here is one:
Years ago, the railroads used to run their own power lines along the track, to power equipment such as signals, switches, interlockings, and road crossing barriers. THey did this because they were the only ones around needing power. As rural powerlines became ubiquitous, the railroads switched and started buying power from local utilities.
Today, the railroads are dependent on utility power for the bulk of their operations. THey have large battery banks at critical installations, and can survive limited duration power outages, but any extended outage slows them way down, since they fall back on manual procedures. (Engineers hand-cranking switches, going 15 miles per hour instead of 70+ MPH).
This technology is attractive not so much because of the capacity (that too) but because it can be rapidly charged. You can envisage a maintenance vehicle with onboard generator and storage driving down the track, and "topping off" these capacitors once or twice a day as needed. Getting rid of the power lines, dependency on (future) intermittent utility power, and vandalism/theft of powerlines is a huge deal.
Conventional batteries would take too long, requiring the maintenance vehicle to block the track excessively.
Bring it on.
Francois.
These things are 3500 volt systems (according to wikipedia). You need 4180v AC to charge them. Nobody's going to use them in personal cars or in remote RR locations. Quite possibly for load leveling and power factor adjustment though.
Getting a high charging voltage from a low-voltage high current source is a known technology. :).
Besides, the high voltage will discourage theft!
It's known tech for large stationary facilities, true. However, if people are worried about ammonia, compressed air, or liquid hydrogen tanks in cars they're not going to be happy with what happens when a 3500v capacitor discharges to ground after a crash. The passengers better be wearing their rubber suits.
Then what interest does Zenn have in them?
http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/292614
They have the rights to makes ultra compact cars using their technology, their stock jumped 25% on this weeks news.
That would be so cool. One circuit fault and you could be driving around in a giant bug zapper. A true multipurpose vehicle.
NEW Zenn SUV
THE TAZER
The real point of the super-capacitor tech is, it's a great solution for practical IR laser weapons. No trajectory to compensate for, no more "doping" the wind, point and shoot. No smoke/dust/discharge to show the enemy where the IR pulse that just exploded the little kid's head came from. Easy to maintain/repair. Practical IR weapons frankly have it all over the venerable rifle/pistol. Even an efficiency much greater than alternate methods of killing large numbers of people like calling in "spooky" and getting 'em with the chain gun.
A US population raised on video games + IR weapons means a practical way to eliminate large amounts of the enemy without spending huge amounts of money and destroying valuable infrastructure.
So, you can expect these supercaps to be boosted "it's for better cars, um, coffee machines, er, whatever" lol.
Regular or extra crispy? I've thought that that giant laser airplane we are building might be the way to assassinate somebody who has too many collateral casualties around him.
The High working voltage is also a problem for energy extraction. Since the capacitor stores a charge as a DC voltage you need very high voltage switching gear to step it down. ie Very high voltage Mosfets IGBT.
Then the step down transformer needs to be very well insulated, which can be difficult with High Frequency transformers (need HF to reduce weight as size of the xformer). Then there is the problem of failure. HV DC will arc across a very large gap. If one of the transistors in the H-Bridge fails, it will be difficult to break the flow of current. You can't use ordinary breakers to break HV DC current flows. If the breaker fails, look out for a big bang.
We'll never see vehicles using these capacitors, the risks are too great for use in general transportation. Perhaps for Grid storage or UPS systems. I doubt these will be cheap.
Typical multi layer condenser. Can hold a lot of charge, but is way, way more expensive then lead acid battery.
Actually wrong, did you read anything about EEstor? The whole point of the product is that it can be done at a fraction of the cost.
There is nothing that shows that it will be at lower cost. There is simply a statement that it will be, but the drawing is a typical multilayer capacitor. Why in the world would it be cheaper? Absolutely not! Tell me what exactly will make it cheaper to manufacture?
The essence of this article is captured in one sentence: "They have an agreement to produce caps for Zenn electric cars but to date have not shown any prototypes. This has led some to suspect EEStor as not having the technology they report."
What follows is marketing to keep company alive. I've seen few start-ups many years back and they always talked about some unreachable idealistic goal as something that they have already. That's the only way that they could get money to continue going. Exuberant optimism. They also always portray some preliminary discussions with a larger company as a vote of confidence. The owner of the company has nothing to lose. In start-ups perception is everything, reality has no value.
That's my experience of R&D also (and not just in startups!) - BTW nanosolar also matches that spec by the looks of it!
I agree with you. There is nothing in the link that says anything about their technology, and you are correct that the drawing is just a generic drawing of a capacitor. There is more to a storage media that the amount of energy that can be put into it, including the rates of charge and discharge (both short and long term), and how deeply the thing can be routinely discharged. This quote leads me to believe there is a limitation:
But don't worry, technology MUST save us - it must it must it must! Somewhere in all these happy horseshit developments is going to be the silver bullet that means we'll all be able to continue driveing personal automobiles - which is after all the only thing that really matters.
That's the idea buddy. :) Don't worry though, feel free to move to the middle of the country get yourself some land and live off the land and be happy or move to a really poor country they don't have too many cars there. :) Either way I believe that future tech will bring a cleaner more advanced society for all (that want it).
Best hopes for silver bullets and driving personal automobiles.
So far the majority of the oil wealth that we have used went to transportation, much of it frivolous and wasteful. We even replaced our previous transportation infrastructure and reconfigured our communities to make personal automobiles a requirement and use as much as possible. Now the premise is that we should replace our automobile fleet, increase our power generation capacity (most of which will be coal), and rebuild out T&D infrastructure so that we can all continue to use personal automobiles. What does it take to get people to understand the incredible cost the automobile has exacted from all of us?
There most certainly will be EVs, and some may use caps for storage (it's a minor detail), but we cannot simply switch to EVs and have the car-culture go on as it has. If we cannot envision a world where humans are not wholly dependent on automobiles, then there really is no way to avoid the worst-case scenarios.
The claim:
The claim by the historically wrong "theantidoomer"
Actually wrong,
O Rly? Let see - given how you've been wrong so many times before - lets see if the trend continues.
I can go to many different stores and spend under $100 and get a lead acid battery.
I can NOT go to any store and buy these 'way way less expensive' eestore caps.
Historically, if something can not be bought it is considered expensive.
But go ahead and show the wal-mart web page, the battery plus, the .... web page that has the way, way cheaper EEstore caps you claim are cheaper.
(edit - your lack of response shows how, once again, you were incorrect theantidoomer. And how people who question the shipping status of EEstore are FAR more reasonable.)
Being unable to be bought makes them unobtainable, not expensive. ;) In the same vein, I believe EEstor's products are made from military-grade Unobtanium, as opposed to them being vapourware (as others have opined).
Traditionally more expensive, you mean. With EEStor we don't yet know so don't claim otherwise. If you research EEStor you will discover NO patents related to ultracapacitors. What you will find instead is several patents related to the manufacture of ultracapacitors.
I remain neutral about EEStor but the breakthrough they appear to be seeking is in scalability of manufacturing and in cost control. There's no way to evaluate that until they actuall get into production.
I agree. I remain neutral...They aren't hyping, sorta like Nanosolar. All private money. So I let them be, no reason to beat up on them.
However, in our internal process of searching for advanced battery technology here, we found that there claims are pretty hard to swallow.
The energy density is still very low...which may explain some of there early claims to be working on a battery-ultra cap hybrid. It isn't likely that we will see vehicles running on Ultra-caps only any time soon.
But, this raises the question as to the point of the ultracaps, in a Lead acid environment, it could provide high current spike capability, possibly NiMH(possibly), but for more current Li Ion (or derivatives) it appears to be unnecessary as many of these systems can spike in excess of 1000 amps instaneous.
But, I wish them nothing but success in the most genuine sense. Improving battery technologies can only help our transitions (in my best anti-doom face).
I haven't been here for a while, but having some experience with capacitors and capacitor discharge systems, I have to say that you guys are ....., even though you don't want to know the truth, you spew off a bunch of anecdotes about capacitors and continue on and on without any resolution to the discussion.
Truth is, the patents on manufacturing process for EESTORE ARE the most important bit, since the process is the product in this case. Supercapacity is achieved through science, whether using extra thin, gold layers, or through better dielectric materials for higher voltage, or by increasing the surface area (or effective surface area) of the capacitor. This latter is probably the process of EESTORE, in combination with a higher voltage dielectric. The first gen of gold caps were limited to low voltage because of the weight of dielectric and conducting layer materials. If EESTORE has come up with a better dielectric process to combine with a carbon/carbon black type material, then we will be looking at products that can make chemical batteries as we know them to be obsolete. Especially when considering the weight factor. (nanobots constructing monoatomic filament towers of carbon, covered with single layers of defect-free, monatomic layers of glass and carbon?)
In light of safety factors: in an accident, the capacitor might have some kind of frangible dielectric that shatters (see above), causing an internal discharge so that exposure to high voltages is minimized.
There is a lot of potential for this if they do it right.
Your favorite Luddite,
Auntiegrav
I think you are right...there is a lot of potential (mind the pun).
But, the fact is that they haven't lifted the skirt enough to understand if their approach is anything more than research.
There are a substantial amount of applications for existing and new ultracapacitors, but long range vehicles is a reach with was available now, and with what they have 'stated' about their approach.
Best Hopes they sitting on Mr. Fusion, I certainly would love one.
There is a lot of potential
There is the potential that Peak energy won't be an issue. But for that to happen, man's level of expectation of "what is normal" will have to change.
eestore has had years to show a product and the claims fly in the face of known capacitor knowledge, hence the skeptics
Just like claims that 'peak oil is no problem' when man *LIKES* lights, heat, cars, eating meat, and the history of violence to obtain materials.
On balance, more hype. Maybe worse. Their patent is here: 7,033,406.
This reads like a fairly typical process for making multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCC), which have been around for years. Their wrinkle might be low porosity or other properties of the ceramic permitting higher breakdown voltage than usual, but the patent is well enough written to avoid really disclosing what they propose to accomplish, or how, except to raise the breakdown voltage. It hasn't been necessary to submit working models for years, so patents are sometimes written in a way that allows a patent holder who did nothing to sue the actual inventor years later when the patented item finally gets invented for real.
The money quote is found about 2/5 of the way down:
That formula has been known for much more than a century, and OTOH there are far more recent textbooks. So I can't imagine how or why they or their patent lawyer settled on a textbook from 1957, the last hurrah of vacuum tubes.
Not that it matters, this formula does not apply to barium titanate and other "high K" ferroelectric materials at high energy density. Ordinary high-K MLCCs that one buys at a distributor already show very substantial saturation effects when operated at rated voltage - that is, the capacitance at rated voltage decreases as much as 80% below the value marked on the reel. Making the dielectric less porous - so that it doesn't punch or arc through - is not going to solve this problem; it may even aggravate it slightly. It will allow the voltage to be raised, causing even more of the capacitance to disappear, reducing the energy storage to a small fraction of what investors might have concluded from the formula.
Because the process described in the patent is fairly conventional, it would still seem to involve spraying every one of hundreds or thousands of layers. This is not cheap. A conventional MLCC storing a few hundredths of a joule at a couple of kilovolts and occupying a 2220 (220x200 mils) package might cost fifty cents each in large quantities. Storing 52kWH, 187 million joules, might cost somewhere north of $3 billion with an array of such things. That's one hell of an expensive substitute for a gas tank. Before we can sell it, we need to cut the cost by a factor of around one million. Nothing in the patent seems to suggest a factor exceeding a few hundred even if "E=CV.sup.2/2" (energy is one half capacitance times square of voltage) and every other optimistic assumption proved true.
It's pretty clear to me, then, why they need a military sugar daddy. If they can accomplish production miracles and fabricate a 52kWH/180MJ pulse capacitor array for a million bucks instead of 3 billion, they'll have a pulse-laser or electromagnetic pulse generator (EMP) energy storage unit that the DARPA types will salivate over.
In the meantime, IMO, nothing here, move on. There appears to be a reason why, for the time being, they have no functional website, no engineering samples, no product specs, no nothing, just secretive whispers, shhhh, don't look behind the curtain.
J'accuse! theantidoomer
Again you come here like the saviour, offering your anecdotes and hype as the antidote to the doom we luddites and others seem to be predicting. And yet again we have explained why there is nothing to your over zealous optimism.
Time again we the scientists and engineers who actually do this stuff, have tried to explain to you the limitations of technology - like my outburst here:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3448#comment-283788
and yet you persist on this madness.
I have been wondering what goes on in your head, what motivates you, and then I read this:
So essentially your position is a dichotomy because you do not believe we should give up anything. A classic 'have-the-cake-and-eat-it'-syndrome familiar to anyone with children.
Not only is your position naive in the extreme by ignoring how many things we already 'give up' everyday with the real compromises we make in engineering, manufacturing and economics: the opportunity cost of every decision, the allocation of limited resources, the law of entropy. But you insist on placing immediate comfort over safe future, the familiar conveniences over the real costs and demands they require.
You lack the ability of moderating your expectation to match reality. And in order to justify your position to yourself, and deny the absurdity of your position, you are having to deal with superficial anecdotes.
This truly is the level of thinking for a five year old. However in my opinion you are more likely just a shill.
But for the benefit of others I would like to say a few words.
I work at the border of science and engineering, one foot in each. For people like us, problems like PO and GW, and I might add the inevitable collapse of our unsustainable monetary system, leave us with only two choices, in depth analysis, or total ignorance. Most of my colleagues choose the latter, understandably as they have invested their lifetimes into their careers and research and locked themselves into a certain lifestyle. Personally, if I'm having to perform objective analysis of problems in my work, its hard to do the opposite in my daily life. But for others it seems they can detach their personal lives from the side of the brain they use at work, and live the common irrational way of life, at least for now.
For the non-engineers and -scientists it's much easier. For them its all about religion. All they see is the cornucopia of technology at the shop window - the perception being that its all at least linear, if not exponential: everything getting faster, bigger/smaller, better every year, with no limits in sight. And why would they see any limits - they have no concept of what is a limit - energy, space and time - laws of physics are there for the theoretical physicists to 'break'. And even less so, they have no idea of the compromises done in engineering or the law of diminishing returns (engineering IS ABOUT making compromises!).
If you point out to them some shortage of a particular resource, they'll just state we'll figure out a way of making more from less, forever (forever meaning often their lifetimes). Similarly, as they have no idea how the monetary system works, they believe absolutely that money is no object in the way of finding and applying any number of solutions to all our problems.
Finally we come to the technocopians - the advocates for the status quo. Their motives stem from the various fears and delusions they have got from being confronted by greens and extremists on the other side (which I don't particularly like either). Or they have simply analysed PO far enough to have found something personally unacceptable to their wish of what the future should be. Hence they desperately defend their hopeless position with what ever means: assured rhetoric, logical fallacies, outright denial. TOD is a tough place for them since people here know their engineering and math. Here you cannot just bluff people with numerology or tech-jargon.
The reason I like TOD and have stuck around for now, is that here you have lots of oridinary people different walks of life, making extraoridinary efford in analysing the situation objectively and holistically. People who are not distracted by hype or narrow interests. And people who can see hope in the future without having to resort to irrationalities or denial. Having to let go of our current way of life is seen as an opportunities for a better, healthier and happier existance for man. In that, I think we are the true optimists.