Charge in 5 minutes, Drive 500 miles?

ctroutwi writes "In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering Ultra-Capacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultra-capacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately 9$ (~$.45 a gallon) of electricity and then drive 500 miles."

daddypants email link broken?

[adam]

I emailed the on-duty editor (regarding this being a dupe), like any good little /. subscriber. Unfortunately my e-mail bounced pretty much immediately. Normally I would resist the temptation to join in the /. circle-jerk that is shouting "OMG DUPE DUPE DUPE!!" but I wanted someone (ScuttleMonkey, etc) to note that the 'daddypants' email link is bouncing.
( ERROR: Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at... Line 126 ) ..ScuttleMonkey, if you want the full error, feel free to let me know where to e-mail it.

On a sidenote, what seems odd to me is that not only is this a dupe that is currently visible on the index [slashdot.org] of slashdot, but that the article summary is almost identical to the earlier submission, and is even from the same submitter. Insert Matrix deja-vu quote here.

Mods, try to be on the lookout for copy and paste karma whores (man, plagiarism annoys me). Unfortunately with 700+ comments on the last discussion, this may not be easy, haha.

Re:daddypants email link broken?

[jginspace]

On a sidenote, what seems odd to me is that not only is this a dupe that is currently visible on the index [slashdot.org] of slashdot, but that the article summary is almost identical to the earlier submission, and is even from the same submitter.

Yup:

500 Miles on a 5-Minute Recharge?

"In the wake of rising gasoline costs there have been plenty of alternatives seen on the horizon. Including Hybrids, Biofuels, fuel cells and battery powered all electric cars. CNN has recently posted a story about a company (EEStor) that plans on offering UltraCapacitor storage products. The claim being that you charge the ultracapacitor in 5 minutes, with approximately $9 of electricity and then drive 500 miles."

...

Does anyone know if those editors are paid or is it just a labour of love? They really do seem to labour...

Re:Regular house current (FYI)

[AKAImBatman]

try running a basically closed loop 220V, 30amp connection for 5 mintues

220V * 30amp = 6,600 watts * 5 minutes = 0.55 kilowatt hours. You're only a few orders of magnitude off from "$9 worth of electricity", specifically 52 kWhs for EEStor's product. To charge 52 kWhs in 5 minutes, you'd need to be chugging through ~600 kW of power, or about 2.7 kiloamps at 220V.

Bye, bye wall plug.

Re:Don't go China

[Anonymous Coward]

All the exploding batteries were made by Sony, jackass.

Re:Don't go China

[Anonymous Coward]

They are using capacitors not batteries.....

Those figures do make sense

[realnowhereman]

I meant to write this the first time the article appeared :-) I had originally thought that it wasn't going to work out; but getting to the end, it turned out they did. Oh well - now I've done it, you might be interested... for your viewing pleasure...

Supposition: 500 miles on a 5 minute charge, with $9 worth of electricity.

$9 worth of electricity = 100kWh
100kWh = 360 megajoules
500 miles = 804 kilometres

Force = Energy / distance
    = 360e6 / 804e3
    = 447 Newtons

(of course the above is only the average force available for that journey)

F_drag = 1/2 * Drag_Coefficient * Cross_Section * AirDensity * Velocity^2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_coefficient [wikipedia.org] gives Drag as around 0.3 for an average car. Cross-section is probably about 3 square metres.

F_drag = 0.5 * 0.3 * 3 * 1.29 * v^2
    = 0.581 v^2

55 mph = 24 m/s

F_drag_55 = 334 Newtons

Which is well within the average 447 available; and gives scope for losses. So; it turns out it's not crazy to suggest you can get 500 miles on $9 worth of electricity.

I wonder how far my house would travel a month...

More details..

[stoney27]

There are some good details on this technology on Energy blog

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/01/ eestor_ultracap.html [typepad.com]

A breif run down:

• It is a parallel plate capacitor with barium titanate as the dielectric.
• It claims that it can make a battery at half the cost per kilowatt-hour and one-tenth the weight of lead-acid batteries.
• As of last year selling price would start at $3,200 and fall to $2,100 in high-volume production
• The product weighs 400 pounds and delivers 52 kilowatt-hours.
• The batteries fully charge in minutes as opposed to hours.
• The EEStor technology has been tested up to a million cycles with no material degradation compared to lead acid batteries that optimistically have 500 to 700 recharge cycles,
• Because it's a solid state battery rather than a chemical battery, such being the case for lithium ion technology, there would be no overheating and thus safety concerns with using it in a vehicle.
• With volume manufacturing it's expected to be cost-competitive with lead-acid technology.
• As of last year, EEStor planned to build its own assembly line to prove the battery can work and then license the technology to manufacturers for volume production
• EEStor's technology could be used in more than low-speed electric vehicles. The company envisions using it for full-speed pure electric vehicles, hybrid-electrics (including plug-ins), military applications, backup power and even large-scale utility storage for intermittent renewable power sources such as wind and solar.
• They have an exclusive agreement with Feel Good Cars, a Canadian manufacturer of the ZENN, a low speed electric car, to to purchase high-power-density ceramic ultra capacitors called Electrical Storage Units (ESU). FGC's exclusive worldwide right is for all personal transportation uses under 15 KW drive systems (equivalent to 100 peak horse power) and for vehicles with a curb weight of under 1200 kilograms not including batteries.

-S

An 18 ton capacitor? Yeah, it would cost a bit

[Moraelin]

Here's some hard data: these things are low voltage devices. E.g., Maxwell's data says 2.7V for theirs. They also have crap power density: 3-5 Wh/kg. (Yes, I didn't miss a "k" there.) They may have high capacity, but Q = C*V, so low voltage still puts a limit on it.

So if you want to store about 90 kWh in a bank of those, you'd need anywhwere between 18,000 and 30,000 kg worth of ultra-capacitors. Yes, between 18 and 30 metric _tons_. Not quite a commuter car, you know? I'll also go on a limb and say that buying whole tons of them will cost a pretty penny.

Also, transferring 90 kWh in 5 minutes means 1080kW power. More that 1 MW. So, yeah, I don't think your average power socket can do that. At 2.7V that means 400,000 A, too.

So, basically, it's just snake oil. It ranks up there with the promises to make energy out of water by changing the orbits of electrons in hydrogen. Some fraudster figured that he can get tens of millions of dollars VC to pretend to make such a thing. And given the IQ of some VC these days, they probably will too.

Re:An 18 ton capacitor? Yeah, it would cost a bit

[alva_edison]

According to the patent (you will find a link to it in this coment [slashdot.org]), a 52kWh unit would weigh approximately 336 pounds (~152kg). I haven't done a thorough analysis of the patent, so I can't judge its merits (and I'm not a materials expert, which some of the analysis requires); however, it looks plausible.