For all the fans of batteries and supercapacitor
http://revolution-green.com/2013/08/02/graphene-based-super-capacitor-breakthrough/ (http://revolution-green.com/2013/08/02/graphene-based-super-capacitor-breakthrough/)
Kind Regards
Mark
Good enough to be included:
http://www.csiro.au/en/Outcomes/Energy/Storing-renewable-energy/Ultra-Battery.aspx (http://www.csiro.au/en/Outcomes/Energy/Storing-renewable-energy/Ultra-Battery.aspx)
Sincerely
CdL
Better super capacitors sounds very promising. I am just not sure in the sense that there is an endless stream of press releases about solar cell, battery, and capacitor breakthroughs. Will this be the 'breakthrough' breakthrough?
You can imagine electric vehicles that have a robotic umbilical probe underneath the the chassis for finding juice. When you get to a red light the the probe inserts itself into a power outlet embedded the street intersection and it sucks up power. It could make driving an electric vehicle in the city very friendly, you would never have to "fill it up." Alternatively for a charging station, you just drive up to it and the umbilical probe taps into the power outlet embedded into the ground and 25 seconds later you are back on the road. The transaction is either fully automated through your smartphone or you pay on the spot through your smartphone.
With respect to the link for the "ultrabattery," I don't believe it. That looks like a 'breakthrough' that never makes it to fruition. There is no real rational reason to mate a lead-acid battery to a super capacitor.
Quote from: MileHigh on August 03, 2013, 06:49:14 PM
With respect to the link for the "ultrabattery," I don't believe it. That looks like a 'breakthrough' that never makes it to fruition. There is no real rational reason to mate a lead-acid battery to a super capacitor.
Sure there is. If you combine a battery with a super cap, you end up with a battery source that has more energy per weight(even size) ratio, while each greatly relieves the other of stress of heavy loads, but with the advantages of both. Lasersaber has a couple vids using just super caps as a car battery. Pretty small compared to the original battery. Some DIY guys are adding supercaps to their electric cars. ;)
Mags
The article that Mark linked to says that today's super caps have approximately one-twelfth the energy density by volume compared to lead-acid batteries. So your statement about more energy per unit volume is wrong. Taking away lead-acid battery volume and replacing it with super cap volume gives you less total stored energy.
The tech is 10 years old now. There are misleading statements that don't make sense in the main article that's linked to. After 10 years there is no battery performance data, and they don't even state anything about how they integrate the lead-acid battery with the super cap inside the case of their finished battery. The only recent news is about using the battery in a hybrid vehicle and making a claim for the mileage they have gotten "out of the battery." That barely makes any sense and I would think a hybrid vehicle runs mostly on gas anyways. They compare their battery technology with NiMH battery technology but NiMH is yesterday's news. The battery tech to beat is LI. A Google search clearly shows there is no meat on the bone for this one. The whole thing smells like a dead end that will never see the light of day as a commercial product.
Hi all
I ran an article on eh ultra battery and they are indeed going into mass production.
http://revolution-green.com/2013/07/23/the-ultra-battery-update/ (http://revolution-green.com/2013/07/23/the-ultra-battery-update/)
I am not a fan of them, however they will have a place in the market. they are gearing up a multi-million dollar production facility and the data is readily available.
I will stop using the word breakthrough...it was pun on our other little news roundup site.
I tend to let the reader make up their own minds. There are a lot of press releases and many should be treated cautiously, I review a dozen before I write up one.
It is not always obvious in the USA but in other countries you can see evidence of many innovative renewable energy applications.
Tomorrow i get into the real juicy stuff, Magnetic Monopoles.
Thanks for the comments Milehigh, I do take not of your comments, but providing a vehicle for information which some people may find useful I do not believe is a bad thing. If nothing else it brings to peoples attention eh volume of work and the accelerating impact renewable energy is having
Kind Regards
mark
Mark,
You are bringing a lot of new and interesting stuff to the table, and that's always a good thing. I did more looking around because of your previous posting and I still come to the same conclusion. Both of the big battery manufacturers mentioned don't show Ultrabatteries on their respective web sites from what I could see.
It's not credible for them to not state how many Joules or equivalent ampere-hours are available in the super capacitor for a given battery. No mention of some kind of controller inside the battery either. I didn't see anyplace you can purchase them online but that comment might (or might not) be premature. I am not saying that they aren't a legitimate company although I am not at all comfortable with the lack of hard data. They could be legit but it won't get off of the ground. I will believe in the multi-million dollar production facility when batteries are rolling off the line and being loaded onto trucks.
Look, here is a "dead" web site for the Ultrabattery: http://www.ultrabattery.com/ (http://www.ultrabattery.com/)
Reading between the lines it was set up years ago in anticipation of a roll-out schedule, and that schedule obviously never happened. I bet you that web site has been floundering for a few years.
So this may be in the "Segway" class of products. The fun part is we can wait a year and see what transpires. In my heart I hope they are real but I am not counting my chickens.
MileHigh
P.S.: If the super high energy density super capacitors you originally posted about are the real thing, that could be a real biggie. That's much more interesting for me.
Thanks MH
Actually they have renamed them, I can not remember of the top of my head but will find out for you (Ultra Batteries)
I agree the caps are always more exciting.
I guess I am trying to educate people a little about the processes of science and whats happening in the wider world. After years of free energy claims, testing I guess it my belief real science will be providing the answers. Go to Free energy news website you have over 4000 pages of what does not work. and the next best things
Kind regards
Mark
Quote from: MileHigh on August 04, 2013, 04:11:41 AM
The article that Mark linked to says that today's super caps have approximately one-twelfth the energy density by volume compared to lead-acid batteries. So your statement about more energy per unit volume is wrong. Taking away lead-acid battery volume and replacing it with super cap volume gives you less total stored energy.
http://batcap.net/Products/BatCap2000/tabid/89/Default.aspx
50ah in a 6.5"x7"x6" package. 35lb
Also, not 10 years old, look into graphene super caps. Energy density comparable to Lithium Ion, well, until they started using graphene in lithium batts, which increased them 10x. ;)
Mags
Also look into lead carbon acid batteries. Instead of both electrodes being lead, one is replaced by carbon. Less weight and better features. ;) ;D
Mags
Graphene nanoribbons made by unzipping carbon nanotubes. It's amazing stuff. It almost feels like we are in a renaissance of changing battery technology as we speak and five years from now it will really be the Jetsons!
I did my searching and indeed there are many promising new technology announcements for batteries and super capacitors that have taken place this year. I am very optimistic about that and I am overall quite optimistic about our energy future. You have better storage technologies converging with increasing energy from renewable sources. Those are complimentary synergistic technologies. If a solar panel could charge my cap bank during the day and a setup could power my living room LED lightning and TV/surround sound at night that would be awesome. If the cap bank/inverter was the size of a PC box/subwoffer I could live with that. Then the magic target is the price. If you could do that for say $300 in 2018 I think that you would have a successful product. Even if the return on investment would be quite long, that's only the cost of a cell phone. It would be an empowering experience to do that and feel like you are "sticking it to the Man."
Then your home theater personal computer by that time will also be lower power so you could run that too. An SSD/low power processor combination would do the trick. For all we know full PCs will be transparently integrated right into TVs by 2018. (No Windows 8 allowed.) Hey, they could be Linux flat panels too, all 17,000 flavours. I say that to be politically correct. lol
The BattCap sounds like something I want for Christmas. They don't say exactly what it is inside, but that model sounds like a hybrid battery-supercap. No mention of electronic guts either. I can feel my chest thumping just from looking at the picture of it.
I'm always most interested in the longevity aspect of a new battery or cap design. Specifically, how many charge/discharge cycles, before it's no bueno? Also how many years in storage, before some element of the device breaks down.
Energy density is important but, really becomes critical in mobile / automotive applications, and of course monetary cost / affordability has some kind of relationship to energy density. But a great enough longevity, ultimately trumps other considerations, in non mobile, and even in some mobile application. This is why I personally hope for advances in caps, more so than in batteries. Planned incomes from the replacement of dead batteries, needs to become a thing of the past. I didn't find any specs. on the projected longevity of either of the two battery / cap devices. Has anyone else?
we need a cellular phone battery that is entirely divorced from the house plug.divorced from the grid.i think supercaps will go well with hand-shaking dynamo recharge systems,being able to swallow a massive amount of energy in one go as opposed to the trickle-charging li-ions.this is one reason to actually delay or supress supercaps from a giant buisnes perspective.li-ion market will take a hit-n-a-half,overnight.
Who remembers EEStor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor)
:(
Powercat:
I read the full Wiki article on EEstor and of course everybody around here is familiar with their story. It gives some balance to the discussion and reminds us of the need for real production units. I will take a guess that one in a 100 of these breakthrough information releases comes to fruition.
Whenever I follow a link and I see the weaknesses in the information presented I get very conservative and won't believe it until I see it. For example, Magluvin linked to super capacitor/batteries that are used by car audio enthusiasts. Those will work fine to prevent voltage brownouts for the occasional big bass thump or any very loud audio transient in car audio. That requires a manageable amount of energy that a super capacitor can provide. However, the Uttracapacitor (the one that I panned) is supposed to do that for a car propulsion system for acceleration or regenerative braking and perhaps to start the car. The problem is those things require a lot more energy than a fat pluck of an electric bass string. There were no numbers for anything (a warning) but my instincts are telling me there is a mismatch between the car drive train energy requirements and any super cap you could add to the battery considering the battery has a fixed volume. That's honestly just a guess.
What's interesting is that in 2013, the same group seems to have moved on to lead-carbon battery technology:
http://www.hybridcars.com/48v-lc-super-hybrid-to-showcase-lead-carbon-battery-technology/
Interesting paragraphs:
QuoteBased on identical basic specification 1.4 liter VW Passat family sized saloons, the production-ready LC Super Hybrid technology at 12 volts has already been widely demonstrated to carmakers in Europe and the US following its debut at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show. It offers the potential of a mass market, gasoline-powered, large family car with superb drivability, impressive performance and excellent fuel economy of 50 miles per imperial gallon (42mpg US or 5.6l/100km) and 130g/km on the NEDC New European Drive Cycle.
The more powerful 48 volt demonstrator is said to offer significant additional functionality including torque assist to the petrol engine for launch and low speed transient acceleration, optimized highway cruise conditions with electric assist 'load point moving' and a leaner fuel calibration, in-gear coast-down and the ability to harvest significantly more kinetic energy from regenerative braking. It combines cost effective, advanced lead-carbon batteries with CPT's production ready, versatile SpeedStart motor-generator system, which has been recently validated for 1.2 million stop-starts compared with 150,000 to 300,000 for first generation micro-hybrids.
So they are really talking about a gas motor assist from an electric motor powered by their batteries. It's kind of cool when you think about it, you hit the accelerator pedal and an electric motor kicks in seamlessly in the background to give you more torque. It's clear that it's still a gasoline powered vehicle, but with a very respectable 42 mpg.
Perhaps Mark's link will be the one that percolates to the top. Perhaps the next-generation LI batteries with the graphene nanoribbons will be the one that makes it. Nonetheless, I am cautiously optimistic that within five years laptops, tablets, cell phones, and perhaps even electric cars will be running with new and better battery or super capacitor technologies.
It makes you wonder if you had some kind of photovoltaic technology incorporated into the skin of the car and advanced capacitor technologies under the hood, that cars sitting outside in the sunshine might be able to provide for a significant portion of their energy needs from solar power such that you had to "fill up" less often. On the other hand, it might be technically possible but still too expensive.
MileHigh
MileHigh,
talking of solar panels I hope the price of lithium batteries drops in the same way as solar panels have, agree with you on how often we hear a new announcement but never see the product on the shelf, there is also a safety issue with super capacitor batteries if they are in a collision etc.
They are only using very small caps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubw3cHM4YxU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubw3cHM4YxU)
sorry to inform you that li-ions will never drop in price significantly.element lithium is both 1)quite rare and 2) intensely power-consuming to mine and purify.but dont despair,,the company at 27thcenturytechnologies.com has said they have a self-charging li-ion cell ready for mass production.
Something similar said about solar panels many years ago then it was all about the quality of silicon used being very expensive
Quote from: powercat on August 05, 2013, 12:15:54 PM
Something similar said about solar panels many years ago then it was all about the quality of silicon used being very expensive
One decade before solar cell silicon/silicium production process had been a monopol from Wacker industry. Only Kyocera had received a production licence !
From 9N (99,9999999% purity) today it is possible to use 6N silicon !
Besides quality there is also the factor quantity: concentrator technology !
Sincerely
CdL
Quote from: markdansie on August 02, 2013, 10:58:24 PM
For all the fans of batteries and supercapacitor
http://revolution-green.com/2013/08/02/graphene-based-super-capacitor-breakthrough/ (http://revolution-green.com/2013/08/02/graphene-based-super-capacitor-breakthrough/)
Kind Regards
Mark
Mr. Dansie,
Thanks for bringing this to our attention!
Greg