and some more eestor news

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energyfan
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and some more eestor news

Post by energyfan »

dont have much time so I'll just post a link :

http://theeestory.com/articles/52

note: i have doubts about eestors credibility, but still posting, its news...sorta
Last edited by energyfan on Tue Sep 30, 2008 1:08 am, edited 1 time in total.

dnavas
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Re: and some more eestor news

Post by dnavas »

energyfan wrote:dont have much time so I'll just post a link :

http://theeestory.com/articles/52

note: i have doubts about eestors credibility, but still posting its news...sorta
http://www.lightevs.com/
EEStor EESUs are expected to provide over 450 watt hours per kilogram and over 700 watt hours per liter
seems like a pretty sizable decresse in density, but still over (what I consider) the magic 400wh/kg.

The Missouri blood still runs thick, though, and I'm not buying it yet....

-Dave

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

hello
Problem is, that even if their numbers are correct, the energy density of their energy storage is still much less than in gasoline.
If you assume a 40 kg tank (which should equal a full gasoline tank in a smaller vehicle), then according to them you would get 18 KW/h of energy stored in this "tank". The engine in my small car has 52 KW. So if I want to power an electric monotor with the same power I would be able to drive for roughly 20 minutes? This does not seem to great an efficiency or am I missing something here?
Now dont get me wrong these numbers are still awesome compared to what we have had so far (I think the short charging times are of particular importance), but still, it is not great.
Skipjack

93143
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Post by 93143 »

In the first place, a 40 kg EEStor hypercapacitor would be less than half the size of a gas tank of similar mass. You'd want a much larger one, especially since it isn't a large fraction of the mass of the vehicle.

In the second place, 70 horsepower (52 kW) is not likely the average power of a gasoline-fueled car engine under normal driving conditions, unless you drive with the hand brake engaged. At 100 km/h on the highway, assuming an engine efficiency of about 25%, that would be around 10 mpg. 52 kW is more likely the peak power (although that does seem low - your car must be pretty small).

It is true that gasoline has about 14 times as much energy per unit volume as an EEStor hypercap, or almost 30 times as much energy per unit mass; however, it must be remembered that the efficiency of a gasoline engine tends to be below 25%. Thus the advantage of gasoline is reduced to maybe a factor of 3 in volume, or 6 in mass. Gas tanks aren't particularly large or heavy, and anyway an all-electric in-wheel drive system tends to take up a lot less space than a gasoline-powered engine/drivetrain, so volume probably isn't a huge issue. The mass of an electric vehicle would be higher, but that's an advantage in collisions, and with reclamative braking (which you can't do in a gasoline-fueled car) the vehicle's efficiency doesn't suffer.

As a matter of fact, reclamative braking means that the vehicle's in-city mileage should go WAY up. Highway driving would still be drag-limited, but when your engine doesn't need to idle and the brakes dump your kinetic energy back into the hypercaps instead of wasting it as heat, well...

Maui
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Post by Maui »

Skipjack wrote:hello
Problem is, that even if their numbers are correct, the energy density of their energy storage is still much less than in gasoline.
Yes, but combustion engines are much less capable of extracting that energy when compared to electric engines. Anyway, to make a radical change in automobiles and oil consumption, we don't need a technology that rivals gasoline in terms of extractable energy storage. Even lithium ion batteries have the ability to allow you to do most day-to-day driving on electricity. For many people, that may be all they need. Think about it... how often do you fill up your car? Would you need that big of a tank if you car filled itself up automatically everytime you parked it? And for those that need more, there's hybrids.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

Dont get me wrong, I am not saying that this is not a grea thing, it just seems that it does need a lot more weight to store the samte amount of energy.
Yes, it would be smaller, but that does not help the weight much. You still need to move the extra weight which requires more power. The cat is biting its tail.
My car is golf class car here and certainly not at the high end of the horsepower scale, but there are lots of cars here with even less KW. The reason is that you get taxed by KW here.
Anyway the car still makes 52 KW and that is pretty precise measurements as I said, you are being taxed by it (manufacturers will make them seem rather lower than higher). This is car is the typical city cruiser. You get to do your shoping and every day stuff, but every now and then you can also take it on the road for a longer trip.
The Gas tank holds 50 litres (which I guessed to make roughly 40 Kg).
What I do think helps electric cars is that they can be a lot simpler (engine, transmission, etc). This can help save weight which can then be used for larger batteries.
Still, I was slightly disappointed by those numbers. I was expecting them to be a lot better for something that is supposedly revolutionary.
Yes, I know that Lithium Ion batteries are much weaker even.
I also agree that even the Lithium Ion batteries would be sufficient for a normal city car, but especially in the US the trend of the last years has been towards even bigger cars and SUVs (I have seen more of thos here too actually). Now how do you get the average consumer to switch from his gas wasting, polluting SUV to a clean and efficient electric car, especially if it wont have the KW and would have to be comparably small and light?

Mike Holmes
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Post by Mike Holmes »

The recent trend in cars has been to downsize. Unsurprising, given gas prices, no? If the cost of excellent fuel efficiency is a smaller car in the short run, I think people will buy into it. They did with "sub-compacts" in the 70s gas crisis, and only returned to larger cars when gas costs once again became a small portion of people's disposable income.

Put into more concrete, if annecdotal, terms, I'm looking to buy a small electric car as soon as it's available.

And, as I keep saying, if/when something like Polywell becomes a reality, I'll come out smelling like a rose in the long run when my fuel costs are nil. If not, I still will at least be able to afford to drive. I've been considering the bus lately...

Mike

Wittgenstein
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Weight comparison

Post by Wittgenstein »

Skipjack wrote:Dont get me wrong, I am not saying that this is not a grea thing, it just seems that it does need a lot more weight to store the samte amount of energy.
Yes, it would be smaller, but that does not help the weight much. You still need to move the extra weight which requires more power. The cat is biting its tail.
My car is golf class car here and certainly not at the high end of the horsepower scale, but there are lots of cars here with even less KW. The reason is that you get taxed by KW here.
Anyway the car still makes 52 KW and that is pretty precise measurements as I said, you are being taxed by it (manufacturers will make them seem rather lower than higher). This is car is the typical city cruiser. You get to do your shoping and every day stuff, but every now and then you can also take it on the road for a longer trip.
The Gas tank holds 50 litres (which I guessed to make roughly 40 Kg).
What I do think helps electric cars is that they can be a lot simpler (engine, transmission, etc). This can help save weight which can then be used for larger batteries.
Still, I was slightly disappointed by those numbers. I was expecting them to be a lot better for something that is supposedly revolutionary.
Yes, I know that Lithium Ion batteries are much weaker even.
I also agree that even the Lithium Ion batteries would be sufficient for a normal city car, but especially in the US the trend of the last years has been towards even bigger cars and SUVs (I have seen more of thos here too actually). Now how do you get the average consumer to switch from his gas wasting, polluting SUV to a clean and efficient electric car, especially if it wont have the KW and would have to be comparably small and light?
Comparing the weight of the EESU to the weight of gasoline is not a fair comparison. You need to compare the weight of the gasoline and its tank to the EESU, since the EESU is both the fuel and the storage.

It also might be worth comparing how having electric versus ICE affects the weight of the other components.

Of course, this is all assuming that the EESU is for real as described, which still seems to be quite an assumption.

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

Ok, please forgive me, I was under the assumption that the EESU would be in some kind of casing as well... Maybe not though? The articles stated nowhere that the encasement for the battery was part of the weight given here (in contrary given a powerdensity per Kg made it appear silly to assume that they included "dead" casing weight).
I am also not sure how much an average gasoline tank weights, but it cant be that much. As I mentioned before though, it might be worth comparing system- weights in order to find out how they compare exactly. In that case you should compare those for all vehicles sizes though. On a hunch and without actual facts, I would assume that larger and heavier cars would benefit less from the reduced system weights of electric systems, but that is as I said pure speculation on my part.

On the trend to smaller cars and gasprices. Well in the US you now have a peak gas price, that will soon go down quite a bit, I am sure.
Not here in Austria though, I assure you. Gas prices have been constantly climbing here for the last twenty years and even though the Euro was at an all time high the last few months (compare to the US$), gas prices here in Austria were still 2/3 higher than they were in most of the US (as in almost 8 USD per gallon). Nevertheless I have never seen so many SUVs on the road before in my life. Yes there are a lot of these city cars on the roads here, but even more heavy and big cars.
Also even my golf class car weights more than a ton. This is a lot heavier than cars of the same class used to be 20 years ago.
So I can not really see this trend anywhere here, besides what the statistics say.
Having been to the US quite often, I can definitely not say I have seen it there. Holy the amount of trucks people are driving there is ridiculous! Who really needs a car like this to drive to work and go shopping every day (I bet my butt that less than one percent of these people ever take their SUV offroad)?

93143
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Post by 93143 »

Skipjack wrote:Yes, it would be smaller, but that does not help the weight much. You still need to move the extra weight which requires more power. The cat is biting its tail.
The only energy expenditure that depends directly on mass is the energy required to accelerate. In an electric vehicle this is reclaimed when you brake, so it isn't really much of a loss. You can't do that with a conventional gasoline-powered vehicle.

Rolling resistance depends indirectly on weight, but it's not a large loss - just keep your tires filled. Drag (which dominates at high speed) does NOT depend on mass - only on size and shape - so on the highway, mass is almost completely irrelevant.

It's easily more than worth the extra mass to get the increased efficiency.
Anyway the car still makes 52 KW and that is pretty precise measurements as I said, you are being taxed by it (manufacturers will make them seem rather lower than higher).
That's peak rated power. There is NO CONCEIVABLE WAY that a golf-cart-class vehicle would use that much power continuously under normal driving conditions. Unless, as I said, you have the hand brake on...
Now how do you get the average consumer to switch from his gas wasting, polluting SUV to a clean and efficient electric car, especially if it wont have the KW and would have to be comparably small and light?
The Tesla Roadster has a 400 kg lithium ion power pack that holds 52.8 kWh. This gives it a range of 350 km if you drive carefully (which, of course, no one does, because that's not the point of a sports car). The vehicle's peak rated power is about 250 hp (185 kW).

Now imagine replacing that power pack with the same mass of EEStor hypercaps. You've just increased the range by a factor of three and a half.

You could, if you wanted, dramatically increase the motors' rated peak power, and the range wouldn't suffer unless you drove like a maniac, because an electric motor's efficiency at a given output power doesn't depend strongly on its size or maximum power rating, and it doesn't need to idle.

Also remember that higher vehicle mass = better collision safety.

So in short, I think that if EEStor is on the level, it's possible with a bit of engineering to make an electric car superior to a gas-powered one in basically every way. Provided it's not supposed to fly...

Skipjack
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Post by Skipjack »

With golf class, I meant Volkswagen Golf, not golf cart (that would be ridiculous). Golf class is what we call the cars of the same size as a Volkswagen Golf here. I am sorry, I was falsly assuming that this would be internationally understood.
Ok, I missunderstood, of course that is if I hit the gas pedal fully.
I do notice it though, when there is more people sitting the car than just me. Same goes for when I am reversing upwards. A 52 KW engine is not very powerful.
The Tessla roadster certainly makes the most of the electric engine, no question about it, but it is a twoseater and it is build of (expensive) extra lightweight materials to get even more out of it.
Definitely not something that an average Joe can afford.

93143
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Post by 93143 »

Skipjack wrote:With golf class, I meant Volkswagen Golf, not golf cart (that would be ridiculous).
Oops, sorry... hehe... I misread... I assumed it was hyperbole...

This after having to retype that post TWICE because the forum ate it...
The Tessla roadster certainly makes the most of the electric engine, no question about it, but it is a twoseater and it is build of (expensive) extra lightweight materials to get even more out of it.
Definitely not something that an average Joe can afford.
Quite so. But it's getting there, performance-wise. 250 horsepower is really quite beefy (although with in-wheel electric motors you can actually do much better than that if you need to), and the range isn't too bad. I think that if the EEStor caps work, then their high capacity and quick charge time will mean that EV technology will have overcome its last fundamental disadvantages with respect to gasoline-powered vehicles, and will then be able to start the cycle of cost reduction in earnest without worrying about workarounds for any significant shortcomings.

Unless the hypercaps show a tendency to explode on impact or something like that...

dnavas
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Re: Weight comparison

Post by dnavas »

Wittgenstein wrote: Comparing the weight of the EESU to the weight of gasoline is not a fair comparison. You need to compare the weight of the gasoline and its tank
Actually, the tank weighs mainly nothing. An electric motor weighs a lot less than an ICE, especially if you include the tranny (not needed -- well, most of it anyway :)), the exhaust system (not needed), the radiator and fans (not needed), the alternator (not needed), etc. The general rule of thumb in conversions, afaik, is that you take 600lbs out of your car. IIRC, the Tesla's motor is something like 150lbs, leaving 450lbs. At 4mi/kwh, I get a range >300mi without any additional weight on the car at 400wh/kg.

ymmv

-Dave

Aero
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Post by Aero »

Pardon me if this link has already been posted. If not, I think you'll find it quite interesting.
http://bariumtitanate.blogspot.com/2008 ... ivity.html
Aero

Aero
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Post by Aero »

Aero

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