CNN article just posted today:


AUSTIN, Texas (AP)  -- Millions of inventions pass quietly through the U.S. patent office each year. Patent No. 7,033,406 did, too, until energy insiders spotted six words in the filing that sounded like a death knell for the internal combustion engine.

An Austin-based startup called EEStor promised "technologies for replacement of electrochemical batteries," meaning a motorist could plug in a car for five minutes and drive 500 miles roundtrip between Dallas and Houston without gasoline."

<snip>

 EEStor's secret ingredient is a material sandwiched between thousands of wafer-thin metal sheets, like a series of foil-and-paper gum wrappers stacked on top of each other. Charged particles stick to the metal sheets and move quickly across EEStor's proprietary material.

The result is an ultracapacitor, a battery-like device that stores and releases energy quickly.

<snip>

Whole article at: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/09/07/electric.car.batteries.ap/index.html

Been following them for a long time.

It would truly change EVERYTHING, when it comes to motive things like cars and such.

To have a storage device that can ACCEPT an energy transfer at a very high speed AND be able to also store a huge amount of energy AND be light weight....

It's not FE, but that isn't the point. Even if you had an FE device and it was say at your home, EEStor's technology would allow you to charge up your car in minutes via your FE device, wind, solar, whatever and drive all over the place. Hence, you don't have to have an FE device in your car. One of the key goals for having an FE device in a car per say, is that you don't have to keep charging the car up and you can drive indefinitely, BUT, if it only takes 5 minutes or so to charge up your car and you can drive for 500 miles on those charges, that is akin to having an FE device already (in relation to cars)... You get the point.

That is the greatest block for electric cars, the differential between the time it takes to charge and the distance you are can drive on said charge. And this could meet both those needs easily.

Both... Excellent points. 

I had thought of the accident / KaBoom danger myself. I used to be a firefighter and we thought cars with magnesium parts were a pain in the butt (pretty hard to extinguish magnesium) but I'd hate to face a flaming bucket of lightning!  I'd hate to have to attack one of the new polymer lithium batteries for that matter.

And yes, the article said that regular household wiring would not be able to handle recharging the ultracap. So I guess you drive it (or push it) down to the local recharging station and watch the city lights dim as they "fuel" up your ride.


"I don't know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be
fought with sticks and stones" -Albert Einstein   (or so I was told.)

Someone quietly beat them to the punch...
http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/large-cell/bcap3000.asp

Also the 440v US power mains can deliver up to 50 amps before blowing a breaker, so using resistance and a step down transformer people should be able to get a charge in the garage. The trick will be using high farads at lower voltages. example: 125V-3000F cap bank charging off the grid @ 125v and 0.01 Ohms resistance, the cap bank would take about 2.5 minutes to charge and have a maximum power dissipation of 1,562,500 Watts. That sounds like quite a efficient electric scooter ride to me...

I'm seriously considering buying a few of these 2.7V@3000F ultra caps this week, but I would need the help of some of our electronics gurus to design some of the the needed electronics. I'm thinking 5 caps in series for 13.5V@3000F. Anyone interested in starting a cooperative EV thread? We would need to design a self regulating charging system, and a POT controlled discharge system. Maybe even a regenerative braking system in the future... Anyone interested? I would really like to have a 20 horse electric car out on the road some day soon! Or a one horse electric bike at the very least!

~Dingus Mungus

You have to divide the max watts by 3600 to get Wh's...
434Wh for the bank I described... Not quite a stick of dynamite yet.

google: "maxwell ultra cap"

They have caps and modules for sale now, and the caps I'm looking at are rated for 2.7V@3000F...

Remember when you place caps in series you must divide the capacitance by the number of caps you connect.
Eg. ten 2.5V 3000 F caps in series will give you 25V at 300 F.

How many Farads do these supercaps have ?
What about shortcircuit them ?
Would it go boom like a bomb then ?
(in a car accident for example..?)

The metals have resistance which under short circuit conditions would have to absorb the discharge. They would vaporize and it would be energetic.
Also if the impedance were low enough the short circuit current would cause a magnetic pulse inducing a current in surrounding conductors. Even blood is a conductor, not a good one, but Bob Beck used the discharge from a camera strobe capacitor to induce enough current in lymph nodes to zap HIV. This pulse would be MUCH larger.
An interesting thought is would it kill car computers for a distance around the collision.