Batteries and New Battery Technologies

[apex1]

"no wonder American cars have gone **** up, Euros are so far ahead [with their Ford]. ...God, grant me the patience to not snap at the arrogant Kraut. At least he could have used a Beemer for an example.

That arrogant Kraut is a Kiwi, you know! And he was right on the spot, the Mondeo was (as all successful Fords in the past decade) a German / European development.
If it comes to car comparison the US are 50 years behind the Germans.

 

[masalai]

BertKu I would not recommend holding your breath whilst waiting for delivery... USA is in depression and is only waiting for "official bureaucratic confirmation" 3 or more months after the fact as much of their Govt stats are so heavily massaged that they must be regarded as lies... Therefore That business is probably in "survival mode", to return in a few years, when economic recovery seems possible. I was looking at using ReEpower motors but several Aussy builders have cancelled due to failure to deliver... That is why I am looking at Torqeedo from Europe...

 

[mark775]

50 years? It's not been that much longer that Henry Ford made the technology that defeated the Germans in two world wars! There's more Mondeos than say, Ford pick-ups, for example? You think that the directorate at Ford America doesn't have access to the technology of Ford of Germany?
Just recently, A man on a One-World mission, Barack Obama, GAVE Chrysler to Fiat in exchange for Fiat technology (there's an oxymoron!) that Americans don't want. Right, I agree that the unions and the regulations have made it difficult for American car companies to compete on an international level. I agree that Americans got caught up in cheap fuel and big cars about the same time as bad government policy made these cars too inefficient. There were a few just-plain-bad cars, too, born of complacency. We have an uphill battle and it can't start in earnest for 1227 days but we are resilient (GM CEO, Barack Obama, has 1500 full time battery engineers working on R & D for the Volt, as we speak, by-the-way. I won't buy one because it is worse than no longer American - It is Government/Union boss payback).
We can't ALL be BMWs (long my favorite cars) and some of us have to stay on the sidelines sometimes in order to be rested for when some dummkopf starts yet another world war. Prost!

 

[mark775]

How do you like the CTS-V? Sorry, let me slow way, the hell, down so you can get a look...

 

[masalai]

moved to post#524 http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/op...rd-cruising-yachties-26558-35.html#post282991 as more appropriate to continue there

 

[apex1]

50 years Mark, yes. But maybe 38 only I did not measure that. To comment the rest I do´nt feel any need.
And btw mates we are hijacking this thread!

 

[BertKu]

If you find an article on induced drag on a foil, wing or blade it might help you understand what I am saying. If the design is efficient to start with it does not need the add ons.
Rick W

Rick I am in the middle of a Childrens Pony National Championships horseriding and I promised a sketch of what I had in mind. The championships are finished on the 4th of july thus in the meantime a very vague sketch

1) I need to try to get everybody to come up with ideas for a new type of battery. Crazy?? no, not at all. By talking too each other, ideas are born.

2) I still have to speak to a structual engineer due to the tremendious forces this construction will have on the sea.

3) After the boat is launched, I have to mount 4 horizontal brackets to avoid that the gears are grinding to pieces at sea, due to the movements.

4) The problem: there is no more space in our harbor for additional yachts

5) Problem no 2 : A trailer + boat cannot be more than 2 meter 50 cm wide.

6) The pontoins will be lowered and brought up either by electric motors or as a manual backup, with a winch

7) Problem No 3 : I am married for too long to ly in a single berth, thus I want a decent queen size bed. (therefore the square boat)

8) In view that EEstor is not coming forward with a low weight capacitor battery product , in the meantime I will have a small sail on board.

9) I will be using 2 electro motors/generators preferable 6 KW each, but as an initial try I am looking at http://www.markelektriks.com/sub/pmdc.htm Bert (I will next week come up with some better drawings)

 

[BertKu]

trailer moved around electric boat

Here the sketches
Bert

 

[Guest625101138]

Here the sketches
Bert

Bert
I have played around a little with articulated hulls and find they have some real challenges.

A nice size model will give you some idea of the design challenges. There is a lot of structural detail around the pivot points.

May be worth your while starting a new thead on the design.

Rick W

 

[BertKu]

Will do

Hi Rick,

I will follow up your suggestion to start a thread.

As soon I have the time I will make all the detailed drawings. I am not too worried about the forces, as I am not looking for a super light construction like you want, but merely comfort, reasonable speed, electrical driven with enough space for solarpanels, extra sail, trailer suitable, stable on the sea, lots of light batteries from EEstor or I hope that with inputs from other people we could make "super capacitor batteries" ourselves.

Maybe primitive, but without licence and as large and light as possible. I will first explain to the audience how a capacitor is made, not everybody knows this. Then, I hope that somebody could have a brainwave and we all could benefit from it. A capacitor as a battery is for a boat the ideal product. No gasses, million times charge and discharge. High current capabilities, light. It has a few disadvantage, but there are ways to overcome them.

Bert

 

[BertKu]

Supercapacitors as battery

For those who know how capacitors are made please skip this part. It must be made clear that anything what comes out of this brainstorming session, you cannot apply for a patent and it will be open source property for all boatowners.


What is a battery? two plates which contains on the one side positve electrons and at the other side negative electrons. In the middle some stuff which triggers the reaction of positive and negative electrons. By using different materials, the voltage will vary and the weight.

A capacitor are two conducting plates which has an insulation between the two plates and forms the dialektricum.

If one take three rolls of material, two with a conducting material and one dialektrum and start winding them all three on another reel, you will get a conducting layer, an insulated layer, a conducting layer etc. etc.

Every so many meters, you weld a conducting strip onto the conducting layer, which will form later the plus and minus terminals.

If you need high current capabilities you weld extra strips and connect them parallel, thus allowing faster flow of electrons to the plates or away from the plates.

How larger the conducting area, how larger the capacitance.
How thinner the dialektricum, how larger the capacitance.
But if one makes the insulation (dialektricum) too thin, your voltage potental could let the electrons go through to the other plate and you will have a short and the electrons will equalize. i.e. you don't have a "battery" anymore, your "battery" is now flat.

What is the trick of the trade.
You use some acid which bites in the surface of the conducting plates and by etching caves, your surface area is increased and as such you will get larger capacitance. Thus more energy in your "battery".
Or you have a "cave" type of ceramic and in vacuum you vaporise a thin layer of metal onto the ceramic.

Any suggestion is valuable Don't bather about our critics who will tells us that we are crazy and nuts. Just ignore them. Just let us have lots of inputs and we will try it out.

Maybe you should read the patent application of EEstor and use that as a guide to come up with other ideas not covered in this application.

BertKu

 

[BertKu]

Super Capacitors

Attached a photo and article on a Supercapacitor. It is a pity that Siemens stopped the production and development in 2000 for obvious reasons.

China makes them up to 1000 Farad at present.

It means thus that if you have a small sternlight on your boat, you could charge the capacitor in seconds and the light would be on for about 16 hours (1000 Farad). This offcource with some MosFet electronics which charge a second capacitor with a narrow pulse when the first capacitor is fully charged and with a wide pulse when the first capacitor is nearly discharged.

A low current Microchip can easy be programmed for that purpose.

BertKu

 

[brian eiland]

Carbon Aerogels

Carbon Aerogels and Ultracapacitors

Let's recap Carbon Aerogels - they are solid substances similar to gels but where the internal liquid is replaced with air. Aerogels are so porous and lightweight that they are sometimes called "solid smoke" or "blue smoke". Touching aerogel feels like styrofoam.They are typically 50-99.5% air, yet can hold (theoretically) 500 to 4,000 times their weight in applied force.

Aerogel can have surface areas ranging from 250 to 3,000 square meters per gram, so in theroy, a cubic inch of aerogel flattened out would have more surface area than an entire football field. Aerogel has 15 entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, including best insulator and lowest density solid.

This technology will improve ultracapacitors by swapping in carbon nanotubes. This greatly increase the surface area of the electrodes and the ability to store energy since the amount of energy ultracaps can hold is related to the surface area and conductivity of electrodes. So.. since they have a extremely high surface area, carbon aerogels are used to create ultracapacitors with values ranging up to thousands of farads.

Currently, Carbon Aerogels represent one of the lowest density solids available on the market and can be produced as thin films, powders, monoliths, or micro spheres. The main problem so far has been the cost. Nano materials tend to be a hundred or thousand times more expensive than conventional dielectric materials.

This is a little discouraging, the big limitation on voltage:

Supercapacitors are also being made of carbon aerogel. This is a unique material providing extremely high surface area of about 400-1000 m²/g. The electrodes of aerogel supercapacitors are usually made of non-woven paper made from carbon fibers and coated with organic aerogel, which then undergoes pyrolysis. The paper is a composite material where the carbon fibers provide structural integrity and the aerogel provides the required large surface. Small aerogel supercapacitors are being used as backup electricity storage in microelectronics, but applications for electric vehicles are expected. The voltage of an aerogel capacitor is limited to a few volts. Higher voltages will lead to ionization of the carbon, which will damage the capacitor. Carbon aerogel capacitors have achieved 325 J/g (90 Wh/kg) energy density and 20 W/g power density
...extracted from HERE

 

[BertKu]

Life is not always easy

Thank you so much Brian for the article and information.

Such an Ultra super capacitor is ideal for our boatowners. My neighbour has a Doctorate in Metalurgy, my wife has a Msc in Chemistry and they are willing to give me support to see whether we cannot crack the problem and make a backyard capacitor with primitive tools.
What we still need is somebody who has knowledge in production of electrolytic, tantalum , super capacitors etc who could give some hints on production. Somebody who lives in Arizona, Phoenix, where there was a production facility. Somebody in Regensburg, Germany or wherever. Maybe we should ask neighbours or friends. We need people who could sell us the raw materials etc. Come on guys, lets take it as a challenge. We all benefitting from it when we have cracked it.

BertKu

 

[FAST FRED]

"I agree that Americans got caught up in cheap fuel and big cars about the same time as bad government policy made these cars too inefficient."

Different folks have different definitions of EFFICIENCY.

Considering the death rates of folks in light "efficient" cars / vs the cost of a single day in intensive care , many Americans chose real cars to "efficiency".

It would take a million miles of 50 mpg compared to 15 mpg to pay for a week of intensive care..

And of course being DEAD , is never "efficient".

The new mandates from the ruler of GM is expected to cause 4000 extra deaths per year.

Efficient? For who?

FF