Batteries and New Battery Technologies

[JonathanCole]

Pericles wrote:
"Even at $1 per watt/hour, a 1200 Ahr battery capacity would cost more than the bleedin' catamaran, as far as I can work it out."

If you want to understand the cost of a battery, you cannot simply use the nominal watt/hour rating. That $1.00 per watt hour is the cost based on ther nominal rating or the one-time charge capacity of the battery. To get the actual cost over the life of the battery you first multiply the dollars times the wattHours to get the purchase price. Then multiply rated watt/hour capacity times the number of cycles the battery is rated for. This gives you the figure for the total watt/hours the battery can store over its life. Now divide the first number by the second number to give you the cost of storing a wattHour of electricity. Only then does it become evident that the new battery technologies are much cheaper when they have a much greater number of deep discharge cycles. Of course you still have to make a larger up front investment, but in return you get a reduced cost of storing a kwHr of electricity.

On my solar electric catamaran, I have specified a 30kwHr battery bank. Altairnano's last year price ($2/wHr) would be $60,000. This year they sold a large battery bank at 0.50/wHr. at that price, the same battery bank would cost $15,000. If the batteries last for 15,000 deep discharge cycles as they claim, the 30kW x 15,000 = 450,000 kwHr. $15,000/450,000kwHr = $0.033/kwHr of storage over the life of the system. That is 3.3 cents to store a kwHr of electrical energy. Even if you allow for the inefficienies it is still less than 3.5 cents per kwHr of storage. I'd call that a bargain, particularly when you can fill-er-up with solar or wind generated electricity.

[guxiangdeyun]

will you tell me about some marine propellers suppliers in the world
thank you

[Pericles]

Google for them.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=mar...ient=firefox-a

http://www.shipserv.com/pages/search...officeId=66103

Pericles

[masalai]

Hi Pericles, Those motors are the ones I am looking at (africancats pdf..), I am not so far advanced as you appear to be so I am sitting waiting fro cheaper non-gassing batteries & a generator based on something light like the Lombardini 502 0r 702 as per http://www.polarpowerinc.com/product...cogen_lomb.htm as a pair.... This should meet both drive & "house" desires. . . with wind, the motors are immersed to deliver electricity, on windless & sunny days solar panels. I don't see the need for wind generators in the design yet... I aim to be able to run on coconut oil as well...

[Pericles]

Hell's teeth Brian! You got close to the camera. Is that an islamic gesture I see before me?

How to make coconut oil. Take one bullock!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_oil

I reckon it's quicker & more simple to take a trip to the supermarket for SVO.

Those pod motors are more powerful than the Asmo units. I'm torn between the two. Francis Joyon had a wind powered generator on IDEC. No diesel generator for him, no heating either!!

http://www.buildboats.info/

Best wishes,

Perry

[masalai]

If you are intending to "do a lap" or spend some time around Australia & Melanesia, then A/C could be a need... or you will be sleeping on the forward tramp and swealtering... There are many days when the wind stops... The "between months" between monsoons & trade winds... - at that price and lack of filtering -CNO is not to be used as fuel...

I am told it is a "quaker" thing/look - twixt lip & chin is a bit sparse, also above jaw line... The camera was a good 8 ft away & I savagely cropped - removing "extra stuff" to my left...

[brian eiland]

Found this interesting discussion of the EE-Stor battery:

Eestor silver bullet stealth battery

I wish it had been put over in this subject thread to try and corral some of these discussions together. So I'll just cross reference them.

[brian eiland]

Originally Posted by brian eiland

Good afternoon gentleman,
Well it's happening again, my being bombarded by this 'Forever Battery' claim.

Those are all some pretty startling praises, so I went to visit XDSL, mPhase Technologies
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080326/0379601
http://www.mphasetech.com/

They have some sort of 'coming out party' this coming 3Apr. As I look thru a lot of there info, I see their claims for extremely long (forever) shelf life, but I don't see rechargeable, and a few other factors. Am I missing something about this 'great' new battery??

I raised a few questions about these inflated claims, and I think I was correct in doing so. I don't see any 'fantastic technology' here other than self-life. And in doing a little more research I found the some of the principles of this firm have been involved in some questionable SEC activity in the past. This might even be a 'pump and dump' stock situation (I say maybe as I do not know, just saw such a reference). Then again maybe they just hold a small piece of the bigger battery puzzle and need to self promote to find partners. Too bad we have this sort of activity on our stock market at a time we really need this new innovative work & investment in battery technologies.

[JonathanCole]

Since Brian brought up the EEStor story in this thread, there are a couple of things are helpful to know to understand the functional difference between a capacitor and battery. I have developed a supercapacitor patent and came to understand the importance of these things in the course of that work. This is basic math. The energy stored in a capacitor is expressed by this formula,
This basically tells you that you can get exponential energy storage gains by increasing the voltage of the capacitor.

The other important one is
.
This shows what happens when you put capacitors in series. The capacitance rapidly is reduced leading to reduced energy storage.

Most super capacitors and ultra capacitors are low voltage devices. When you put them in series, their energy density goes way down.

I believe that the EEStor ultracapacitor tries to get around this by essentially creating a high voltage, high energy density device, by utilizing thin films of barium titanate which is the highest value insulator known. This would be deposited directly on electrodes (with huge surface areas) at molecular thicknesses. The difficulty is that this ceramic like material, barium titanate may be prone to cracking or other forms of rupture in any expansion and contraction scenario.

As to whether these supercapacitors can have so many cycles, this is absolutely true. It is because they are purely electronic devices and store electrons by introducing a tension on the insulator that separates the positive and negative charges. Think of it like atomic/molecular springiness that stores the energy.

If you want to transfer energy, the capacitor is the way to go, because it has very low losses. In a special circuit called a tank circuit, a capacitor can transfer energy almost without loss. So when you want to charge your electric vehicle or boat, it will be good to have a big bank of capacitors at the filling station, that has slowly accepted the charge from the grid or other sources. It will be charged at a voltage somewhat higher than your vehicle, and will then be able to dump the energy as quickly as your battery/capacitor can take it on.

[Guest625101138]

Originally Posted by JonathanCole

...........
This basically tells you that you can get exponential energy storage gains by increasing the voltage of the capacitor.

The other important one is
.
This shows what happens when you put capacitors in series. The capacitance rapidly is reduced leading to reduced energy storage.

.......

Sure capacitance is reduced in series connection but voltage rating has gone up so energy storage has gone up as this is a function of V^2.

Rick W

[JonathanCole]

Originally Posted by Rick Willoughby

Sure capacitance is reduced in series connection but voltage rating has gone up so energy storage has gone up as this is a function of V^2.

Rick W

I stand corrected , it should have read capacitance goes down in series, not energy.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_...allel_circuits

Capacitors

Capacitors follow a different law. The total capacitance of capacitors in series is equal to the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of their individual capacitances:

. The working voltage of a series combination of identical capacitors is equal to the sum of voltage ratings of individual capacitors provided that equalizing resistors are used to ensure equal voltage division. This is all because of Ohm's law.

[brian eiland]

I just happened across this interesting website that is devoted to the subject of ultracapacitors

Ultracapacitors.org
http://www.ultracapacitors.org/index.php

This EEStor group really appears to be moving right along with a production plant inbuild

Also found this discussion of interest:
Carbon Aerogel & Ultracapacitors

[brian eiland]

Technology Review

http://www.technologyreview.com/read...es&id=20090&a=

http://www.technologyreview.com/read...es&id=18086&a=

[masalai]

brian e, Thanks for the posts, most interesting progress. - One can only hope for rapid development and implementation...

[brian eiland]

Originally Posted by brian eiland

..Also found this discussion of interest:
Carbon Aerogel & Ultracapacitors

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.

MIT's Lab has been working on the ability to charge electronic items (phones, ipods, gadgets) in minutes and never having to replace a battery again. Can you imagine fully charging your mobile phone in a couple of minutes?

Get ready.the day is coming...