Batteries and New Battery Technologies

Thank you Jeremy, I nearly was getting an inferior complex. But as usaual, you, CDK and Porta are spot on. You are absolute so right, but if nobody is using super capacitors, nothing will improve or materialize or get cheaper or beter or what ever. Let me have my dream, 10 solar panels in series, i.e. 160 Volt, charging without a charger, just a diode, a super capacitor of 180 Volt max rated voltage, with a buck converter driving a lower Voltage motor or just use PWM at 72 Volt high efficiency rare earth magnet motors . But indeed it is a nice dream, but maybe not realistic at this point in time. In the meantime I am struggling to make the software working for my 2 motors. The sensors are mounted like you suggested. It took me some time to get the inline deburger working and now I hope to get it right. The software for the battery mangement I have already going and also the remote switching for the various lights tec. Just a plus and a minus. As soon it is all working satisfactory, I will start with the hull. (Which is an other story). The young engineer, I lent that marvelous book Yacht Design by Larssons to, dropped by last night and kindly returned the book. I still have faith in the youngsters. Nice fellow. He thoroughly enjoy it to design his own yachts.
Bert

 

I don't believe in perpetual motion devices, but putting 20 Kw in getting 1 liter of Diesel out of the ground, which by compressing gives you an controlled explosion, probabbly 9 Kw out per liter of energy. So why should a cleverer person then you and me, not come up with a system of putting 16 Kw into water and get 7 kw out of it. There is some research on a laser beam system which at 3700 degrees celcius, extract energy out of seawater

Not a problem, there are lots of girls out there, you just have to buy them a furcoat and sunglasses.
Bert

 

Bert:

You're correct on the diesel, most of the energy is wasted as heat which is dumped out as heat thru the radiator, where it contributes to some global warming. All heat engines- Stirling, steam, nuclear, turbine, etc. suffer from the Carnot cycle losses based on the difference between the two temperature reservoirs.

The solution has already been invented; the fuel cell can theoretically reach 100% efficiency since it is not a heat engine. Of course there are many technical difficulties to resolve, the most significant being that it costs maybe 10X more to get the hydrogen based fuels to run one. You can run a fuel cell directly from diesel, but the hydrogen content is so low that you don't gain much by doing it. Methane has the highest hydrogen content at 25% and shows the most promise, but water is only 11% hydrogen and CANNOT be utilized directly without the hydrogen being extracted first, a very inefficient process.

Hope this helps.

Porta

 

Well ... the heat produced by the engine isn't really significant to global warming. It is the CO2 produced by the engine that is supposed to be the culprit.

Yes, in fact water is the "exhaust" of the hydrogen fuel-cell process. That is, when a fuel cell takes in hydrogen and produces energy, it does so by combining the hydrogen with oxygen, producing H2O (water) + energy. If it were possible to load in some water, break the water into oxygen and hydrogen, then combine the hydrogen with oxygen to get a net energy output, that would be a violation of the law of conservation of energy.

Er. Unless the energy to break out the hydrogen were coming from another fuel. For example you could add sodium to water, producing sodium hydroxide and hydrogen, then use the hydrogen in a fuel cell. You also would get energy from the sodium reaction --double energy! You would need elemental sodium as a fuel which you could easily extract from sea water (common table salt is sodium chloride) --by putting as much energy as the maximum you could possibly get back from the reaction.

 

Absolutely, you are quite right. Actually, it's pretty easy to put 16kW into water and get 7kW out - - you can do it today with a steam engine.

 

metal fuel cells

Incidentally, there are already practical, low-cost commercial fuel cells that use metals like zinc or aluminum instead of hydrogen. They are usually called metal-air batteries rather than fuel cells, but they are technically fuel cells with the metal as the fuel.

There are two advantages of hydrogen over solid-metal fuels. First, hydrogen is a gas so you can easily refuel a spent cell. With solid-metal fuel cells you have to construct a new cell. Second, the exhaust of a hydrogen cell is water which you can easily get rid of, so the weight of the system decreases as you use up fuel. With solid-metal fuel, the "exhaust" is a solid metal oxide which is just left in the cell until it is exhausted and the entire cell is discarded or recycled. Since you are adding oxygen to the metal, the solid-metal fuel cell actually gets heavier as you extract energy.

Frankly, I wonder if the emphasis on hydrogen fuel cells is not misguided and whether we would not be better off coming up with practical solutions for quick, easy, and safe replacement of spent solid-metal cells and an efficient industry for recycling them.

 

Comments above, from my background in basic chemistry meant in a constructive spirit.

Hope this helps

Porta

 

Yes, I think anything based on hydrogen fuel for vehicles is not viable because of weight of fuel tank to store the hydrogen, the infrastructure required and hazards of hydrogen instability. The engineers at BMW and others must know this also, yet the prototypes continue to be made at maybe a million dollars a pop for the free advertizing? Solid metal fuel cells aren't any better for the same reasons stated for hydrogen and would be even heavier, IMHO....

Porta

 

I can't speak to the instability (not sure what you're referring to there), but the other problems have been solved. In Australia many vehicles are dual fuel using LPG but switching to the more expensive petrol when needed for extra power. In addition, many cities are going to LNG for fueling buses. There would be a need for new infrastructure, but I think the scale of that issue is overstated. Lots of gas stations already have LPG tanks, H2 tanks could be added above ground initially and eventually places underground as things moved away from gasoline.

There are still technical problems to be solved, but right now the biggest issue is one of political will. Maybe when gas hits $5 a gallon the demand will materialize.

 

Hippo:
Yes, here one of my favorites that is an attractive alternative right now because of very low LNG prices and widespread infrastructure support available in personal homes for the US.
http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-gx/

Not sure if the same range, safety rating and boot space is available compared to petrol version, but it might have an acceptable trade off of problems for some consumers.

But that still leaves the issue of very high cost of hydrogen fuel until all fossil/renewable fuel reaches maybe $50 gal and STAYS there. Hydrogen cannot be liquified at any ambient temperature on earth and all containers are permeable to it, so more massive high pressure tanks are required to store an equivalent amount if you use the same technology (alternatives storage like hydride tanks are also massive). Special cryogenic tanks used on deep space rockets are not practical on the personal vehicle scale.

I was thinking of the thick Japanese nuclear reactor walls that were blown out by hydrogen explosions under low pressure as regards instability. Any kind of leak from hydrogen under high pressure would be considerably more dangerous than LNG or LPG because of the higher energy content of hydrogen.

Anyway that's the way I see it, FWIW.

Porta

 

Some forty years ago, I did a presentation to a commission of technical inquiries here in South Africa. I was shot down like a blown up balloon.

In the North of South Africa, we have one of the best silicon sand reserves. Of which we could easy extract/grown good quality silicon rods for solar cells. Also, because of coal in the ground, electricity was at that time 0.5 $cent per Kwh, to grown the rods.

We have hundreds of kilometers of railway lines in the mines under the ground. Thus electrical traction was well known, as all locomotives are electrical. Further, because of all those electrical locomotives, the battery industry was and is still well established. Also there was and is assembling of all famous make motorcars, thus the local automotive component industry was also well established. No sweat to make some special automotive parts.

My proposal was: Make for each roof on the houses, 100m2 solar panels. Thus have some 12 to 20 Kwh of solar-energy per day, good enough for some rainy days reserve and local travelling. The sun energy transferred via solar cells into battery energy.
Make a small local electric automobile with lead acid batteries, as most travel is within towns in anyway.

South Africa could have had a leading small electric car industry.

The International automotive industry put pressure on the commission, the oil companies took the chair over of the solar-energy society and the project was shot down. What a pity. Politics is not always clever. I wish that a leading country like the USA, had something like this done 40 years ago, but politics is run by 3 industries, the oil, the automotive and the weapon industry. They are lobbying the governments in the world.
I am an optimist about the inventions people will make, but a pessimist if it comes to governments.
Bert

 

I didn't mean that it was insignificant compared to the CO2, I meant that it was an insignificant heat source. I'm to lazy to look up the following fact which I vaguely remember, so this may be wrong, but what I recall is that the energy delivered by the sun to the earth every day is a million times greater than all of the energy produced by all human activity on that day. If my memory is correct, then this means that all of the heat produced by all of the human energy sources is completely insignificant as a source of global warming.

Interesting. I did not know that. I assumed that electrolysis would be pretty close to 100% efficient. But I was not actually proposing this as a practical solution, only a theoretical one. As you say, sodium is extremely dangerous to handle, and I imagine that sodium hydroxide is probably also dangerous to handle. And if you are willing to deal with the dangers of elemental sodium, you could probably use it much more efficiently in a sodium-air battery (aka sodium fuel cell).[/QUOTE]

And please don't take this the wrong way --I mean it purely for your information-- a lot of people consider it rude to write in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. It is considered to be form of shouting at someone.

 

Sorry about the caps, won't use anymore. How to change font or colors in my comments, as they cannot be spotted quickly, some have written in PM.

P.

And please don't take this the wrong way --I mean it purely for your information-- a lot of people consider it rude to write in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. It is considered to be form of shouting at someone.[/QUOTE]

 

Israel Electric Car Project

I believe Israel is strongly persuing an electric car future.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22783747/ns/us_news-environment/

About 15 years ago while I was working in SE Asia, I was trying to convince the US car manufacturers, and a few US gov entities that we should begin working on alternative automobile technologies over there, where they had a 'youthful' and rapidly growing auto market, as well as some BIG money investments possibilities from the businessmen in each of those countries desiring their 'own national automobile product'. I couldn't get to first base with any of them.

 

Project Better Place

That link pointed to a 2008 article about Project Better Place
For a moment I thought it was another dead project, but found some encouraging info on its own website and WikipediA, in short:

1. Partners in Israel, Denmark, China, Australia, USA, France and Japan
2. lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) battery technology
3. battery packs to cost between US 4¢ and 5¢ per mile over their life,provide the cars with a 160 km (100 mi) range per charge, perform for 2000 recharge cycles, and last for 8 years.
4. Recharging stations: 30min @ 50% capacity
5. Battery swapping stations 1 to 2 min (100@ charged battery)
6. Israel and Japan already have taxi pilot demonstrators
7. Denmark, Australia and USA are gearing for rollout in late 2011

Perhaps these are the batteries we have been looking for???