Who killed the Electric Car?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by moementum7, Aug 10, 2006.

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  1. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    I think it would actually be a bigger breakthrough than the atomic bomb, because it would mean the eventual end of fossil fuels for auto transport.

    You may have noticed that companies with the best new tech usually dont go public for investment money, because it means less payoff for the principal owners...who have had no trouble in this case getting private financing from Kleiner Perkins, Lockhead Martin and Zenn Motors.
     
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  3. scorpius a realist Valued Senior Member

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    did you know that each one cost GM 100.000$ to make...
     
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  5. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Oh really and what companies would those be? And I'm not saying they should have public stock rather that they should be showing off a prototype if it was for real, if it was for real they would show off a prototype and be swimming in billions of dollars by now, keeping it stealth makes no sense especially considering how much people know of them already.

    Lack of mass production will do that.
     
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  7. eddie23 information sponge Registered Senior Member

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    No! Im not walking 35 miles to work every day somehow I think im past the 1890's and even then they used horses that left their own form of polution behind.
    If I remember the history channel show correctly New york had a major poop problem before the car took over.
     
  8. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    AT&T or someone had a commercial promoting the yellow pages which went: "Let your fingers do the walking." They did not know how true that would be, but they will be walking on your computer's keyboard, when people get rational and more energy conscious - Fraggle makes this point well, so I stop.

    Yes NYC had serious problems with the horse powered economy. About the turn of the century there was an energy study which conclusively proved that NYC was about as large as it could be - growth was over. The study considered the availability of grass growing land and the energy the horse pulling wagons of hay would need to deliver hay to the city. With slightly more expansion, there would be no net gain in the supply of horse food as it had to come form ever more distant pasture.

    Again technology,(fingers walking on keyboards), will solve the probelm (but is making new ones as Indian fingers are cheaper and walk to NYC equally well).
     
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  9. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    There might gain millions of dollars but they would lose ownership of the company...which isnt a good thing if you already have enough capital from private sources to start production of a new technology you have confidence in.

    In the high tech hysteria of the late 1990s startup companies often made a killing by selling shares based on nothing. They had no products and no customers, but there were enough suckers in the market who would buy the shares nevertheless...only to find themselves holding worthless paper when the owners cashed in and sold out.
     
  10. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    So? And invention like that your made for life, you get a noble prize, you live off stock and sleep on beach on your own personal tropical island, naked, surrounded by naked women.

    I was not talking about public shares! But on private stock that is exactly what EEstor is doing selling based on nothing...
     
  11. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Again, I'd put more faith in Lockheed Martin's engineers than some guy named ElectricFetus:

    http://gm-volt.com/2008/01/10/lockheed-martin-signs-agreement-with-eestor/

    Today, however, Lockheed Martin, the major U.S. military equipment manufacturer has announced a partnership agreement with EEStor to develop energy applications.

    If these ultracaps can really deliver what they are projected to, they could offer a dramatic advantage for electric vehicles.

    To that end, I interviewed Lionel Liebman, manager of Program Development – Applied Research at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.

    The entire interview can be seen by clicking below:

    Can you tell me what your announcement was today?

    -Lockheed Martin and EEStor are working together to find areas for integrating their technology to a variety of power management platforms we’re working on.

    Is it a financial contract?

    -We’re not taking any sort of ownership of EEStor. It is an exclusive rights agreement to allow us to market these technologies to a very limited number of potential customers including homeland security and the defense markets.

    Lockheed Martin builds fighter jets and military equipment?
    And missiles, rockets, ground equipment, vehicles, and systems sensors. Obviously everything that requires power to operate. Power is becoming a sticking point or burden to the warfighter and that’s one of the things were focused on is coming up with solutions that make the warfighter’s job easier and more efficient.

    Are you looking to develop portable energy storage for the battlefield?

    -Yes there are opportunities not only to help in the area of relieving some of the dependence on fuel as energy. Also to increase the value of some of the renewable energy initiatives that are going on right now. Energy storage increase the value of these types of power generation technologies. EEStor’s technology can help in that area.

    What have you seen from EEStor in terms of their technology?

    -We’ve visited their facility. We were very impressed. They are taking an approach that lends itself to a very quick ramp-up in production. We’ve seen a lot of their testing and efforts to measure the purity of the powders that they use, and the chemistry. Well be working with them very closely this year to develop prototypes in certain pursuits.

    Have you been able to evaluate any of their current prototypes?

    -That’s an effort that’s ongoing. We’re really just getting started to integrate their technology into some of the efforts that we have going on here. That’s going to be something that we’re doing this year.

    So its a collaborative effort to build the prototypes then?
    That’s right.

    Do they have something that they’ve tested that you’ve seen which makes you want to work with them?

    -We haven’t personally tested their prototypes yet. Its something that we’ll work on together this year.

    How does Lockheed Martin feel about ultracaps and storage versus li-ion or NiMh batteries?

    -Lockheed Martin doesn’t have a bias. One way or another its really just a function of what does the customer want. For certain applications being able to provide pulse power is really really important, in another its not so much really pulse power but continuous power. If you talk to the Army they are really interested in hybridized solutions. Suffice it to say that EEStor’s technology is a piece of some of these systems solutions that we come up with. We are a system integrator so we look at the EEStor technology as a building block or a tool in a toolbox to provide the best solutions for the soldier.

    Do you see the ultracap as a power solution or an energy solution?

    -The EEStor chemistry and architecture lends itself to both types of applications. Its a scalable technology. In the situation where you are trying to store energy, transport it without discharge obviously thats very attractive in the utility grid load leveling (situation). If your talking about powering for example a high energy weapon that requires a short burst of energy a capacitor is a great approach to do that. Capacitors are in hybridized systems today for that reason. The chemistry is great purely form the view of battery technology but its also very attractive for some of these extremely high pulse power applications.

    Are you looking to use this technology in any vehicular type of application?

    -We have a number of platforms that were working on. Our applied research group is primarily focused on land forces power management which involves several area including vehicular power.

    Are you confident that their technology will offer a greater amount of energy and power density than batteries?

    -Yes, and at a fraction of the cost.

    Do their caps hold 10x the energy at 1/10th the weight of a lead acid battery?

    -Yes.
     
  12. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I don't know, but EEstor doesn't seem to be the typical scam, if it is one. It certainly true that barium titanate crystal has huge dielectric constant. That of Ammonia di-hydrogen Phosphate, ADP, is too and it is water soluble, cheap, and fun to grow. I wasted more than a month of my PhD research time growing large ones as wanted to make an electrically scanned (extremely fast) Fabre Perot interferometer with ADP (It turned out to be easier to make my plasma shot to shot so reproducible that I could measure line profile shapes with repeated discharges. Even if I had made a fast scanning FP interferometer, it would have failed as the shot noise problem would have killed my project, but I only knew and understood that about a year later.)
    But I digress:
    I expect the risk of disaster with their super capacitor is unacceptable high. Consider how it can fail: For any reason (cosmic ray passing thru, diffusion re-crystallization, thermal cycle or mechanically induced micro crack in the dielectric, etc.) a break down does occur when near fully charged, you will be dumping a lot of energy in a very tiny volume - we call than a bomb.

    I would not ride in a car with this potential ability to hurl pieces of steel thru me at least not before more than 100,000 had be used for at least a decade with no capacitor bombs exploding, even once.
     
  13. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Yaawn, Appeal to Authority. Do you honestly believe Lockheed martin has not ever invested in technologies that were utter failures? A company like Lockheed takes risk because it can, its brushed off miserable failure one after another before. And you never read corperate PR before have you?


    Question: Do you think thier product will work
    Lockheed Martin: Of course it will work, why if we were to say were were in the any way unsure why our investors and stock would pull out.


    If you haven't noticed yet, how much money has lockheed put into EEstor, is their agreement with EEstor binding? I'll give you the answer: zero dollars and zero cents, and no its not binding. Note to mention lockheed has not mentioned a word about the completion of product testing that was to end last year.

    Billy T,

    Yes if this products was to work it would have the same max energy density as TNT, yet could be charged to any explosive power in between and upon catastrophic self-discharge would not only explode like dynamite but would also emit a hellish EMP. You have seen caps fail, I've seen caps fail but one of these failing it going to be an awesome sight!
     
  14. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Yes I believe the authority is pretty good in this case when considering also the independent testing. Appeal to a qualified authority is how scientific facts are distributed.

    Unless we do the tests ourselves there is no other basis for validation.
     
    Last edited: May 31, 2009
  15. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    No that how theological dogma is establish, scientific fact is establish with unequivocal data. People did not just go "well darwin is a well traveled biologiest he must be right!", they looked at his data, the nature of his theory, compared it, tested it, etc, etfc.

    A no money non-binding agreement seems pretty damming to me.
     
  16. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    Yes and qualified authorities are entrusted to validate the data.

    Again, unless you are qualified to do the tests yourself...whatever knowledge you express IS an appeal to authority.
     
  17. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    Soooo? we don't just take their fucking word!

    That funny because I'm not an authority, nor does anyone say I am, nor is it the same fallacy if I was appealing to my self, in fact there is so much wrong with what you said you really should look up what an appeal to authority is.
     
  18. Diode-Man Awesome User Title Registered Senior Member

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    I'd say it's more a question of "what" than "who."

    Best Reason: Lack of nano-lithium ion batteries.
     
  19. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I suspect it is much more powerful than TNT as in a breakdown thru the dielectric a "plasma pinch" probably forms. I.e. the current would initially self confine between two metal films in thin filament less than the diameter of a pencil lead and be less than a mm long. Huge, rapidly-released, energy density.

    I happen to know a little bit about making fast dense electrically driven high energy plasmas as I worked about a decade on the controlled fusion problem.

    All capacitors have some self inductance (every current path does). The rate of current rise is limited by the LC time constant. Thus, for production of plasmas, one wants the L to be as low as possible. Inductance, L, is basically a geometry factor. - Small volumes for the current path have lower inductance L. With a fixed required C, you want to use the highest possible dielectric constant to reduce the volume.

    One of the fastest, I think THE fastest, capacitor designs used in plasma research is called a "Bloom line." It is very simple: Metal plates with very pure water (dielectric constant 80 as I recall) between. This Bloom line capacitor is very rapidly charged by slower, but still fast capacitors to a voltage that will break down the pure water dielectric but that break down takes a msec or so. So you dump the Bloom line capacitor to make your plasma before the water has time to break down.

    EEstore's huge dielectric constant will make the L much smaller than even in a Bloom line so the current rise time for the brake down will be much faster than the Bloom line discharge. (Nano seconds instead of micro second, I would guess for the LC time constant.) The energy would be released in much less time than a TNT explosion (or any chemical explosive).

    I think only a nuclear bomb* can achieve such a high power level explosion as the EEstor capacitor can in self discharge break down. but the energy released is much smaller of course. I would not want an EEstor capacitor car to even be next to mine at a traffic light

    ------
    *Or inertial confinement experimental lasers, like today's just opened National Ignition Facility. The NIF cost 3.5 billion and took 10 years to build. - The military paid for it as it can simulate nuclear explosions. BTW, I think you'er correct about the Hellish EMP. Perhaps the milatary will be EEstor's main customer?

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    :shrug:
     
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  20. Carcano Valued Senior Member

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    We all take the word of QUALIFIED authorities every day...in school, on the job, when you get on an airplane, etc.

    Most of the scientific knowledge you think you have is really based on your trust of authorities on the subject.
     
  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    As I understand it, the independent test confirmed the very high capacitance (or dielectric constant) achieved. You can do this with voltages of less than one volt applied. Then there is no danger of explosion as I just discussed in post 356.

    Did they test at the operational voltage also?

    If they did, I bet the capacitor was in a concrete bunker as no one knows what the probably of an explosion is.
     
  22. weed_eater_guy It ain't broke, don't fix it! Registered Senior Member

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    A bit off-topic:

    Anyone ever had the prank done to them where their buddy in a lab shouts "here, catch!" and tosses a small, charged cap? Of course your instinct is to catch whatever is being thrown your way, and get your hand shocked!

    So couldn't one just not charge a hypothetical EEStor cap all the way to near-breakdown? Why not do partial-charge, and partial dischange, like most lithium-polymer batteries are run at? (if i'm not mistaken) I think that's the way they mediated some of the safety issues with li-po batteries, a similar strategy might work here?

    School me if you want, I really don't know much about this, glad to learn though.
     
  23. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    There would not be any way to tell what is "near breakdown", especially if it is induced by cosmic ray or sudden mechanical or thermal micro-fracture.

    Also with any capacitor storage system, "half charged" is only 25% of full energy storgae capacity as the stored energy goes a V^2. Certainly it could safely be used with lower voltages, but then the would be no advantage over Li- ion etc. battery. Some of them have caught fire when over heated, but the would not explode, only burn.
     
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