DailyDirt: All Electric Vehicles
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Electric vehicles are gaining some increasing acceptance on the roads, as some drivers realize that the vast majority of their trips are less than a 40-mile roundtrip. The "range anxiety" factor is still a concern for a lot of people, but there might be some alternatives to the existing rechargeable batteries in use today. Here are just a few examples of possible solutions to improve the energy storage capacity in electric cars.- A German car maker is using a 'nanoFLOWCELL' technology to power its all electric vehicle. The Quant e-Sportlimousine might have a horrible name compared to a Tesla S/3/X, but it claims a range of 600 kilometers (372 miles). [url]
- Batteries might not be the best way to store energy for an electric vehicle, but the alternatives aren't quite ready for commercial vehicles. One of these alternatives is based on a phenomenon called 'thermopower wave' where a fuel is ignited at the end of a carbon nanotube, and the resulting heat pushes electrons and creates electricity. These nanogenerators are far from being perfected, but they have the potential to efficiently turn high energy density fuels into electricity much more efficiently than an internal combustion engine. [url]
- Phinergy and Alcoa have an aluminum-air battery that could power a small EV for 1,000 miles. The catch is that when your aluminum-air battery is depleted, you'd have to replace an aluminum-containing cartridge at a special service station (so you couldn't just recharge the aluminum-air battery by plugging it into a standard wall outlet). Still, it would could be a nice way to extend the range of an all-electric vehicle significantly with an energy storage technology that has a not-so-complex, closed-loop life cycle. [url]
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Filed Under: aluminum-air battery, battery, electric vehicles, energy storage, ev, nanoflowcell, nanogenerators, nanotube, range anxiety, thermopower wave
Companies: alcoa, phinergy, quant, tesla
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Re:
I'd like the robot to do the job please.
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nanoFLOWCELL's Dubious Claims, and Cleverly Shifting the Goalposts Back and Forth.
The problem arises with the other half of the nanoFLOWCELL system, a Flow Battery. A flow battery is simply a fuel cell in which the active chemicals are dissolved in an inert fluid-- typically water-- and can therefore be delivered from holding tanks. This allows a wider range of active chemicals than those which are customarily used in fuel cells, but the catch is that you need a lot of water to make various metal oxides, metal sulfates, etc., behave as fluids, and flow-batteries generally do not have very high energy densities. There are applications where this does not matter, but an electric automobile is probably not one of them.
I am informed that the nanoFLOWCELL company involved has not filed any patents, or disclosed the chemical composition of its energy-storage fluids. I am also informed that the proprietor has a dubious reputation for making claims which evaporate in thin air.
One persistent problem about electric cars is the way in which their promoters conflate instantaneous power and long term energy. The true claim that a car can go two hundred miles an hour (for a minute or so), and can go a thousand miles (at five miles an hour, or so), is glossed into an unstated claim that the car has sufficient performance for ordinary commuting, which unstated claim may very well be untrue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery
http://www.kitco.com/ind/Albrecht/2014-03-06-Flow-Ce ll-Batteries-A-Substitute-For-Lithium-Ion.html?sitetype=fullsite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_( photography)#Electronic_flash
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Eugene_Edgerton
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EV CarShare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiEJPbxL2hI
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