Fisker Battery Promises 500 Mile EV Range, 1-Minute Charging

[ZiprHead]

https://www.pcmag.com/news/357356/fisker-battery-promises-500-mile-ev-range-1-minute-charging

I'm dubious.

 

[Bronzeage]

I too will believe it when I see it. The real limit on fast charging is the heat produced. It will be interesting to see how Fiskar handles that problem. Either they have found something like cold fusion(we all know how that worked out) or they have an incredibly heat hardy battery, and hardware which resists bursting into flames.

 

[barbos]

Commercial application of the solid-state battery isn't expected until 2023.

That's a dead giveaway that at most they have a hunch and some 8th grade level calculation.
If they really had a prototype battery which is 2.5x energy density of current batteries they would not have been talking about 5 years.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't like the idea at all. It's not as dangerous as the supercapacitor idea but there's still an awful lot of energy locked in there, any power source that can charge that fast can also discharge even faster. Back with the supercapacitors I worked out the energy in a typical gas tank--it rivals that of a 2000# aircraft-delivered bomb. (Note that most of the weight of such a bomb is the casing, not the explosives.) Fortunately, gasoline does not contain oxidizer and thus the speed the energy is liberated at (except in Hollywood) is limited by the airflow. Gasoline burns hot, but unless sprayed into the air it doesn't explode. A shorted supercapacitor would liberate it's energy basically instantly--and go up like the stuff all over the news during Turkey Shoot I & II. This won't be that dramatic but it will still deliver it's energy much more quickly than gasoline.

I would want to see the safety analysis of what happens to a ribbon parking lot (ie, stopped traffic) when a traffic accident pierces a battery pack.

 

[LordKiran]

I don't like the idea at all. It's not as dangerous as the supercapacitor idea but there's still an awful lot of energy locked in there, any power source that can charge that fast can also discharge even faster. Back with the supercapacitors I worked out the energy in a typical gas tank--it rivals that of a 2000# aircraft-delivered bomb. (Note that most of the weight of such a bomb is the casing, not the explosives.) Fortunately, gasoline does not contain oxidizer and thus the speed the energy is liberated at (except in Hollywood) is limited by the airflow. Gasoline burns hot, but unless sprayed into the air it doesn't explode. A shorted supercapacitor would liberate it's energy basically instantly--and go up like the stuff all over the news during Turkey Shoot I & II. This won't be that dramatic but it will still deliver it's energy much more quickly than gasoline.

I would want to see the safety analysis of what happens to a ribbon parking lot (ie, stopped traffic) when a traffic accident pierces a battery pack.

As long as we're here, thoughts on graphene generated power?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/04/flowing-salt-water-over-graphene-generates-electricity/

https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2013.232

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Safer, better lithium batteries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuwqGj3UAHE

 

[barbos]

I don't like the idea at all. It's not as dangerous as the supercapacitor idea but there's still an awful lot of energy locked in there, any power source that can charge that fast can also discharge even faster. Back with the supercapacitors I worked out the energy in a typical gas tank--it rivals that of a 2000# aircraft-delivered bomb. (Note that most of the weight of such a bomb is the casing, not the explosives.) Fortunately, gasoline does not contain oxidizer and thus the speed the energy is liberated at (except in Hollywood) is limited by the airflow. Gasoline burns hot, but unless sprayed into the air it doesn't explode. A shorted supercapacitor would liberate it's energy basically instantly--and go up like the stuff all over the news during Turkey Shoot I & II. This won't be that dramatic but it will still deliver it's energy much more quickly than gasoline.

Supercapacitors are typically 10 Wh/kg some 30Wh/kg, whereas explosives are above 1000 Wh/kg. That's at least 30x more than supercapacitors. And bomb mass is about 50% explosives.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't like the idea at all. It's not as dangerous as the supercapacitor idea but there's still an awful lot of energy locked in there, any power source that can charge that fast can also discharge even faster. Back with the supercapacitors I worked out the energy in a typical gas tank--it rivals that of a 2000# aircraft-delivered bomb. (Note that most of the weight of such a bomb is the casing, not the explosives.) Fortunately, gasoline does not contain oxidizer and thus the speed the energy is liberated at (except in Hollywood) is limited by the airflow. Gasoline burns hot, but unless sprayed into the air it doesn't explode. A shorted supercapacitor would liberate it's energy basically instantly--and go up like the stuff all over the news during Turkey Shoot I & II. This won't be that dramatic but it will still deliver it's energy much more quickly than gasoline.

Supercapacitors are typically 10 Wh/kg some 30Wh/kg, whereas explosives are above 1000 Wh/kg. That's at least 30x more than supercapacitors. And bomb mass is about 50% explosives.

I wasn't interested in the kilograms, but the total energy available in a car's power source. Gasoline has far more joules/kg than any chemical explosive, a battery pack that delivers the same range will have a substantial fraction of that energy.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Yeah, umm... no. So many articles like this pop up about this or that. Typically it is done at a tiny scale, they get money, and we never hear of it again.

And this is Fisker we are talking about. Not the best coming from there in the past.

 

[Underseer]

I don't like the idea at all. It's not as dangerous as the supercapacitor idea but there's still an awful lot of energy locked in there, any power source that can charge that fast can also discharge even faster. Back with the supercapacitors I worked out the energy in a typical gas tank--it rivals that of a 2000# aircraft-delivered bomb. (Note that most of the weight of such a bomb is the casing, not the explosives.) Fortunately, gasoline does not contain oxidizer and thus the speed the energy is liberated at (except in Hollywood) is limited by the airflow. Gasoline burns hot, but unless sprayed into the air it doesn't explode. A shorted supercapacitor would liberate it's energy basically instantly--and go up like the stuff all over the news during Turkey Shoot I & II. This won't be that dramatic but it will still deliver it's energy much more quickly than gasoline.

I would want to see the safety analysis of what happens to a ribbon parking lot (ie, stopped traffic) when a traffic accident pierces a battery pack.

And that's the conundrum with all battery tech, isn't it?

Pack more energy into a smaller volume than gasoline, and your storage device is more flammable/explosive/etc than gasoline.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't like the idea at all. It's not as dangerous as the supercapacitor idea but there's still an awful lot of energy locked in there, any power source that can charge that fast can also discharge even faster. Back with the supercapacitors I worked out the energy in a typical gas tank--it rivals that of a 2000# aircraft-delivered bomb. (Note that most of the weight of such a bomb is the casing, not the explosives.) Fortunately, gasoline does not contain oxidizer and thus the speed the energy is liberated at (except in Hollywood) is limited by the airflow. Gasoline burns hot, but unless sprayed into the air it doesn't explode. A shorted supercapacitor would liberate it's energy basically instantly--and go up like the stuff all over the news during Turkey Shoot I & II. This won't be that dramatic but it will still deliver it's energy much more quickly than gasoline.

I would want to see the safety analysis of what happens to a ribbon parking lot (ie, stopped traffic) when a traffic accident pierces a battery pack.

And that's the conundrum with all battery tech, isn't it?

Pack more energy into a smaller volume than gasoline, and your storage device is more flammable/explosive/etc than gasoline.

What's worse is that it's self-contained. Fires in something like this would probably be considered a class D fire. Note how your fire extinguisher doesn't have any rating for class D--it won't do squat.

We are already seeing the problem with Li-Ion batteries going bad on airplanes. That's why you're limited to 100Wh in a battery pack and you can't check them at all.

 

[bilby]

I don't like the idea at all. It's not as dangerous as the supercapacitor idea but there's still an awful lot of energy locked in there, any power source that can charge that fast can also discharge even faster. Back with the supercapacitors I worked out the energy in a typical gas tank--it rivals that of a 2000# aircraft-delivered bomb. (Note that most of the weight of such a bomb is the casing, not the explosives.) Fortunately, gasoline does not contain oxidizer and thus the speed the energy is liberated at (except in Hollywood) is limited by the airflow. Gasoline burns hot, but unless sprayed into the air it doesn't explode. A shorted supercapacitor would liberate it's energy basically instantly--and go up like the stuff all over the news during Turkey Shoot I & II. This won't be that dramatic but it will still deliver it's energy much more quickly than gasoline.

I would want to see the safety analysis of what happens to a ribbon parking lot (ie, stopped traffic) when a traffic accident pierces a battery pack.

And that's the conundrum with all battery tech, isn't it?

Pack more energy into a smaller volume than gasoline, and your storage device is more flammable/explosive/etc than gasoline.

That's one of the reasons why hydrogen is a poor choice of fuel - it is explosive in a wide range of mixture concentrations in air.

Methane (natural gas), and petroleum vapour (gasoline) leaks can lead to devastating explosions, but the fuel/air mix has to be in quite a narrow range - too much air, and nothing happens; too little, and you get a fire rather than a detonation. A methane leak or a gasoline spill can be rendered safe by doing a quick cleanup and letting the gas or vapour blow away in the breeze.

If your car catches fire, that's pretty bad; but a car that explodes is much worse.

To be able to deliver a lot of power, and to be able to recharge rapidly, a battery needs a small separation between anode and cathode, preferably over a large area, through which electricity (or ions) can flow readily on demand. This is also the recipe for possible short circuits, unless the battery is in excellent condition (ie hasn't just been rammed into another object at high speed).

It's a major engineering problem; the best answer is probably to store the energy chemically, and either burn it in an internal combustion engine, or convert it to electricity in a fuel cell. IMO fuel cells (using alcohols or hydrocarbons) are likely a better way to power electric vehicles than rapid-charge batteries.

Of course, the challenge then becomes to manufacture those fuels (with power supplied by green sources such as nuclear, hydroelectric or wind power), rather than using fossil reserves.

 

[Bronzeage]

The engineering challenge of mechanical transportation has always been the problem of excess heat. We always make more heat than we can use immediately. The life of any machine depends upon whether or not it can shed the excess heat to the environment, before it destroys itself.

For decades, the gasoline automobile engine plodded along with an efficiency of about 10 to 12 percent. A statement like this immediately starts an argument about what's being measured and how. Do you count the energy consumed by the air conditioning system? What about the generator?

Granted, a car with no air conditioner or generator would get better fuel mileage, but it would be hard to sell one.

These days, car manufactures like to brag that they've built engines that scrape 40% and higher. Again, one can't be sure how that number was crunched. Under the best circumstances, that still means you're only using 60% of the gasoline you bought.

The ideal solution would be an internal composting engine. It would run off grass clippings, the temperature would be fairly low and the process is quite slow, but all the heat energy could be converted to forward motion, without pissing 70% of it off into the atmosphere.

 

[skepticalbip]

The ideal solution would be an internal composting engine. It would run off grass clippings, the temperature would be fairly low and the process is quite slow, but all the heat energy could be converted to forward motion, without pissing 70% of it off into the atmosphere.

It sounds like you are a proponent of switching to Stirling engines for our cars and trucks. Stirling engines wouldn't break any drag racing records but how much of the heat would be pissed away into the atmosphere would depend on what percentage of the heat generated could be transferred to the engine.

 

[bilby]

The engineering challenge of mechanical transportation has always been the problem of excess heat. We always make more heat than we can use immediately. The life of any machine depends upon whether or not it can shed the excess heat to the environment, before it destroys itself.

For decades, the gasoline automobile engine plodded along with an efficiency of about 10 to 12 percent. A statement like this immediately starts an argument about what's being measured and how. Do you count the energy consumed by the air conditioning system? What about the generator?

Granted, a car with no air conditioner or generator would get better fuel mileage, but it would be hard to sell one.

These days, car manufactures like to brag that they've built engines that scrape 40% and higher. Again, one can't be sure how that number was crunched. Under the best circumstances, that still means you're only using 60% of the gasoline you bought.

The ideal solution would be an internal composting engine. It would run off grass clippings, the temperature would be fairly low and the process is quite slow, but all the heat energy could be converted to forward motion, without pissing 70% of it off into the atmosphere.

The maximum possible theoretical efficiency of a perfect engine is the Carnot Efficiency, and is equal to 1 minus the ratio of the absolute temperature of the cold reservoir and the absolute temperature of the hot reservoir. In a practical vehicle, the lowest possible cold reservoir temperature is generally that of the environment, around 300 Kelvins; For a gasoline engine, the hot reservoir is the temperature of burning gasoline under pressure - about 1200 Kelvins, giving an absolute top limit of efficiency of 1-(300/1200) = 0.75 = 75%. Of course, real engines are not even close to that efficiency - but that's the best you could get out of a perfect design. One big contributor to inefficiency below this maximum limit in gasoline engines is that the actual cold reservoir temperature is the temperature of the exhaust gasses - usually in the order of about 700 Kelvins, giving a maximum theoretical efficiency of about 42%

Low temperatures make engines fundamentally far less efficient; A compost powered engine where the heat of decay provided the hot reservoir would have a hot reservoir temperature around 350 Kelvins, and a maximum theoretical efficiency in ideal conditions of just 14%, where the heat sink is the environment at 300K.

The best engines have very high working temperatures, combined with very low exhaust temperatures, all else being equal. Of course, all else is not equal in real engines, so efficiency varies a lot; But while there's nothing stopping it from being lower than the Carnot Efficiency, it is physically impossible for it to ever be higher.

Thermodynamics is not just a good idea, it's THE LAW.

 

[bilby]

The ideal solution would be an internal composting engine. It would run off grass clippings, the temperature would be fairly low and the process is quite slow, but all the heat energy could be converted to forward motion, without pissing 70% of it off into the atmosphere.

It sounds like you are a proponent of switching to Stirling engines for our cars and trucks. Stirling engines wouldn't break any drag racing records but how much of the heat would be pissed away into the atmosphere would depend on what percentage of the heat generated could be transferred to the engine.

They might go faster if they were Stirling Moss engines

 

[barbos]

High energy density batteries don't have to be unsafe. Lithium Ion do have propensity to spontaneously overheat and have flammable electrolyte.
But other chemistries don't have that.