EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: firepower on March 30, 2015, 03:40:20 pm
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another solar road way type technology.
http://tanktwo.com/ (http://tanktwo.com/)
https://youtu.be/8BAk4l98GtY (https://youtu.be/8BAk4l98GtY)
I think its a Gimick, low energy density (casing and air gaps and electronics) and low current path due to point contacts and random connections will mean random voltage ranges.
Not all cells will be used as only those that meet the algorithm.
This is basically a box of dry joints, any vibration would cause intermittent open circuits and arching.
with most energy density you want the most chemical in the smallest volume, thats why you use liquids or powders or gels/pastes
hell of a lot easier to just transfer electrons at high current and voltage then transfer battery balls.
Is there any spec on the cell? Ah capacity? dimensions? volume?
I smell BullSh!T
"On the other hand, Tanktwo battery packs offers more kWh and more peak kWs for the same cell capacity, compared to traditional battery packs. For this reason, the price per kWh for a Tanktwo battery pack will always be lower than the price per kWh of traditional battery packs made with the same battery chemistry and capacity."
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Slick site with very little actual data. IMHO It's an interesting but impractical idea, I'll go as far as saying it's a bad idea.
I could name a handful of issues of the top of my head but instead I'll speculate the project will never go into production.
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nope. the thing exists. I know the guy who invented it.
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nope. the thing exists. I know the guy who invented it.
As a prototype? All the "photos" on the site appear to be CGI renders. Seems TankTwo is at the get investors stage so slick presentations and press releases are top priority. But I couldn't find any actual data or independent test info at all.
I simply don't see any practical use for it, who's going to dedicate a big old hole to fill with balls in their car? Who's going to finance, build and maintain the ball stations? I'm amazed this got off the drawing board.
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A well-maintained Tanktwo battery-equipped EV can have more capacity at resale than when it was new, allowing for unseen resale values.
I guess statement refers to increased capacity of a single cell in the future so tank of the same size new batteries could be better in the future.
Sounds like a EV solution with changeable batteries made from small modules. I have doubts about tank construction and bigger capacity claims, but it may work. I have not seen real thing besides the site, it would be interesting to see it action.
EDIT: looking through the claims it seems that such technology (small replaceable battery modules) may have some strong advantages over more conventional battery types only and only if it proliferates and dominates the market (meaning significant local/global infrastructure upgrade, big market share of vehicles). Claim Chicken or egg?
No avian dilemma here: A Tanktwo battery beats the alternatives even if you just charge it the old fashioned way, without new infrastructure.
seems to be unfounded. Small battery modules may have advantages (gradual replacement/upgrade of battery cells, quick refill) only if they are treated as such. If they are treated as a single battery pack, many advantages vanish (this would be the case if little or no infrastructure is built) in comparison to single battery pack unit.
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If you wanted to recharge an electric-drive car's battery pack in 1h, you would need an electrical circuit rated for 400A/240V and a battery able to absorb that much energy that fast. Easier said than done and some people may have trouble handling cables that thick.
The dry joint issue can be mostly solved by simply adding an air bladder at the top to compress the balls after they have been loaded so cells won't shift or break contact so easily.
I agree that energy density, both by volume and mass, would be questionable at best - stacked lithium cells are already at the limits of being practical without the extra weight and volume of fully enclosing individual cells, along with the routing MOSFETs' losses.
As for some cells not getting used, that is not necessarily a significant issue as long as you only get billed for the difference between the charge in the cells you dumped and the cells you picked up.
Sounds like a EV solution with changeable batteries made from small modules. I have doubts about tank construction and bigger capacity claims, but it may work. I have not seen real thing besides the site, it would be interesting to see it action.
It would be much simpler to simply come up with standard EV battery pack sizes, capacities and locations so they can be quickly swapped out when fast-charging is either not possible or still not fast enough. If swappable batteries become part of the energy delivery infrastructure rather than individual property, battery packs would get progressively upgraded over time to deliver more billable capacity at lower labor and material costs.
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Ionic liquid aluminium air batteries seem more practical for quick refueling.
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Seems very much like the strategy of swapping battery packs for range extension. Except for the differences:
1. Since there are many small batteries, they can be derated/replaced at a finer granularity
2. Dynamic mesh power reduces impact of single failed cells, and can keep using marginal cells
those seem to be the only real advantages. Disadvantages compared to single swappable packs:
1. Less energy and power density because of spherical packing arrangement
2. Higher cost per Wh capacity because of the construction of the balls and contacts
3. Cooling the cells efficiently is impossible
4. Contradictory requirements for materials: to make contact reliably, the patches on the outside of each ball must be compliant. But that means they have to be thin, reducing their power handling ability and making wear and tear a problem
5. Requirement for a large storage tank inside the vehicle, which you can calculate must be larger than either a liquid fuel tank or an EV battery pack. The tank needs to be large in each dimension so it is nearly cubic
6. Multiple unproven technologies required: mesh power, randomly oriented contacts, air delivery (easily the wildest proposal if you understand how pneumatic tubes work), and on and on.
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Don't forget a delivery system that can exchange hundreds or thousands of those balls through forced air tubes without jamming in less than three minutes. That I'd like to see.
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I think it is a great idea, with a lot of problems, some of them are breaking it totally. Namely the contact resistance of these batteries. If you put a lot/all of them in series, you basically have a system, where you have a lot of batteries connected to each other by only a small surface, and small forces. The real EV batteries (not these tesla notebook ones) all have screw terminals and all use busbars and thick metal plates to make the connections. Replace it with two rounded surface touching each other randomly and you are asking for trouble.
Probably all the cells have to be in series to reach a voltage level to decrease the current, such the contact resistance doesnt matter anymore, but at around 500-600V you start having trouble with the electronics, MOSFETs stop behaving and IGBTs are pain.
So far I would have prefered the Renault-Nissan battery swap, but that went down the drain.
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Does anyone care to offer odds on the transfer system jamming badly enough that one or more charged spheres suffer sufficient shock damage to cause them to catch fire?
How many catastrophically failing spheres can the charging system hopper contain without the whole lot going up?
If the spheres have enough impact absorbing and fire protection material round their batteries to make these concerns dismissible, the energy density will be even lower . . . .
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This technology seems ahead of its time. Like maybe about 2 days ahead.
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Seems like a bunch of mobile phone guys got together with a bunch of marketing guys.
http://tanktwo.com/team/ (http://tanktwo.com/team/)
Here's the patents.
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/searchResults?DB=EPODOC&submitted=true&locale=en_EP&ST=singleline&compact=false&DB=EPODOC&query=tanktwo (http://worldwide.espacenet.com/searchResults?DB=EPODOC&submitted=true&locale=en_EP&ST=singleline&compact=false&DB=EPODOC&query=tanktwo)
https://tanktwo.com/tanktwo-blog-post/ (https://tanktwo.com/tanktwo-blog-post/)
They're tiny!
(https://tanktwo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/candy-in-hand-300x257.png?ac2611)
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Bumpy roads could be a problem: <bump>*rerouting*........<bump>*rerouting.... |O *rerouting*
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Even in some magical universe where spherically packing a bajillion separately packaged batteries was somehow not a spectacular waste of time, space, and weight; how do they expect this to gain critical mass among car manufacturers and charging stations?
I'm pretty sure that no engineer would ever want to be associated with such an awful project, I just can't tell if the whole idea is a result of incompetence or a deliberate scam.
I suppose the algorithms for routing paths through the spheres could have some niche uses, but nothing like what they are advertising.
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200A current thru those contacts? Yeah, sure... ::)
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At least we know who's going to do their marketing...
(http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luqd5yKukJ1qzwapfo1_400.jpg)
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The very front page asks a question: why not make the batteries smartphone smart: Anyone who's seen the latest EEVblog mailbag where Dave's phone craps itself randomly will know why not.
And the front page looks like it has marketing smeared all over it. |O
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Can't believe they the size of ping pong or squash balls, bugger all capacity. By the time you add up all the tech it meant to have and the construction of the casing for strength and shock. You be filling up more often than current EV.
Tesla are designed for fast charging, fastest possible as well as battery swap. EV are topped up every night at home, always full tank every morning.
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just think about the sound of exchanging them i would sound like you won a slot machine :-DD ding ding ding
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The ideal solution would be replacing a complete battery pack, but the trick is designing a car where such a large, heavy component can be quickly and easily removed without unduly compromising safety or performance. And of course, coming up with a standardized pack that can be fit into a wide range of vehicles. Probably the best way to do it is to have the pack slung under the car, but then you need to have access to the bottom of the car at every battery swap station--probably means a lift or a pit unless it's an SUV.
I wonder if a better solution than battery balls would be to use a standardized cylindrical cell. You could still have a large 'tank' of arbitrary size/shape that only needed a small outlet and inlet opening for getting spent and charged cells out and in, but cylinders will rest and pack more densely and predictably than balls, and can have larger contact surfaces on their ends. You could have the two contact-bearing sides of the walls press in to provide high contact force once the cells are in place. Contacts can be arranged to give whatever series/parallel arrangement is required.
The big challenge is feeding them in and out reliably; without a proper set of guides the cylinders will be even more prone to jamming then balls. Maybe having them snap together into a belt would be beneficial, with internal sprockets to help feed them into place.
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The big challenge is feeding them in and out reliably; without a proper set of guides the cylinders will be even more prone to jamming then balls. Maybe having them snap together into a belt would be beneficial, with internal sprockets to help feed them into place.
Mechanisms for feeding cylinders in and out are already highly evolved in automatic firearms. Look for a design called the HK73.
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Aluminum, Gallium and water to power Hydrogen fuel cells, the byproduct is aluminum oxide (alumina) and the Gallium is reused. At the "pump" you can recover the alumina that can be converted back to aluminium using solar or wind energy so that new aluminum pellets are available for the next customer.
http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007a/070515WoodallHydrogen.html (http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007a/070515WoodallHydrogen.html)
Not sure where this research is at, there are several companies trying to bring it to market with their own versions of the reactor to produce hydrogen on demand, to be used directly or via fuel cells to produce electricity.
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The real EV batteries (not these tesla notebook ones) all have screw terminals and all use busbars and thick metal plates to make the connections. Replace it with two rounded surface touching each other randomly and you are asking for trouble.
Not such a big deal-those surfaces will be.... spot welded in rush current and they will have useless EV wehicle full of soldered metal balls and sparks will destroy NASA mission to Mars while jamming their radio equipment :-DD
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I wonder if a better solution than battery balls would be to use a standardized cylindrical cell.
...like an 18650?
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:wtf:
A traffic spike to our website from the eevblog? I better get in on the action, before we're piled up with the Solar Roadways, Perpetuum mobile, and other BS stories.
We're for real. Let's do some debunking.
I smell BS! Can't be done! Marketing hype! Boo!
Skeptics are cool. I'm one of them.
But I also happen to have designed and built the HW, so there is another perspective, of which I'll share some here.
I might have to do some posts in between because this will take some typing.
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Welcome to the forum.
Your tone is a little upsetting. I haven't seen anyone here say that it can't be done or that it is simply BS. But they are questioning why it is better than other simpler ideas, that do not require an array of new technologies to be perfected at the same time. Engineering is not, like politics, the art of the possible: it is about finding solutions that are better and cheaper, not "if you build it, they will come" faff. To give you an example, wireless power in the home, such as the WiTricity concept, is obviously possible. Is it economic to install at this time, or in the foreseeable future?
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Engineering is not, like politics, the art of the possible: it is about finding solutions that are better and cheaper, not "if you build it, they will come" faff.
wait what? i must be studding the wrong thing :-DMM
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another solar road way type technology.
http://tanktwo.com/ (http://tanktwo.com/)
https://youtu.be/8BAk4l98GtY (https://youtu.be/8BAk4l98GtY)
I think its a Gimick, low energy density (casing and air gaps and electronics) and low current path due to point contacts and random connections will mean random voltage ranges.
:rant:
1) the best way to convince you would be to make you read the patents. It is heavy duty legalese mumbo jumbo, but the facts are there in all the glorious detail.
2) Let's do some numbers. The casing shape is an ellipsoid, with a very specific semi axis ratio (approximately 1.2:1:0.8) which is the shape with the highest known random packing density of any shape. It beats cubes, spheres and everything else.
Here is an interesting reference for you to dig into if you don't buy that argument to begin with: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EllipsoidPacking.html (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/EllipsoidPacking.html)
Wolfram alpha is cool, but after that read also the M&M packing density paper (fascinating, and you get to eat the experiment afterwards). By the way, the internal code name for the String Cell is "candy". We're not big on poetry, it's ok if you think that's lame.
So: "our" ellipsoids have a random packing density of approximately 76%, which we round down to 73% due to "wall effects" in small "tanks" and the process which is not perfect.
Next, the shell is already less than 10% of the volume at the current size (and there is lots of room for improvement). We also use a couple of percent of the volume for the PCB and the ASIC. Leaving, conservatively, 60% for electrodes and other real battery stuff.
Compared to a regular battery pack, that's pretty damn good to begin with, because the 20-something percent which is "lost" is used for cooling, something which other packs need to do too.
And a cylindrical cell, or a pouch cell for that matter, needs a casing of some sort too, which is arguably less in volume than our current plastic cell, but it is really not much to begin with - we're just a few percent behind already now. And we have our ways of filling that space entirely, batteries are not always rectangular or cylindrical - think wrist bands for wearables)
But, only then the things get interesting. We don't need an external BMS (battery management system), because it is integrated and distributed.
1) We don't need bus bars or thumb-thick cell wiring (a Tesla Model S P85D, to take a rather cool example, draws a bit of current when it is putting that Lambo Aventador to shame in an acceleration test). [Note: I'm not saying that the P85D has bus bars in their pack, but it is a nicer visual image than the Nissan Leaf. (Hi Nissan, I promise that if you want to buy our batteries I'll never say that again in public)].
2) We use light plastic tanks with no rigidity requirements, which are a major issue if you have a half ton plus pack. You can't have 7k cells sloshing around in a standard pack. This saves space, but more importantly a LOT of weight. Weight is harder to save on when you design a BEV.
The list is much longer beyond this, but from this point onward we are already on parity with the legacy systems.
Not all cells will be used as only those that meet the algorithm.
Well yes, obviously. But the exact utilization rate is what matters. And of course one of the things that the company is making money of is by developing algorithms that make better use of packs.
About the absolute numbers: even with simple routing algorithms (Think Dijkstra algorithm, which we all have learned in school, you can get already 90%+ utilization rate. Easily. Of course this depends on a boatload of other parameters, such as number of contacts on the string cell, placement of contacts, size of the "air gap", size, shape, number of channels (the contacts placed to the walls of the string battery, which is the enclosure or the "tank" if you will), and a ton of other variables. Getting close to 100% is easy, although admittedly not intuitive. Simulations and hardware prove it though.
This is basically a box of dry joints, any vibration would cause intermittent open circuits and arching.
Nope, wrong. Two reasons:
1) the dense ellipsoid packing naturally leaves little empty space, which also means there is little room for rattle. If you just fill a container, and shake it violently, you can barely hear any rattle to begin with. This is also not intuitive, but it's basic physics. In geometrical terms it is simply a matter of degrees of freedom. Think shaking a bag of sand vs. a bag of marbles.
2) the string battery container has a silicone bladder, which is pumped up with compressed air. Even with modest pressure applied, the string cells remain rock solid in place. The G forces found in a normal passenger vehicle don't come even close to what is needed to even marginally upset the arrangement.
3) contact resistance is a well understood section of engineering, as the connector wasn't invented yesterday. You need surprisingly little mechanical force to achieve an acceptable contact resistance value, if you use the appropriate alloys. In the early prototypes, we used gold. That works well, but is a little on the expensive side. Tinned copper, for example, has worked very well - a little bit to our surprise admittedly. Apparently the oxidation effects don't harm operation at all, and contact resistance is in the milliohm range. We probably won't use tin much going forward for certain reasons, but it is an illustration.
4) the string cells are smart, meaning they measure and control stuff, and also measure the current going through their contacts. The connections go through N-channel power MOSFETs, and when contact pressure is accidentally reduced and contact resistance goes up, the power FETs have disconnected the load long before the mechanical connection is severed. Hot plugging and unplugging requirements are nasty on connectors, but we remove that requirement by anticipating "hot unplugging" events it and removing current before it can cause a spark. It's surprisingly simple.
with most energy density you want the most chemical in the smallest volume, thats why you use liquids or powders or gels/pastes
Sure. That's why you won't see the Boeing or Airbus Leaf soon.
hell of a lot easier to just transfer electrons at high current and voltage then transfer battery balls.
Of course. That's why a car with our batteries can still be charged in the same way than any other electric car. And even when you have the capability to swap them, you won't do so most of the time.
Is there any spec on the cell? Ah capacity? dimensions? volume?
Of course. We don't quote capacity without NDA because there are variations on the battery chemistry options with impacts on price, longevity, peak current, and other parameters. But there is nothing special going on there, the battery chemistry are variants of the "standard" Lithium-ion cells and all options are available to our customers too.
I smell BullSh!T
Try getting new firmware for your nose.
Thanks for the feedback anyway. This will only make it better!
Bert
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Slick site with very little actual data. IMHO It's an interesting but impractical idea, I'll go as far as saying it's a bad idea.
I could name a handful of issues of the top of my head but instead I'll speculate the project will never go into production.
You're wrong with your speculation, but still would like to hear your issues. It is only by eliminating the issues one by one ourselves (the ones we could come up with) that we got it to be a product.
nope. the thing exists. I know the guy who invented it.
As a prototype? All the "photos" on the site appear to be CGI renders.
Okay. Let's post a few pictures of a proof of concept proto run from a year and a half ago. This is version three, still built with discrete components, and therefore not a lot of room for battery. But it is fully functional and was used to develop software on. Picture is in attachment.
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Seems TankTwo is at the get investors stage so slick presentations and press releases are top priority. But I couldn't find any actual data or independent test info at all.
We opened for business two weeks ago. Perhaps you are the kind of person with 100 or 200 million spare cash, but unfortunately we are not one of those.
So we had to start and grow like most other businesses grow: build something, sell it, build something better, sell something better. If you have a better idea, please share it!
We designed the best we could, and we built prototypes as many and as well as we could that are being evaluated by potential customers.
I simply don't see any practical use for it... I'm amazed this got off the drawing board.
That's fine, there are people that do see it. It's not surprising you are amazed because it is really quite cool - and indeed rather complex to execute.
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Hi, Bert,
Welcome to the forum and thanks for sharing your comments.
Could you comment a bit about tank size requirements and how it is supposed to fit in a car? What kind of capacity and voltage can you expect from single module (5-10 Wh at 3.7V)? Is the outer shell size determined at this point and will be fixed in the future?
Okay. Let's post a few pictures of a proof of concept proto run from a year and a half ago. This is version three, still built with discrete components, and therefore not a lot of room for battery. But it is fully functional and was used to develop software on. Picture is in attachment.
Can I have few of those assembled PCB for Easter? Those modules look like very funky eggs
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A well-maintained Tanktwo battery-equipped EV can have more capacity at resale than when it was new, allowing for unseen resale values.
....Small battery modules may have advantages (gradual replacement/upgrade of battery cells, quick refill) only if they are treated as such. If they are treated as a single battery pack, many advantages vanish (this would be the case if little or no infrastructure is built) in comparison to single battery pack unit.
Good you realize some of the ecosystem-level advantages, but your assessment of the benefit vanishing without infrastructure being present is fortunately not correct. While it is certainly true that it decreases, the net benefit is still significantly positive.
Many details are still in unreleased patents, but I'll share three elements that bring us to break even.
From the Li-ion battery wear data you can see various complex phenomena occurring at the same time, compounding and influencing one another in various ways, but certain basic things hold true.
Therefore (although I'm simplifying for the sake of the argument):
- the fuller you charge and the deeper you discharge, the more wear is induced
- the shape of the "SoC vs. wear curve" is a standard bathtub
- fuller charging and deeper discharging effects at a dynamic rate over the lifecycle, ie. the edges of the tub become blurred (think Monte-Carlo analysis curves)
- limiting temperature excursions is very important for longevity
- Commercial BEV cells have bricking-reserves and lifetime optimizing reserves roughly between 15 and as much as 40%
Therefore:
1) if you optimize SoC limits for each individual cell as it ages and the variance grows, you can extract a significantly higher useful charge out of the pack as a whole
2) if you throttle cells individually to optimize for limited delta t, (caused by wear induced ESR changes, less optimal cooling conditions in the corner of a pack etc.), the longevity can be maintained while extracting more capacity (or more longevity @ same capacity).
3) if you choose to widen your SoC limits, and accept a higher FFR down the road, you can simply replace those cells at a maintenance center after, say, 5 years. You can build the cost of that replacement rate into the sticker price, and push the pack as a whole significantly higher. This is purely a business model exercise and requires no service stations - only a cell segregator at the maintenance center which is in essence a glorified shop vac.
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I have not thought about dynamically enabling/disabling separate cells to improve overall wear, charge levels and other parameters. In comparison, big sealed single battery pack is not that flexible - some cells wear out unevenly and cannot be replaced in the future.
With this in mind, even single EV with such technology and little external infrastructure could benefit from improved battery management.
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If you wanted to recharge an electric-drive car's battery pack in 1h, you would need an electrical circuit rated for 400A/240V and a battery able to absorb that much energy that fast. Easier said than done and some people may have trouble handling cables that thick.
Tesla is doing fine with their Supercharger concept, but it has some limitations, grid load wise and for a few other reasons too. It seems though that cramming 130kW through a rather modest cable works fine.
The dry joint issue can be mostly solved by simply adding an air bladder at the top to compress the balls after they have been loaded so cells won't shift or break contact so easily.
That's how we do it! Other methods have proven to work, too.
I agree that energy density, both by volume and mass, would be questionable at best - stacked lithium cells are already at the limits of being practical without the extra weight and volume of fully enclosing individual cells, along with the routing MOSFETs' losses.
See my comments elsewhere. Your skepticism here is warranted but the numbers work out great. The RDSon values make the losses insignificant at the currents involved.
As for some cells not getting used, that is not necessarily a significant issue as long as you only get billed for the difference between the charge in the cells you dumped and the cells you picked up.
That, too is correct. Even though we don't talk much about that yet.
It would be much simpler to simply come up with standard EV battery pack sizes, capacities and locations so they can be quickly swapped out when fast-charging is either not possible or still not fast enough. If swappable batteries become part of the energy delivery infrastructure rather than individual property, battery packs would get progressively upgraded over time to deliver more billable capacity at lower labor and material costs.
Better Place spent $1.1B pushing that model like there was no tomorrow, but it failed. The list of reasons is a mile long, but the three most important ones seem to be that
1) one size fits all does not apply to transportation. Granularity is required.
2) swapping stations for packs are expensive and fragile
3) You don't want to receive a $20k battery of unknown history - the reverse logistics needs to be trustworthy before you want to participate.
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Seems very much like the strategy of swapping battery packs for range extension. Except for the differences:
1. Since there are many small batteries, they can be derated/replaced at a finer granularity
2. Dynamic mesh power reduces impact of single failed cells, and can keep using marginal cells
Correct, good analysis. Not complete though - but I'll comment on your your perceived disadvantages below.
those seem to be the only real advantages. Disadvantages compared to single swappable packs:
1. Less energy and power density because of spherical packing arrangement
This is not correct. I've explained elsewhere a few reasons why this is not the case.
2. Higher cost per Wh capacity because of the construction of the balls and contacts
That is not correct either. It is true that while at the moment we cannot yet build you a battery at a competitive price, but already at very modest volumes we can be cost competitive.
Another, not earlier mentioned argument, is that smaller cells cost less per Wh than large ones, the most important reason being the same why large dies suffer from lower yield, but also because guaranteed FFR rates can be lower with our batteries vs. the competition.
3. Cooling the cells efficiently is impossible
How so? That's what the space between the cells is for. Air cooling is even sufficient, keep in mind that each cell does duty cycle control to begin with. The cells can also be liquid cooled but so far no application has required it.
4. Contradictory requirements for materials: to make contact reliably, the patches on the outside of each ball must be compliant. But that means they have to be thin, reducing their power handling ability and making wear and tear a problem
That is partially correct, in the sense that it is an engineering trade-off.
However, the current that each cell sinks our sources is so low that the power handling is not even close to being a limiting factor. The 18650 cell fuse links in a Tesla Model S battery are high double digit AWG wires too, nothing special going on there.
Wear resistance is also fairly easy to achieve, but keep in mind that most people will only occasionally do a battery swap. They'll charge their car in their garage or on their driveway most of the time, as they do today.
5. Requirement for a large storage tank inside the vehicle, which you can calculate must be larger than either a liquid fuel tank or an EV battery pack. The tank needs to be large in each dimension so it is nearly cubic
The volumetric requirements for the container are roughly comparable to a pack of comparable capacity. There are few constraints on the shape, which can be extremely irregular.
6. Multiple unproven technologies required: mesh power, randomly oriented contacts, air delivery (easily the wildest proposal if you understand how pneumatic tubes work), and on and on.
That's true, the system implements various new methodologies from several disciplines.
Progress would not be possible without someone proving unproven things.
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I appreciate that you are responding point by point to comments. That is really everything that should be expected for PR in an engineering forum, so good job there.
I still don't understand how you can say that the packing is space efficient. Surely if it was, then every large storage battery would contain rounded instead of flat elements? I suppose you're including the space taken by the bus bars, cooling channels, module BMS, and module rails in an EV pack in that comparison.
The comment about efficient cooling is based on teardowns of Tesla battery packs, which are liquid cooled. I could be wrong, but liquid cooling over the cells only seems feasible if connections that lie inside the liquid volume are permanently welded. You might be able to use gas-tight connectors but they add cost (expensive connectors but even more in assembly time cost). Liquid cooling also seems incompatible with an air delivery system. So the alternative is air cooling, but that requires a higher W/K cell package to achieve the same system efficiency.
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Welcome to the forum Bert, I originally read about TankTwo on Electric Motorcycle Forum. Glad to have helped in highlighting your product. It is a original and unique idea, just does not seem practical / economical unless you planning on a monopoly like the fuel industry has.
http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=4496.0 (http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=4496.0)
By the way the Zero motorcycles have the highest capacity/kg of any battery pack 184Wh/kg air cooled, compared to Tesla Roadster 117Wh/kg and Model S 140Wh/kg liquid cooled.
We needed specs for the most important part of your smart battery, the cell capacity. What is your expected Wh/kg?.
Then we will be able to make fair jugdement.
Every week there is a new upstart or lab promising break through in new battery technology.
I like to apologize for being harsh on your product, making statements without facts, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. I support any tech that promotes EV and gets us better efficeny than burning dinosaurs.
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Don't forget a delivery system that can exchange hundreds or thousands of those balls through forced air tubes without jamming in less than three minutes. That I'd like to see.
It's not done the way you think it would be done, but it is simpler than you think.
Moreover, pneumatic conveying is a very mature technology which you can buy off the shelf from many industrial suppliers already today.
I think it is a great idea, with a lot of problems, some of them are breaking it totally. Namely the contact resistance of these batteries. If you put a lot/all of them in series, you basically have a system, where you have a lot of batteries connected to each other by only a small surface, and small forces. The real EV batteries (not these tesla notebook ones) all have screw terminals and all use busbars and thick metal plates to make the connections. Replace it with two rounded surface touching each other randomly and you are asking for trouble.
Obviously we are not cramming half a kA through two metal thingies that gently nudge one another. The system is distributed to the extreme and the contact resistances are not an issue in any way.
Probably all the cells have to be in series to reach a voltage level to decrease the current, such the contact resistance doesnt matter anymore, but at around 500-600V you start having trouble with the electronics, MOSFETs stop behaving and IGBTs are pain.
You're observation about the semiconductor limitations is correct - but you are going down the wrong path for the solution. The FETs see a Vds of a couple dozen volts max.
So far I would have prefered the Renault-Nissan battery swap, but that went down the drain.
Sometimes businesses fail, and then someone else tries to do it better.
Does anyone care to offer odds on the transfer system jamming badly enough that one or more charged spheres suffer sufficient shock damage to cause them to catch fire?
You can't shoot them from a cannon, but their exposure to G forces encountered during all foreseeable handling scenarios won't do them any harm.
Additionally, there are safety mechanisms in place to deal with the theoretical worst-case scenario.
How many catastrophically failing spheres can the charging system hopper contain without the whole lot going up?
That's a good question, but they aren't spheres, for a reason. See my answer above.
If the spheres have enough impact absorbing and fire protection material round their batteries to make these concerns dismissible, the energy density will be even lower . . . .
A fair assumption, but that's not how we do it. Think how airplanes decelerate to get an idea.
This technology seems ahead of its time. Like maybe about 2 days ahead.
It's the technology of tomorrow, so you're about a day off.
Seems like a bunch of mobile phone guys got together with a bunch of marketing guys.
http://tanktwo.com/team/ (http://tanktwo.com/team/)
Not everyone is on there. But they are saying hi anyway. We're fans of EEVblog too :)
Here's the patents.
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/searchResults?DB=EPODOC&submitted=true&locale=en_EP&ST=singleline&compact=false&DB=EPODOC&query=tanktwo (http://worldwide.espacenet.com/searchResults?DB=EPODOC&submitted=true&locale=en_EP&ST=singleline&compact=false&DB=EPODOC&query=tanktwo)
https://tanktwo.com/tanktwo-blog-post/ (https://tanktwo.com/tanktwo-blog-post/)
They're tiny!
(https://tanktwo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/candy-in-hand-300x257.png?ac2611)
Let me know if anyone has chewed through the patents. Apparently it shows it wasn't Stephen King who wrote them (sorry).
Bumpy roads could be a problem: <bump>*rerouting*........<bump>*rerouting.... |O *rerouting*
Good thinking, but no. Explained elsewhere.
Even in some magical universe where spherically packing a bajillion separately packaged batteries was somehow not a spectacular waste of time, space, and weight; how do they expect this to gain critical mass among car manufacturers and charging stations?
You should leave cyberspace and visit our universe some day. The solution is called "trying to run a business."
Success is not guaranteed and luck is needed, but unless you're a fan of North Korea, you'll have to agree that this is how it's done.
PS: they are not spheres.
I'm pretty sure that no engineer would ever want to be associated with such an awful project
Unless your name is Einstein, Hewlett, Packard, Horowitz, Shockley, Bardeen, Noyce, Grove, Woz, Williams or Pease, I think that's not how you are supposed to behave on the playground.
If you're Heidi Klum I'm ok with it though.
I suppose the algorithms for routing paths through the spheres could have some niche uses, but nothing like what they are advertising.
Maybe you don't understand it all well enough yet? Please read the patents.
PS: They are not spheres.
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but from this point onward we are already on parity with the legacy systems.
No, no you're not.
If you have a OEM approved productionised battery system that is in fully type approved and in volume production with the same energy density as conventional EV batteries then yes, you have parity.
If you have a bunch of designs, prototypes and some sums / simulations, but nothing else you are so far away it's not even funny. I'm not sure if you have worked directly in the Tier1 / OEM automotive industry, but until you have that experience i can tell you that bringing a theoretical system to volume production is no small task.
For example, on a low volume(375 units) ultra high performance hybrid project that i worked on, we had the prototype battery system working in under 3 months. It took another 2.5 years and approx £10M to get that to production.......
This is the sort of thing you will be up against:
http://www.cenex-lcv.co.uk/2013/presentations2013/day2/dome2/D2D2S2-Allan-Paterson.pdf (http://www.cenex-lcv.co.uk/2013/presentations2013/day2/dome2/D2D2S2-Allan-Paterson.pdf)
i.e. the largest, most established, Teir1 suppliers in the business are investing millions already in this field.
You seem to be incredibly nonchalant about the thermal performance of your system, and yet, this is CRITICAL to the systems real world performance, more so that things like cell Ri, or absolute maximum energy density etc.
Sorry to say, whilst i wish you the best of luch, there's no way i'd be investing in your company, based on the facts at hand.
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By the way the Zero motorcycles have the highest capacity/kg of any battery pack 184Wh/kg air cooled, compared to Tesla Roadster 117Wh/kg and Model S 140Wh/kg liquid cooled.
That ^^^ should set some alarm bells ringing i'd hope, as it tells you something very important about passenger car batterys!
(namely, that even a company as forward thinking/innovative/cash rich as Tesla, has had to compromise on Energy density in order to meet practical and legislative limitations(and use a liquid cooled pack, like EVERYONE else........)
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I suppose the algorithms for routing paths through the spheres could have some niche uses
Cool - a 3D travelling purchaser problem (TPP) - and NP-hard :-\
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2) Let's do some numbers. The casing shape is an ellipsoid, with a very specific semi axis ratio (approximately 1.2:1:0.8) which is the shape with the highest known random packing density of any shape. It beats cubes, spheres and everything else.
Yep, they have a big chance to make epic win, but in this kind of research http://www.improbable.com/ig/ (http://www.improbable.com/ig/) :-DD
(http://www.improbable.com/stinkers/stinker-250.gif)
I like math too... Did you calculated this battery energy density per m^3 (cubic meters)?
Probably you should from this perfect eliptic shape substract volume of ... those blooddy PCBs needed to show frustrated investors that this thing can powerup something and they need invest more to run EV vehicle >:D
Yep, I was thinking that my flywheel battery is :bullshit: but looking around and findidng projects and ideas like this battery balls, probably I have much higher energy density even in made at home KERS and no need to fill battery space with... PCBs, but something that can store energy :palm:
Anyway this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery) is for years in industry and... charged fluid can be simply replaced with used one, so no need to mess with bloody :bullshit: balls battery :o
VRB ESS - Vanadium Redox Battery (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utuapj-BaGA#)
PRUDENT ENERGY and the VRB-ESS (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsXLIZ42wlU#)
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Better Place spent $1.1B pushing that model like there was no tomorrow, but it failed. The list of reasons is a mile long, but the three most important ones seem to be that
1) one size fits all does not apply to transportation. Granularity is required.
2) swapping stations for packs are expensive and fragile
3) You don't want to receive a $20k battery of unknown history - the reverse logistics needs to be trustworthy before you want to participate.
Granularity can be achieved with standardized battery packs too: decide on a baseline unit, say 200V 50AH, then equip vehicles with a multiple of those in combination series-parallel to meet performance and range requirements.
As for having a battery with unknown history, the same goes with TankTwo: you have hundreds of unknowns histories in the tank. By buying into any batteries-as-infrastructure scheme, you are trusting the battery ecosystem to maintain the battery/cell park and refurbish/retire bad packs/cells as necessary. The packs/cells individual history should not matter since the ecosystem should be ensuring the packs/cells it circulates are still within specs. An energy ecosystem where people cannot trust the infrastructure is not going to last long. If you are going to tell me TankTwo cells have built-in history, monitoring and logging circuitry could be added to hypothetical standardized-format packs too.
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200A current thru those contacts? Yeah, sure... ::)
How about 200A through 15k contacts?
I read their patents, and they are bullshit.
Either you haven't read them, or you don't understand them.
It's more like a many batteries auto connecting system, a "high power network" router?
Yes.
There is no storage innovations. I think they are making small battery cells, and make them auto connecting to each other, and replace a batch of cells when they're depleted.
If you are unable or don't feel like plugging it in, that is an option, yes.
Might be a good idea for fast "refueling", but I can not see why it is better, compared to swappable bulk li-ion batteries preconfigured as a module.
Maybe because you haven't read the patents? :)
At least we know who's going to do their marketing...
(http://31.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luqd5yKukJ1qzwapfo1_400.jpg)
Update your link - our marketing guy has a beard.
The very front page asks a question: why not make the batteries smartphone smart: Anyone who's seen the latest EEVblog mailbag where Dave's phone craps itself randomly will know why not.
And you are reading the forum from a rotary phone, a typewriter or a clay tablet?
And the front page looks like it has marketing smeared all over it. |O
If you want to sell your stuff, you need to market it. Think about it as having to accept that cow dung needs to exist if you want to have ice cream.
Can't believe they the size of ping pong or squash balls, bugger all capacity. By the time you add up all the tech it meant to have and the construction of the casing for strength and shock. You be filling up more often than current EV.
Maybe you need to look at the facts before you make broad claims about something. It's bad for your street cred.
Tesla are designed for fast charging, fastest possible as well as battery swap. EV are topped up every night at home, always full tank every morning.
That's no different with our solution. You just have an extra option.
just think about the sound of exchanging them i would sound like you won a slot machine :-DD ding ding ding
Unfortunately not. Should we add it to the feature list? :)
And the grand prize is a fire, and a burnt car.
Finally something to put on YouTube!
The ideal solution would be replacing a complete battery pack, but the trick is designing a car where such a large, heavy component can be quickly and easily removed without unduly compromising safety or performance. And of course, coming up with a standardized pack that can be fit into a wide range of vehicles. Probably the best way to do it is to have the pack slung under the car, but then you need to have access to the bottom of the car at every battery swap station--probably means a lift or a pit unless it's an SUV.
Pack swap is a well tried and tested but failed technology, mainly commercially. Better Place tried it. Tesla tried it. Maybe Tesla succeeds, but they don't really need it because they have the Superchargers.
I wonder if a better solution than battery balls would be to use a standardized cylindrical cell. You could still have a large 'tank' of arbitrary size/shape that only needed a small outlet and inlet opening for getting spent and charged cells out and in, but cylinders will rest and pack more densely and predictably than balls, and can have larger contact surfaces on their ends. You could have the two contact-bearing sides of the walls press in to provide high contact force once the cells are in place. Contacts can be arranged to give whatever series/parallel arrangement is required.
Good thinking, it has been tried. I don't have a link at hand but patents describing exactly that have been filed. It's mechanically a lot harder than what we are doing. We seriously considered it as an option.
The big challenge is feeding them in and out reliably; without a proper set of guides the cylinders will be even more prone to jamming then balls. Maybe having them snap together into a belt would be beneficial, with internal sprockets to help feed them into place.
Also the size of the system is problematic, so is the swapping speed.
Mechanisms for feeding cylinders in and out are already highly evolved in automatic firearms. Look for a design called the HK73.
That's a relevant reference actually. It isn't however implemented as easily in practice for a battery.
Aluminum, Gallium and water to power Hydrogen fuel cells, the byproduct is aluminum oxide (alumina) and the Gallium is reused. At the "pump" you can recover the alumina that can be converted back to aluminium using solar or wind energy so that new aluminum pellets are available for the next customer.
http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007a/070515WoodallHydrogen.html (http://www.purdue.edu/uns/x/2007a/070515WoodallHydrogen.html)
Not sure where this research is at, there are several companies trying to bring it to market with their own versions of the reactor to produce hydrogen on demand, to be used directly or via fuel cells to produce electricity.
I wish them the best. We pick the winning technology, at the moment it is Li-ion.
The real EV batteries (not these tesla notebook ones) all have screw terminals and all use busbars and thick metal plates to make the connections. Replace it with two rounded surface touching each other randomly and you are asking for trouble.
Not such a big deal-those surfaces will be.... spot welded in rush current and they will have useless EV wehicle full of soldered metal balls and sparks will destroy NASA mission to Mars while jamming their radio equipment :-DD
I think Tesla won't agree that their batteries aren't real. And Nasa isn't buying, now I know why!
I wonder if a better solution than battery balls would be to use a standardized cylindrical cell.
...like an 18650?
:)
Welcome to the forum.
Thank you! As I said elsewhere, we're big fans of the EEVblog. Quiet ones though. Except maybe today? :rant:
Your tone is a little upsetting.
Apologies, that was not intentional. In my defense, I'm sure you understand that people calling us stupid (and our baby ugly!) doesn't bring out the best in us. We have a much nicer side though, which will surface over time.
I haven't seen anyone here say that it can't be done or that it is simply BS.
I have, but that's ok. The vast majority of people though are open for a reasonable discussion so it's for them that I spent the last few hours typing here. It's not the best investment of my time for our young company, so see it as an engineer's disease that can't be cured.
But they are questioning why it is better than other simpler ideas, that do not require an array of new technologies to be perfected at the same time.
Fair enough! One of the things that is cool about our approach is that it works with manageable technology and complexity for today, which makes the technical and business risk acceptable. It uses methods that don't "belong" in the battery business, but that's the new insight which helps us ahead.
Engineering is not, like politics, the art of the possible: it is about finding solutions that are better and cheaper, not "if you build it, they will come" faff.
I could not agree more. We looked at Better Place, analyzed their flawed business model, and built a new perfected business model based on technology we have within reach.
To give you an example, wireless power in the home, such as the WiTricity concept, is obviously possible. Is it economic to install at this time, or in the foreseeable future?
Total agreement here. When I have urges to build something because I can, I design a receiver or whatever that has no commercial viability whatsoever. That does not apply to what we do here.
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Compare with commercial distribution of compressed gasses:
There are two basic options: rental cylinder (owned by the distributor) or customer owned cylinder. In most cases the cylinders are identical apart from a paint-job and the distributor's stamp on the neck of a rental cylinder Both must be hydro-tested at regular (but fairly long) intervals, the owner being responsible for testing costs. Rental cylinders are usually simply exchanged for a full one, though dealers may offer an exchange on a customer owned cylinder if they stock the same size/type.
Presumably the customer would rent the battery modules and the distributor would be responsible for depreciation and maintenance costs as long as the built-in dataloggers didn't report abnormal external conditions during storage or use. Probably a guaranteed minimum trade in value backed by a 3rd party bond would be required so customers could be assured of the percentage of their deposit they'd get back at end of vehicle life.
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Anyway this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery) is for years in industry and... charged fluid can be simply replaced with used one, so no need to mess with bloody :bullshit: balls battery :o
Except VBR has energy density roughly on par with lead-acid. Also, I am not convinced it would be safe to have people draining and refilling tanks containing a relatively strong Vanadium acid and base. I bet people cross-contaminating their positive electrolyte with negative and vice-versa would be an issue too: even if it does not harm the cell stacks themselves, it will degrade energy density and performance until the contamination gets flushed out.
Look at the size of those 175kW cell stacks in their videos. Even half that size to provide about 100HP worth of electrical power would still use quite a bit of space, add quite a bit of weight and that's without counting the 50L tanks (or more) for each electrolyte, the pumps, nitrogen extractors to flush other gases out of the system to prevent corrosion and whatever other support infrastructure the system needs.
Sounds great for stationary application where size and weight do not matter much and the system becomes a closed loop after commissioning aside from occasional maintenance but not so much for individual mobile use as a frequently opened loop.
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Could you comment a bit about tank size requirements and how it is supposed to fit in a car? What kind of capacity and voltage can you expect from single module (5-10 Wh at 3.7V)? Is the outer shell size determined at this point and will be fixed in the future?
The standard design uses 3.7V Li-ion chemistry. Capacity scales almost linearly with size except in the smallest models. Our customers could order (or make) them in any size roughly between a hazelnut and a lemon. So far however, no one has asked for a different size than the standard 42mm one. Capacity varies as stated before, but low double digit Wh is the right ballpark.
The string battery (the enclosure) is sized to provide the required capacity. I cannot provide detailed numbers, but the energy density per volume unit is in the 300Wh/l range. So 30l will give you 10kWh, a bit less for cheaper batteries, a bit more for the dearer ones.
Can I have few of those assembled PCB for Easter? Those modules look like very funky eggs
That depends on which customer you work for :)
I have not thought about dynamically enabling/disabling separate cells to improve overall wear, charge levels and other parameters. In comparison, big sealed single battery pack is not that flexible - some cells wear out unevenly and cannot be replaced in the future.
With this in mind, even single EV with such technology and little external infrastructure could benefit from improved battery management.
Correct analysis.
I appreciate that you are responding point by point to comments. That is really everything that should be expected for PR in an engineering forum, so good job there.
I won't be doing this for a long time but for now all questions are fair game! Excuse my brevity due to the large volume I am going through.
I still don't understand how you can say that the packing is space efficient. Surely if it was, then every large storage battery would contain rounded instead of flat elements? I suppose you're including the space taken by the bus bars, cooling channels, module BMS, and module rails in an EV pack in that comparison.
Correct. It is a pack-for-pack volume and mass comparison.
The comment about efficient cooling is based on teardowns of Tesla battery packs, which are liquid cooled. I could be wrong, but liquid cooling over the cells only seems feasible if connections that lie inside the liquid volume are permanently welded. You might be able to use gas-tight connectors but they add cost (expensive connectors but even more in assembly time cost). Liquid cooling also seems incompatible with an air delivery system. So the alternative is air cooling, but that requires a higher W/K cell package to achieve the same system efficiency.
Good thinking, but keep in mind that ours have a large metal outer surface with excellent thermal conductivity.
Welcome to the forum Bert, I originally read about TankTwo on Electric Motorcycle Forum.
Thanks, and I didn't know we were covered there! Thanks for the coverage.
Glad to have helped in highlighting your product. It is a original and unique idea, just does not seem practical / economical unless you planning on a monopoly like the fuel industry has.
Not really, because you can swap any EV battery with our battery, forget about the swappability and the idea still works without that one feature. In the same way as many Tesla Model Ses support pack swapping but won't ever use it.
http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=4496.0 (http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=4496.0)
By the way the Zero motorcycles have the highest capacity/kg of any battery pack 184Wh/kg air cooled, compared to Tesla Roadster 117Wh/kg and Model S 140Wh/kg liquid cooled.
And that depends how you measure it (do you include the coolant circulation system, etc.)
Same story here with the specs in that they vary, but we do a little better than the numbers above what the specific density is concerned. Air cooling does limit certain sustained high peak power cases, such as the P85D requires at full acceleration, which is not feasible for a long period of time without liquid cooling..
We needed specs for the most important part of your smart battery, the cell capacity. What is your expected Wh/kg?.
Then we will be able to make fair jugdement. Every week there is a new upstart or lab promising break through in new battery technology.
I said above already way more than I should.
Yes, we've been promised the sky (and then some) many times over. What we're doing different is that we don't require any nobel prize level progress in chemistry or any other magic to happen, it is just a different way of handling things.
GTG, more later.
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By the way the Zero motorcycles have the highest capacity/kg of any battery pack 184Wh/kg air cooled, compared to Tesla Roadster 117Wh/kg and Model S 140Wh/kg liquid cooled.
That ^^^ should set some alarm bells ringing i'd hope, as it tells you something very important about passenger car batterys!
(namely, that even a company as forward thinking/innovative/cash rich as Tesla, has had to compromise on Energy density in order to meet practical and legislative limitations(and use a liquid cooled pack, like EVERYONE else........)
motor bikes don't have the luxury of size and volume of cars, hence they using different battery technology and packaging, Tesla deliberately choose 18650 cells and use 7,140 of them because they are the cheapest cell available in volume, used in power tools etc.
Zero cells are custom design.
Zero gives a 5 year 100,000 miles warranty on battery pack system.
Here is an interview of Zero design ideals.
http://www.cycleworld.com/2015/03/25/on-the-record-abe-askenazi-cto-zero-electric-motorcycles-cycle-world-interview/ (http://www.cycleworld.com/2015/03/25/on-the-record-abe-askenazi-cto-zero-electric-motorcycles-cycle-world-interview/)
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Bert.
How many Wh is each cell? (300Wh per cubic meter?)
How many kWh for a typical tank? (the Tesla has 60 - 85kWh under the seats)
How much does a typical cubic meter of cells weigh?
How long to recharge in the battery tower refill station?
How do you insure the batteries are topped off when you refill?
How does the tank put pressure on the cells to maintain good contact?
Does the tank work if let's say 50% full?
How do you locate bad balls? I assume they're sorted during the tank empty process.
IMHO.
They only features I see are 3min fillup time and and dead cell replacement. You'll need distribution stations and you're going to have a near impossible task in the US (look at the crap that Tesla has to put up with in many states). You'll also need auto manufactures on board or you have zero chance go getting off the ground (do you have any confirmed vehicle manufactures on board?). It's also going to need real world testing, that'll take significant time and money.
As battery technology improves and it will, a typical EV will likely average 200 or more km per charge, for most commuters this is plenty. Longer range consumers will opt for hybrids as they do now and fill up on fossil fuel once a week. 2016 is likely to see Hydrogen vehicles getting hyped by manufacturers over EV.
A far better solution is a replaceable battery pack, it's been tried but because it adds cost & weight it's a hard sell to money conscious consumers it's down the ladder of must have auto accessories.
My crystal ball sees no future for battery balls. It does see self driving cars that don't need handholding to keep their cells topped up. It also sees inductive coupling at intersections so EV can get a quick top up if needed.
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Granularity can be achieved with standardized battery packs too: decide on a baseline unit, say 200V 50AH, then equip vehicles with a multiple of those in combination series-parallel to meet performance and range requirements.
This is true to a certain degree. Paralleling does not work well when aging differences start to emerge.
As for having a battery with unknown history, the same goes with TankTwo: you have hundreds of unknowns histories in the tank.
Says who? Read the patent papers if you want the details.
By buying into any batteries-as-infrastructure scheme, you are trusting the battery ecosystem to maintain the battery/cell park and refurbish/retire bad packs/cells as necessary. The packs/cells individual history should not matter since the ecosystem should be ensuring the packs/cells it circulates are still within specs. An energy ecosystem where people cannot trust the infrastructure is not going to last long. If you are going to tell me TankTwo cells have built-in history, monitoring and logging circuitry could be added to hypothetical standardized-format packs too.
That's certainly true, and yes they do all of that. I have never claimed that the Tanktwo system does something that cannot be applied elsewhere, as a matter of fact, the whole design logic is such that we reuse as much as possible..
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Compare with commercial distribution of compressed gasses:
There are two basic options: ...
This is an excellent insight, and you are halfway there. Certain specifics need to be added to calculate residual value correctly and to ensure safety, authentication and provisioning.
Ownership, leasing, renting, lease-to-own, and closed systems are all possible models. The business model defines the operational mode.
Reverse logistics from industrial gas distribution systems was indeed the baseline.
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Bert.
How many Wh is each cell? (300Wh per cubic meter?)
Both have been said before. It depends on how much you want to spend on the chemistry. >10Wh. Volumetric density is >300W/l. The liter is an SI unit.
How many kWh for a typical tank? (the Tesla has 60 - 85kWh under the seats)
How typical is your tank? 60l? Then you can get roughly 20kWh. Less if you optimize for cost, more if you optimize for density. I know the model S pack quite well, for an outsider.
How much does a typical cubic meter of cells weigh?
That varies too, as said before, and also has been addressed. We do significantly more than 100W/kg.
How long to recharge in the battery tower refill station?
Normal charging is <0.75C. Fast Charging >1C. Cell Swap <180s.
How do you insure the batteries are topped off when you refill?
How about just counting them? Topping off is not needed.
How does the tank put pressure on the cells to maintain good contact?
Has been addressed before, an inflatable silicone bladder system and a tiny air pump work fine.
Does the tank work if let's say 50% full?
Of course.
How do you locate bad balls? I assume they're sorted during the tank empty process.
Good call.
IMHO.
They only features I see are 3min fillup time and and dead cell replacement. You'll need distribution stations
No, not needed. It's the same thing as saying that you can't sell Tesla Model S cars without installed battery swap systems. Maybe you are not easily impressed, that's ok.
You'll also need auto manufactures on board or you have zero chance go getting off the ground
You might want to consider that we, too, came to the same conclusion a little while ago.
(do you have any confirmed vehicle manufactures on board?). It's also going to need real world testing, that'll take significant time and money.
Darn. We always thought that it was effortless and free, just like type approval, EMC, UL, CE, and the other labels we were planning to buy off eBay! :-[
As battery technology improves and it will, a typical EV will likely average 200 or more km per charge, for most commuters this is plenty. Longer range consumers will opt for hybrids as they do now and fill up on fossil fuel once a week. 2016 is likely to see Hydrogen vehicles getting hyped by manufacturers over EV.
A far better solution is a replaceable battery pack, it's been tried but because it adds cost & weight it's a hard sell to money conscious consumers it's down the ladder of must have auto accessories.
My crystal ball sees no future for battery balls. It does see self driving cars that don't need handholding to keep their cells topped up. It also sees inductive coupling at intersections so EV can get a quick top up if needed.
I appreciate your feedback!
edit: fixed some nested quoting mess
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2016 is likely to see Hydrogen vehicles getting hyped by manufacturers over EV.
The last battery replacement technology I remember seeing hyped was ethanol/methanol fuel cells: cleaner and more efficient than internal combustion, safer and easier to manufacture than hydrogen. Some fuel cell manufacturers have models that can accept some combinations of methanol, ethanol, gasoline and hydrogen for convenience.
The big missing piece is having a cost-effective and scalable method of creating methanol/ethanol and there are a few companies working on ways to do that using algae or waste vegetable matter instead of the traditional corn, sugar cane and other methods involving edible plants.
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Bert, because the arrival of the battery balls in a tank is pseudo-random (at least that is how I understand it), is there a concern for a sub-optimal distribution of batteries with different supply/age characteristics occurring ? The mesh can solve some problems, but not all of them.
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Do you get different grades of battery ball at the pump? :-DD
Premium - Newish and selected for high loads and high capacity
Regular - Middle aged and not outstanding
Economy - Near end of life or reduced load or capacity
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Perhaps Vincent can correct me or elaborate, but I thought I heard somewhere the Tesla plan down the road was for you to pull up to a tesla station, drive over an apparatus, and the battery pack is pulled of the bottom of the car and a freshly charged one is put in its place and off you go. That sounds like the most practical solution. Just like exchanging welding tanks. They don't fill your tank. They just hand you another full one.
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It sounds like they are planning to make battery packs cheaper by adding expensive electronics to each cell, and make them denser by adding air space :-//
(Does anyone else remember Ball Semiconductor?)
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How much does a typical cubic meter of cells weigh?
That varies too, as said before, and also has been addressed. We do significantly more than 100W/kg.
Do you have mechanical background?
Question was about cells density = weight/volume [kg/m^3] :-DD
You gave technical guys marketing spam answer in [W/kg] units right?
So, lets assume your battery has... air density 1.2 [kg/m^3] since... you din't show in claimed proof of concept nothing what can store energy but a few layers of PCB and AIR between them :-DD
Sorry, but for the moment it qualifies for Ig Nobel price and this :bullshit: since even rotating steel ring at decent speed will be able store energy.
Yes, if you put insteed of those bloody PCBs steel balls and spin them at desent RPM speed much more energy can be stored than in your inovation >:D
Why? That is simple density of steel is around 7860 [kg/m^3], so 6550 times higher than your AIR battery :--
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Yes, if you put insteed of those bloody PCBs steel balls and spin them at desent RPM speed much more energy can be stored than in your inovation >:D
A 10Wh battery stores 36kJ (10 joules per second for 3600 seconds) worth of energy. How fast would you need to spin a steel ball of similar volume to store 36kJ as inertia?
Decent RPM? If your steel was in the form of a 200 grams ring with a 2cm radius to fit in a similar volume to these balls, you have q = m * v^2/2 so v = sqrt(2*36kJ / 0.2kg) = 600m/s and to achieve that linear speed, it would need to be rotating at half a million RPM. Unless you have a perfect vacuum and frictionless bearings inside your rotating storage, your losses will be horrible and that is before we add the extra components to pump energy in/out of it or the impossibility of forming 200 grams of steel into such a small ring.
Inertia energy storage is woefully inefficient at small scales. It is better suited for MVA-scale application like electric grid dampeners/synchronizers where mechanical and electrical losses are relatively small compared to the system's power handling capacity.
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Yes, if you put insteed of those bloody PCBs steel balls and spin them at desent RPM speed much more energy can be stored than in your inovation >:D
A 10Wh battery stores 36kJ (10 joules per second for 3600 seconds) worth of energy. How fast would you need to spin a steel ball of similar volume to store 36kJ as inertia?
Do you see any Wh in @Bert answer? :-DD
We do significantly more than 100W/kg.
It is 100W NOT 100Wh , [W] is [J/s] >:D
Ball I=2/5MR^2,
Es=1/2*I*w^2, w=2*PI*f
Lets assume 1inch (0.0254m) in diameter steel ball:
V=4/3*PI*R^3 -> M=0.067 kg (7860 kg/m^3)
R=0.0127 [m]
I= 4.35*10^-6
w=sqrt(2*E/I)
E=100 [J] -> w~ 6780 -> f= 1079 Hz -> 65 000 RPM >:D
UPS: Quite high spin speed, but... we have 100J in cubic inch and for observer it looks like nothing moves at all and this is quite amazing 8)
NOT EGG BATTERY filled with PCBs and AIR :-DD
Definietly this below is... prima Aprilis joke :-+
(https://tanktwo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/candy-in-hand-300x257.png?ac261)
BTW: This 1inch rotating steel ball has 1483 [J/kg] @ 65000 RPM ;)
@Bert you made mistake with 100W/kg ?-show us how did you get this 100 [Wh/kg] and at which volume or unveil percentage of real battery volume (Li-on? ) in this EGG BATTERY ?
For the moment you showed only PCBs, AIR and nice loking cover - but this good only as Easter gift or prima Aprilis joke ;D
Than we can easy calculate energy density in EGG BATTERY ???
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Wow. "Tough" crowd. ::) :palm:
Sorry for all the vitriol sent your way, Bert. I really hope this works out.
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Wow. "Tough" crowd. ::) :palm:
Tough? Wait till you have to persuade the Brand manager or platform controller of a major automotive OEM that your idea is worth them investing in...........
There are basically two routes available for new automotive tech to get to production:
1) The "fully productionised" idea. Have an idea, that either saves money, or increases efficiency (but any increased cost must be less than the current £/gramCo2 limit), fully develop and homologate that idea, generally using an existing Tier 1 to help you. Present production ready solution to OEM. (but be prepared to only be paid peanuts for it, even though you've spend £10M to productionise it)
2) The "i've had this great idea, it'll be brilliant, but i haven't developed it yet idea. Attempt to get an OEM interesting in your brand new technology. Then give them then bad news that it will need massive investment, and isn't a sure thing.
The issues with any kind of new "Battery" tech is that it could be rendered obsolete by improvemets in conventional battery tech, which only needs something like a 60% further increase i energy density to be viable across a vast number of consumers.
So now, you have to go to the OEM and tell them your idea will cost them £10M, take 3 years to develop, and there is a better than 50% chance it will be obsolete before it even gets to production. Good luck with that :-DD
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BTW: This 1inch rotating steel ball has 1483 [J/kg] @ 65000 RPM ;)
@Bert you made mistake with 100W/kg ?-show us how did you get this 100 [Wh/kg] and at which volume or unveil percentage of real battery volume (Li-on? ) in this EGG BATTERY ?
Easy enough: many lithium chemistries can achieve better than 150Wh/kg so if 33% of the mass is other stuff (air, PCBs, plastic, etc.) then you get 100Wh/kg. That part is absolutely plausible.
100Wh/kg = 360 kJ/kg, more than two orders of magnitude more than your spinning balls, so you would need to spin them an order of magnitude faster and make them ~25% bigger to catch up, which brings you pretty much in the same ballpark as what I arrived at earlier.
If you wanted to improve your energy-to-weight ratio for mechanical storage, you would be much better off using a torus-like shape: save all the dead weight near the rotation axis which contributes almost nothing to the moment of inertia. That's why flywheels are wheel-shaped with most of their mass located near their outer perimeter.
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Wow. "Tough" crowd. ::) :palm:
Sorry for all the vitriol sent your way, Bert. I really hope this works out.
I feel worse for anyone who's already spent time and or money on the project.
I am curious to how they manage to automatically squeeze / compress the tank when necessary yet allow for ample cooling (airflow?). The egg to egg contact patch has to be pretty small, after all it's spherical.
That plus the 3min load & unload without jamming or damaging the eggs.
It also appears to be trying to solve a problem that isn't an issue that I'm aware of, was any marketing research done? I wonder how much they're trying to raise in capital?
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Wow. "Tough" crowd. ::) :palm:
Sorry for all the vitriol sent your way, Bert. I really hope this works out.
I feel worse for anyone who's already spent time and or money on the project.
I am curious to how they manage to automatically squeeze / compress the tank when necessary yet allow for ample cooling (airflow?). The egg to egg contact patch has to be pretty small, after all it's spherical.
That plus the 3min load & unload without jamming or damaging the eggs.
It also appears to be trying to solve a problem that isn't an issue that I'm aware of, was any marketing research done? I wonder how much they're trying to raise in capital?
This post is a joke, right? April Fools?
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Wow. "Tough" crowd. ::) :palm:
Tough? Wait till you have to persuade the Brand manager or platform controller of a major automotive OEM that your idea is worth them investing in...........
There are basically two routes available for new automotive tech to get to production:
1) The "fully productionised" idea. Have an idea, that either saves money, or increases efficiency (but any increased cost must be less than the current £/gramCo2 limit), fully develop and homologate that idea, generally using an existing Tier 1 to help you. Present production ready solution to OEM. (but be prepared to only be paid peanuts for it, even though you've spend £10M to productionise it)
2) The "i've had this great idea, it'll be brilliant, but i haven't developed it yet idea. Attempt to get an OEM interesting in your brand new technology. Then give them then bad news that it will need massive investment, and isn't a sure thing.
The issues with any kind of new "Battery" tech is that it could be rendered obsolete by improvemets in conventional battery tech, which only needs something like a 60% further increase i energy density to be viable across a vast number of consumers.
So now, you have to go to the OEM and tell them your idea will cost them £10M, take 3 years to develop, and there is a better than 50% chance it will be obsolete before it even gets to production. Good luck with that :-DD
They are likely already talking to these companies.
I doubt seriously that anyone isn't already aware of the risks. As far as the "risk" of a miraculous 60% overnight improvement in battery energy density, *that* is not what I would be betting on. The risk of packaging a battery is vastly different than the risk of betting the farm on a new battery type. And if battery chemistry improves dramatically, they can simply swap in that cell for the existing 18650.
And $15M is a pittance these days. Even *bad* energy companies have pulled off $100M USD funding rounds. Being out of Finland, they may attract the attention of certain investment groups there who tend to finance these types of ventures on the behalf of the Finnish government.
I'm not endorsing the technology, but it *could* solve a real problem: how to distribute electrical charge as flexibly as liquid fuels. The problems to be solved are electromechanical and algorithmic in nature. But it really comes down to building a custom IC, standardizing the packaging, and creating a suitable interface and controller on the vehicle end. I have no dog in this hunt. At first, the idea struck me as silly, but then I thought about it, and it *might* be the unconventional solution that's needed to bring down vehicle battery costs.
It's one thing to go busting people's balls over bad science, pseudo-science, and fraudulent claims, but I'm not seeing that here. It may well turn out to be impractical for various reasons, but this certainly doesn't appear to be a typical "free-energy" scam.
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Bert, because the arrival of the battery balls in a tank is pseudo-random (at least that is how I understand it), is there a concern for a sub-optimal distribution of batteries with different supply/age characteristics occurring ? The mesh can solve some problems, but not all of them.
It is random, but it is not a problem as there are plenty of routing opportunities and there is indeed no risk for sub-optimal distribution. This is a complex problem and is not easily grasped by 5 minutes of thinking, but extensive (many years) of research have been spent on this and it can be proved beyond any doubt, both in simulation and real world tests.
Do you get different grades of battery ball at the pump? :-DD
Premium - Newish and selected for high loads and high capacity
Regular - Middle aged and not outstanding
Economy - Near end of life or reduced load or capacity
Actually, that option exists. It will not be implemented by everyone but it is indeed built into the concept.
Perhaps Vincent can correct me or elaborate, but I thought I heard somewhere the Tesla plan down the road was for you to pull up to a tesla station, drive over an apparatus, and the battery pack is pulled of the bottom of the car and a freshly charged one is put in its place and off you go. That sounds like the most practical solution. Just like exchanging welding tanks. They don't fill your tank. They just hand you another full one.
It has been around for a long time. Google Better Place. Also Musk demoed it already in July 2013.
It sounds like they are planning to make battery packs cheaper by adding expensive electronics to each cell, and make them denser by adding air space :-//
(Does anyone else remember Ball Semiconductor?)
It seems you have information about our BOM that we don't have?
Wow. "Tough" crowd. ::) :palm:
Sorry for all the vitriol sent your way, Bert. I really hope this works out.
Well, it's nothing new that people hiding behind anonymity and a keyboard get sometimes overly confident and when they can't win the argument (or just don't manage to grasp what is being told), they start looking like a a baby that keeps on throwing its pacifier out of the pram. It's cute in a way, but mostly annoying.
There are also intelligent and competent people reading forums, but the ones at the other end of the scale tend to make a lot more noise. :blah:
We're a new business and those badmouthing such efforts, or - worse - spitting on people personally, are just childish. What are you going to do about it? :shrug:
Tough? Wait till you have to persuade the Brand manager or platform controller of a major automotive OEM that your idea is worth them investing in...........
There are basically two routes available for new automotive tech to get to production....
You pretend like you know how it works, but you obviously don't. It is not nearly as simple as you make it sound. I'm sure you are a nice guy that is just trying to bring out the truth, which is admirable. However, when the point comes you are trying to teach an Eskimo about snow, please ease off a little.
I feel worse for anyone who's already spent time and or money on the project.
Hi Bill, it's nice you feel for us. No need to worry - we're doing great. ^-^
I am curious to how they manage to automatically squeeze / compress the tank when necessary yet allow for ample cooling (airflow?).
I'm not sure if it is better or worse for the forum that I repeat for the 5th time how that works. Anyhow, the key words are bladder, air, coolant and pump.
The egg to egg contact patch has to be pretty small, after all it's spherical.
They are not spherical, they are ellipsoids with a certain semi-axis ratio.
It also appears to be trying to solve a problem that isn't an issue that I'm aware of, was any marketing research done?
What can I say to that?
This post is a joke, right? April Fools?
It's hard to tell sometimes..!
Do you know what's strange? I was expecting people here to ask technical questions about how it's done, specifically about the electronics. But that seems to be all rather obvious. Weird :-\
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I was expecting people here to ask technical questions about how it's done, specifically about the electronics.
People asked you about egg battery energy density and you gave them... marketing answer, because of all you need now is... more hits to your web page to show "investors" there is interest in this :bullshit: :-DD
This is classic public relations answers and it is boring :--
Ok. it is funny :-+
They are not spherical, they are ellipsoids with a certain semi-axis ratio.
Yep, they have to be... because of nobody will give patent if someone reinwents wheel, so now those magic numbers might help :-DD
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Why people do NOT need ANOTHER :bullshit: egg battery? >:D
(https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/battery-balls-fast-way-to-fill-your-electric-vechivle/?action=dlattach;attach=144888)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_%28food%29 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_%28food%29)
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 647 kJ (155 kcal)
So, we have in this well known egg battery (647 kJ *10)/kg ~ 6.47 MJ/kg ~ 1797 Wh/kg :o :-DD
@Bert Good luck. I prefere well known egg battery ;D
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Well if I had to put my money on either eneuro or Bert succeeding in the marketplace, Bert would be the winner by a long shot. He has answered all questions reasonably and appears to be competent and capable of reasoned argument, whereas eneuro comes across as a free energy nutjob incapable of stringing together even the most basic of arguments!
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Tough? Wait till you have to persuade the Brand manager or platform controller of a major automotive OEM that your idea is worth them investing in...........
There are basically two routes available for new automotive tech to get to production....
You pretend like you know how it works, but you obviously don't. It is not nearly as simple as you make it sound. I'm sure you are a nice guy that is just trying to bring out the truth, which is admirable. However, when the point comes you are trying to teach an Eskimo about snow, please ease off a little.
Here is a brief CV of my Automotive experience:
I have a MechEng degree and over 20 years direct automotive product development experience. I have worked for cutting edge engineering Tier1 & 2 suppliers including Cosworth & Prodrive. My engineering knowledge has been / is used in numerous highly respected cars from OEMs such as Aston Martin, Bentley, LandRover, Jaguar, Ford, Porsche, and many others.
I have been involved in the development and marketing of Eboosting and hybrid systems for 15 years, including running technology demonstrator and benchmarking programs for the OEMs.
I currently run my own specialist powertrain engineering services company, that provides high tech powertrain engineering resource to OEM and Tier1 clients. If you attend events such as LCV, you will find that most of the companies there are already my clients.
The last major powertrain i worked on (that i am allowed to talk about) was the Mclaren P1, doing Emachine and system design,development and integration.
My "contacts list" has 20 years worth of high level OEM personnel in it, people directly responsible for determining the direction and sourcing requirements for most major OEMs. I have direct and current experience of providing OEMs with powertrain hardware and technology, and have high volume production systems using technology that i have developed.
As we speak, 5 major OEMs are benchmarking an Eboosting system that i was instrumental in developing, and that has taken over 6 years to reach OEM level readiness.
Perhaps you could enlighten me as to your automotive CV before you off handedly brush me off?
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Here is a brief CV of my Automotive experience:
....
Perhaps you could enlighten me as to your automotive CV before you off handedly brush me off?
In that case I stand corrected. You indeed appear to have quite some experience that actually has some relevance in this discussion. Which makes it even more surprising, people of this seniority level typically don't bother with trying to prove that someone else is doing it wrong. Perhaps you only have the best of intentions and want to share your vast experience by outlining methods that have worked well for you? In such case, I applaud your effort. We'll consider studying your go-to-market suggestions.
I don't have any automotive CV, but that is not relevant. The company, however, does. This is not about individuals.
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I don't have any automotive CV, but that is not relevant.
UPS, Eskimo has to learn a lot howto avoid fall into ice hole hidden under snow, which he thinks he knows very well :-DD
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One would think that someone with cellular phone design credentials would know a thing or two about battery management. Sorry for the abuse you're getting, Bert. It's inappropriate.
I do have some questions:
- The 18650 battery was mentioned. I also saw mention on the website of "tablet"-style batteries - which would make a lot of sense as far as volume utilization is concerned. Is the plan to eventually layer such a battery into the ellipsoid? Is it possible for those batteries to be manufactured into shapes other than rectangles, such as a "stretched" octagon that will fill the ellipsoid better?
- Do you know what your business model will be for this yet? I can see a couple obvious paths, one being to become the actual manufacturer. The other, which may be better, is to become a technology licensing company, once the proof of concept is validated. i.e. You only license the physical form factor and interactive logic, and anyone who wants to build a battery can.
- Do you have a target, per-unit cost, yet?
- Are you going to try an build an IC that incorporates all the needed functions into one die in order to reduce the part count / BOM cost? (It doesn't seem like you need to ask much of a FET for this application.)
- How are you handling node-to-node communications? The transceiver design must be interesting since you're depending on random pairings of contacts. Or is it RF? How do you conclusively identify each battery's nearest neighbors?
- How long does it take to identify all the nodes in the "tank" and build the strings?
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It sounds like they are planning to make battery packs cheaper by adding expensive electronics to each cell, and make them denser by adding air space :-//
(Does anyone else remember Ball Semiconductor?)
It seems you have information about our BOM that we don't have?
Nice obfuscation there. The cost of electronics vs. battery cells is not exactly a secret.
Do you know what's strange? I was expecting people here to ask technical questions about how it's done, specifically about the electronics. But that seems to be all rather obvious. Weird :-\
Yes, the electronics part is pretty obvious, and it's also obvious that you're not here to discuss it in any detail, so that just leaves talking about the "why" of it.
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It's worth noting Bert didn't invite himself here to shill his product. He came here to respond to a rabid, infantile, bash-fest of his company's product, which is still in development. He's under no obligation to answer any questions at all.
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I think part of the reason that questions about the electronics have been few is that it doesn't seem like the part that will make or break the project. If each ball has external contacts in a tetrahedral arrangement, then the cell electrodes will each need switches to go four ways. You could also use a low-ohm resistor to bypass a cell that has failed. Communication could use fieldbus protocols, or if it is better to do unidirectional it could work as a ring. Combined power+data modulation is now very common, with 1Wire, PoE, powerline, etc, but as far as I know this would be the first application to series string generators. In this case you don't need very high speed data, but you would like low latency, so some ideas of e.g. EtherCat might be useful.
Something I realized is that the concept of having a pile of balls working together to make power, that can be dropped out one by one and sorted, is inspired by pebble bed nuclear reactors.
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It's worth noting Bert didn't invite himself here to shill his product. He came here to respond to a rabid, infantile, bash-fest of his company's product, which is still in development. He's under no obligation to answer any questions at all.
He's a marketing guy who came here to do damage control...
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It's a product that needs almost every EV manufacturer onboard to work (zero chance) plus who's going to pay to install those ball machines that need to be available before the product takes to the road?
On the plus side it's a slick presentation, perhaps good enough to get a government research grant GNDN.
It'll never be a commercial success for the automotive industry, I can't think of a practical use for it anywhere. What's the timeline and cost projections for this project anyway?
TLDR it's a money pit. Bail out.
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Perhaps Vincent can correct me or elaborate, but I thought I heard somewhere the Tesla plan down the road was for you to pull up to a tesla station, drive over an apparatus, and the battery pack is pulled of the bottom of the car and a freshly charged one is put in its place and off you go. That sounds like the most practical solution. Just like exchanging welding tanks. They don't fill your tank. They just hand you another full one.
yep. it does exist. the Harri s Ranch station in southern CA has one. It is operational ( but by invite only )
90 seconds for a swap.
(https://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/img_3718.jpg?quality=80&strip=all)
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It's worth noting Bert didn't invite himself here to shill his product. He came here to respond to a rabid, infantile, bash-fest of his company's product, which is still in development. He's under no obligation to answer any questions at all.
He's a marketing guy who came here to do damage control...
he's not marketing guy... i know him.
There's been some hardcore development to make this thing work. It is very clever technology.
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It's worth noting Bert didn't invite himself here to shill his product. He came here to respond to a rabid, infantile, bash-fest of his company's product, which is still in development. He's under no obligation to answer any questions at all.
He's a marketing guy who came here to do damage control...
he's not marketing guy... i know him.
There's been some hardcore development to make this thing work. It is very clever technology.
According to his profile on LinkedIn he's an ex Nokia sales manager having done some RF stuff back in the day.
Clever it is, neat too. But does it have a market no. It needs to be sold to the consumer to fill a need that doesn't appear to be there.
The egg adds complexity and cost to an EV, it also simply cannot offer the same Wh per cubic meter (egg shape, electronics) than a bank of batteries on a bus bar can.
If you know anything about the auto industry it won't spend a dime it doesn't have to. Even if it kills people.
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The egg adds complexity and cost to an EV, it also simply cannot offer the same Wh per cubic meter (egg shape, electronics) than a bank of batteries on a bus bar can.
As was pointed out earlier though, EV batteries are not a solid mass of lithium cells either. Large and high-performance EV batteries require cooling. Also, large cells swell during operation and must be compressed to mitigate deformation which could otherwise lead to internal shorts. So you end up with a non-negligible chunk of the battery's volume and weight dedicated to thermal and mechanical management.
Since the "eggs" are loose and have low individual waste heat, they can likely be cooled by forced convection through the tank.
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Perhaps Vincent can correct me or elaborate, but I thought I heard somewhere the Tesla plan down the road was for you to pull up to a tesla station, drive over an apparatus, and the battery pack is pulled of the bottom of the car and a freshly charged one is put in its place and off you go. That sounds like the most practical solution. Just like exchanging welding tanks. They don't fill your tank. They just hand you another full one.
yep. it does exist. the Harri s Ranch station in southern CA has one. It is operational ( but by invite only )
90 seconds for a swap.
(https://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/img_3718.jpg?quality=80&strip=all)
Harris ranch is one of those crazy places. Millionaires and Billionaires fly into that dusty hole in the west side of the valley to a private airstrip to eat a $50 steak, then get back on their plane and fly away. At last count you pass by over 200 of our installations in that stretch of I 5 from the bottom of the grapevine up to about Tracy visable from the road, and many thousands across the valley and beyond, each one helping save thousands of gallons of water per day through high efficiency irrigation, yet I have never had a steak at harris ranch :( never had enough money to justify it, and if I am out there its because I am working and do not have the time.
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There's been some hardcore development to make this thing work.
This all about it, while hardcore development need means, that this is hardcore idea and if someone do not know what is inside this egg "battery"l thay maybe will buy this thing, but today a lot of people read forums and when someone discoveres its complexity which means much higher probability of failure, that maybe if want be fancy will buy this thing, but I do not want risk finishing my EV trip without electricity in my vehicle in remote place >:D
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I'm curious about a couple of things.
1. Why egg shaped not spheres?
2. Do you have a working prototype of the tank & fill / un-fill station, not a CGI graphic? If so link?
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The egg adds complexity and cost to an EV, it also simply cannot offer the same Wh per cubic meter (egg shape, electronics) than a bank of batteries on a bus bar can.
As was pointed out earlier though, EV batteries are not a solid mass of lithium cells either. Large and high-performance EV batteries require cooling. Also, large cells swell during operation and must be compressed to mitigate deformation which could otherwise lead to internal shorts. So you end up with a non-negligible chunk of the battery's volume and weight dedicated to thermal and mechanical management.
Those same considerations apply to the battery balls - they can only be worse than a conventional pack.
Since the "eggs" are loose and have low individual waste heat, they can likely be cooled by forced convection through the tank.
Then you could make an air cooled conventional pack, and it would still be denser than the battery ball tank.
However, a liquid cooled conventional pack can be denser than any air cooled pack, which is why they are used in cars...
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Those same considerations apply to the battery balls - they can only be worse than a conventional pack.
My point was that the "eggs" are not necessarily at that much of a Wh/m^3 or Wh/kg disadvantage once you take all the extra design elements that go into conventional packs: the eggs may not be packed as densely by volume as conventional cells but they do not require liquid cooling, pumps, coolant and radiators either, so what you lose in terms of tank density, you get most of it back by eliminating other stuff - you may have to take on 15kg of extra packaging and 20L of extra volume with the eggs to achieve the same capacity as a traditional battery but you eliminate a 15kg liquid cooling system that occupied 20L of space, so you end up with similar overall system energy density for the complete storage system. The total weight and volume just got shifted around.
The claim that balls can achieve similar performance to traditional batteries is plausible when you look at the system as a whole.
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But you're also adding a sack of electronics to the mix.
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Those same considerations apply to the battery balls - they can only be worse than a conventional pack.
My point was that the "eggs" are not necessarily at that much of a Wh/m^3 or Wh/kg disadvantage once you take all the extra design elements that go into conventional packs: the eggs may not be packed as densely by volume as conventional cells but they do not require liquid cooling, pumps, coolant and radiators either, so what you lose in terms of tank density, you get most of it back by eliminating other stuff - you may have to take on 15kg of extra packaging and 20L of extra volume with the eggs to achieve the same capacity as a traditional battery but you eliminate a 15kg liquid cooling system that occupied 20L of space, so you end up with similar overall system energy density for the complete storage system. The total weight and volume just got shifted around.
I can't understand your argument. No one would bother with liquid cooling unless it enabled significantly higher density than air cooling, even including the cooling system components.
But, a conventional pack doesn't have to be liquid cooled, and in that case the battery balls can only be worse than a conventional air cooled pack, because of the extra electronics, and the packing fraction issue.
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But, a conventional pack doesn't have to be liquid cooled, and in that case the battery balls can only be worse than a conventional air cooled pack, because of the extra electronics, and the packing fraction issue.
Even if you get away without liquid cooling, you still still need to dedicate volume and weight to some form of thermal management or otherwise, cells near the middle of the pack will get significantly warmer, will perform worse and wear out faster than the rest.
As far as the "extra electronics" are concerned, which I presume is mainly about the ridiculous amount of space wasted on PCBs in the prototype, keep in mind that that it is exactly that: a prototype made from off-the-shelf parts. The 4-5 PCBs would likely get reduced to one ASIC integrating all the smarts and one or two power hybrid doing the routing, freeing most of the internal volume for a larger cell before this thing reaches production.
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Here is an interview about Zero motorcycle Li-ion Battery technology, one of the highest battery density pack available.
http://www.motorcycle.com/features/inside-batteries-mo-interviews-zero-motorcycles-senior-battery-specialist-luke-workman-video.html (http://www.motorcycle.com/features/inside-batteries-mo-interviews-zero-motorcycles-senior-battery-specialist-luke-workman-video.html)
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It's also worth noting that EV battery packs are HEATED as well as cooled!
Cars have a horrible operating environment, and general need to keep worked down to at least -15degC and generally should provide a modest "limp home" capacity even at -30degC. In order to achieve this, current EV's use the energy within the battery system to heat that battery when ambient temps fall below about 5 degC. (which is why manufacturers recommend leaving the vehicle connected to the charger when parked, even when fully charged). Using a water "cooled" battery system means the vehicle can use the cabin heater to warm the battery coolant in a controlled fashion. The high thermal capacity of water also means hot (or cold) spots are avoided within the battery system.
It's all well and good coming from a "Mobile phone" background, but i suspect the Battery Ball team are going to quickly find out just how difficult (and conservative) the passenger car market is.
Also, another issue i can see is that the "refueling" stations will have to actively condition these ball cells, especially when those stations are in environmentally poor locations etc
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The people inventing stuff like this think the problem they are solving is somehow important to making electric cars ready for the mainstream.
They seem to reach this conclusion because of course, electric cars need to be as convenient as gasoline powered cars, and those can be fueled up in about 5 minutes.
The thing is, most of the time, most people drive their cars less than ~75 miles a day, which is why the designers of electric cars have targeted a minimum range of ~75 miles. This means that most of the time, most electric cars need to be charged at most once a day. But the thing is, unlike gasoline vehicles, they can be refueled/charged while they are parked. The result is that for most owners, most of the time, 5 minute recharges of most electric cars are not a concern.
Ah, but sometimes people drive their gasoline cars hundreds of miles at a time! If they can't sometime drive their electric cars hundreds of miles at a time without recharging for an hour every hour or two, most people will never buy electric cars. Therefore, we need some way of recharging electric cars ~as quickly as we can refuel gas powered cars. That actually remains to be seen. It might be that people are willing to rent cars for long drives. It is also likely that in the longer run, the cost of batteries for electric cars could decline enough that most electric cars have ~300 miles range. Once you have 300 miles range, ~5 minute recharges are less important, even on long trips, because most people need a break for bathrooms, food, and stretching their legs every 4-5 hours. Already today, Teslas can charge to ~170 miles of range in 30 minutes at a "Supercharger" station.
Bottom line, the trends look like stuff like this is going to be a small niche in a mainstream electric car market, and as such, will likely never get the critical mass needed to be viable.
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It is also likely that in the longer run, the cost of batteries for electric cars could decline enough that most electric cars have ~300 miles range.
Aside from cost, there is also the weight and volume consideration of that 300 miles / 500km battery since the extended-range battery is nothing more than dead weight and space for most everyday driving. If the Standford aluminum-based battery works as well as the students said it did, we could have inexpensive high capacity batteries soon - as long as weight and space are not major constraints.
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It is also likely that in the longer run, the cost of batteries for electric cars could decline enough that most electric cars have ~300 miles range.
Aside from cost, there is also the weight and volume consideration of that 300 miles / 500km battery since the extended-range battery is nothing more than dead weight and space for most everyday driving.
It is simple sidecar solution when higher range needed and no another "egg battery" needed ;)
ETRO Electric Motorcycle Road Test v2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNpRmiyGZK8#ws)
Watch carefully: range 20-45 km on one charge and... up to 5 passengers :o :-DD
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It's worth noting that because an EV has a "bi-directional" powertrain (ie it can source and sink power) the absolute mass of the vehicle has a significantly lower effect on it's fuel consumption (approx 65% lower in fact, as that is the typical overall round trip efficiency of an EV powertrain). Much more important is the vehicles aerodynamic and rolling frictional losses in fact, as those loses are "one way" and irrecoverable.
This is why cars like the Tesla p85, despite being significantly heavier than a conventional ICE passenger car can still return overall lower energy consumption figures!
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It is simple sidecar solution when higher range needed and no another "egg battery" needed ;)
A side-car might make sense on a motorcycle but on a car, not so much.
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Much more important is the vehicles aerodynamic and rolling frictional losses in fact, as those loses are "one way" and irrecoverable.
Yep, and when see people trying change ebike into a few kW EV with aerodynamic Cx~0.95 and A~1m^2 to get higher range it is :palm:
When higher mass is moving than regenerative brakeing sometimes can help extend EV range, but first we need good aerodynamic: low Cx and as low as possible air impact area, so something long and thin relative to weight like train will have advantage.
Sidecar I mean no exactly something like in video above, but designed for EV with aerodynamic in mind which somehow extends, not disturb oryginal vehicle aoerodynamic, but like a train-improoves ratio of Cx*A per vehicle mass, so adding sidecar doesn't change to much Cx and sometimes can even improve overall aerodynamics (reduce drag) ;)
BTW: Tried a few days drive classic car 1.5m wide and 1.5 high (I guess-Peugeot 206 1.4HDI) at speed 50kmh-60kmh, so within city limits and... not so bad ONLY a few cars long traffic jam :-DD
But I do not care while probably at those speeds its fuel consumption was very low (for sure below 4L diesel/100km), but unfortunatelly haven't got integrated classic car speed meter yet with custom MCU and http://www.invensense.com/mems/gyro/mpu6050.html (http://www.invensense.com/mems/gyro/mpu6050.html) ( Six-Axis MEMS Gyroscope + Accelerometer MPU6050 ) to be able calculate terrain slope without need to use GPS and maps, so I could obtain total energy changes (kinetic 1/2mV^2 + gravity m*g*h) to compare fuel consumption with aerodynamic speed increase (probably need air speed meter too).
Anyway when this IC 1.4 HDI fails for sure will try convert Peugeot 206 to EV with help of sidecar, while inserting too many batteries inside classic ICE car to convert to EV I don't think is best idea when we chose traveling to places where parking with longer vehicle is not a concern ;)
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It's been well over a year, still nothing. Same web site, same claims, no product. Did I miss something?
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It's been well over a year, still nothing. Same web site, same claims, no product. Did I miss something?
Indeed. It doesn't look very promising.
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No recent press releases brings up a few possibilities:
1. They ran out of money before the concept was proven.
2. The concept didn't work out, but they have IP to sell and hence the website is still up.
3. It works. There's a buyer, and everyone is busy as hell. Generally when this happens everyone is under NDA, hence few/no press releases.
4. A long spell of abnormally low petroleum prices tarnished the the glitz of investing in EVs and related technology, leading back to #1. It's worth noting that petroleum drilling has been THE hot place to invest money over the last few years. The amount of capital that has been shoveled into horizontal drilling (and evaporated with no returns) has been just staggering. Clean tech, with a few exceptions, has very few investors these days.
In short, there are not a lot of EV Tech investors to be found while petroleum sells for $40-50/bbl. It may well be that this concept failed, but there are certainly a lot of mitigating circumstances. I still do not see a deliberate intent to deceive on the part of the developers.
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4. A long spell of abnormally low petroleum prices tarnished the the glitz of investing in EVs and related technology, leading back to #1.
..
In short, there are not a lot of EV Tech investors to be found while petroleum sells for $40-50/bbl.
I invest in EV right now, but not into :bullshit: ideas but real life challenges.
Anyway I can drive 50km with 1L of water or less, so hopefully no :bullshit: battery balls needed :-DMM
Human powered electric wehicles (HPEV) are more interesting than :bullshit: ideas...
If you want to do something, do not loose your time watching nowadays internet full of :bullshit: ideas :-/O
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Anyway I can drive 50km with 1L of water or less, so hopefully no :bullshit: battery balls needed :-DMM
As a first step... post proof of that and state your sports background.