Supercapacitor energy storage and energy server from KiloWatt Labs

[Gerardo Gwada]

Hello everyone. Does anyone know about this site and its products? Has anyone tested them?
http://www.kilowattlabs.com/

[ngjohnson]

I have tested a similar solution and it has a number of issues for vehicle use due to stability issues that leads to low reliability. The ideas phenomena and I hope they get some of the discharge issues worked out. Supercapacitors are amazing!

[Gerardo Gwada]

Thank you for your contribution

[Codebird]

The site is big on promotion, but lacks much serious technical information. Always something to be suspicious of.

Supercaps for energy storage? We all dream of that, but they'll need a real breakthrough in capacitor technology to make that practical and affordable.

[StillTrying]

The site is big on promotion, but lacks much serious technical information. Always something to be suspicious of.

I agree, something smells. It might be the charger because I'm guestimating that to charge a vehicle battery in 16 to 30 seconds you'd need a charger of about 1MW.

Links for further research.
http://www.microtrontec.com
http://www.microtrontec.com/innovations.php?innovID=9
http://www.cleanenergybusinesscouncil.com/speakers/waseem-qureshi-founder-miccgreentec
http://www.microtrontec.com/img/media/news/Media%20Release-Microtron%20launch%20at%20WFES%202016.pdf

[Gerardo Gwada]

Thank you all

[fourtytwo42]

Thank you all

So whats your relationship with this company Gerardo ?
It seems to me this posting is simply promotional, am I right ?

[Gerardo Gwada]

Hello fourtytwo42
No, I do not advertise for them.
I found this site on the internet and I contacted KiloWattLabs. They seem confident about the quality of their products. I decided to buy a 1,000W output server and a 1 Kwh battery. That's why I put this post, it's to know if someone had tested it. I do not want to throw away my money (I do not have much) so I try to find out as much as I can. Thank you all.

[fourtytwo42]

Ohh okies I didnt understand your reason, now I do, that's interesting because there are no clues to costs on there site at all, may I ask how much you paid for there 1Kwh system ?

[StillTrying]

I found this site on the internet and I contacted KiloWattLabs. They seem confident about the quality of their products. I decided to buy a 1,000W output server and a 1 Kwh battery.

Do you have intermittent mains power? wind power? solar power? What problem is the 1,000W output server and 1 Kwh battery to solve?

[Gerardo Gwada]

hello,
I don't have public prices for now.
I demand 1Kwh storage and 1Kw server for making easy test of charge and discharge.
I would test efficiency in extreme situation of 12 charges and 12 discharge in 24 hours, during 30 days (non stop).

[StillTrying]

This thread makes no sense.

[Gerardo Gwada]

Hi,
have you a suggestion for an effectiv valid test ?
Thank you

[Dtec]

The batteries will not hold up at full discharge cycles


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[WastelandTek]

Yeah, I have to admit, I really don't see this working out very well.  Call me a pessimist.

[lionellgg]

 Hello Gerardo,

I was looking information about the Kilowatt Labs sirius battery & server and found your posts here. I wonder if you have done the test already and will like your outcome about it. Thank you!

I found this site on the internet and I contacted KiloWattLabs. They seem confident about the quality of their products. I decided to buy a 1,000W output server and a 1 Kwh battery.

Do you have intermittent mains power? wind power? solar power? What problem is the 1,000W output server and 1 Kwh battery to solve?

[macrop]

I've been studying this system for the last few days and I'm a little sceptical as it's a little too good to be true. Happy to be proven wrong though. Having said that a company in Melbourne here in Oz have a few of the production ready units. Would love to check them out personally but I'm on the west coast. Everything certainly looks legit from this Arvio lot.   

The claimed energy density is 10 greater than I've seen before for other supercaps. 70Wh/kg claimed. That's better than lead-acid and better than Ni-MH. That's a massive breakthrough if it's true.

Check out the video @ 9:25 for a pic of the actual capacitor. Apparently the individual caps are around 3Wh in capacity. So 2400 caps in the larger unit.




They claim there is no regulation inside but a capacitor would normally have a linear discharge profile so I can't see how this can maintain approx 48VDC through 100% depth of discharge. Makes no sense unless they're switching them internally in strings or something.

[ahbushnell]

hello,
I don't have public prices for now.
I demand 1Kwh storage and 1Kw server for making easy test of charge and discharge.
I would test efficiency in extreme situation of 12 charges and 12 discharge in 24 hours, during 30 days (non stop).

I assume you mean inverter and not server.  Also you will only get 6 charge and discharge cycles per day with 1 kW-hr stored and a 1 kW inverter.  Also The power the inverter can deliver as the voltage goes down on will be limited because the current has to rise dramatically at low voltage.  I assumed 100 volts max on the cap which is 10 A for 1 kW.  But at 10 volts the current has to go up to 100 amps.  See the attached plot for an example of current and voltage for 1 kW charge discharge constant power.

[Marco]

They do seem to suggest they go from parallel to series, and supercapacitors do have comparatively low internal resistance so that shouldn't become a problem too quickly. The unrealistic part is the density.

[amspire]

Supercaps for energy storage? We all dream of that, but they'll need a real breakthrough in capacitor technology to make that practical and affordable.

I keep seeing this being posted. If you get a 10x increase on current technology, then you start to have something really, really scary.

There seems to be this belief that on failure, the energy somehow just seeps away into the ether. Or you can just put a bit of wire across the terminals to discharge to a safe level. Unfortunately energy doesn't work that way and Supercaps have none of the inherent safety of petrol or battery technology.

Lithium batteries can burn. Supercaps if 10x better then the best current capacitors can explode with the force of TNT. Theoretically, Supercaps can store orders of magnitude more energy then the most powerful chemical reaction. It has the potential to be the most powerful non-nuclear explosive by a very large factor.

That is the nightmare we will have to live with if people succeed in mastering Supercap technology.

Go to any of the sites developing the new technologies of Supercaps, and find the data on safety. Usually, they have forgotten to mention it entirely. Strange.

[Marco]

Still far less dangerous than a well mixed fuel air explosion with the same energy.

If you do go with the automatic serializing/parallelizing solution, you will have a lot of MOSFETs to disconnect cells during overcurrent/temperature events.

[amspire]

Still far less dangerous than a well mixed fuel air explosion with the same energy.

Only slightly. Even if you can use clever engineering so that in most scenarios a capacitor does not explode, you cannot cover all the scenarios.

Also it is a dream come true for terrorists. If you can somehow make the equivalent of 300g of TNT in capacitive energy in your phone mostly safe, an absolutely identical looking capacitor can be made that is designed to explode. All they have to do is to run an app on the phone that will cause the capacitor to heat.

It is just not this perfect, safe solution we all dream about.

[Marco]

I don't think any capacitor has the potential for detonation. You can obviously get some pressure buildup in an enclosure by evaporating liquids, but you could do that just as easily with Lithium Ion, just slower.

To really get a cap to detonate you somehow have to cause charge recombination in a supersonic cascading manner. Even if the shockwave could destroy the insulation on the foil, the electrolyte would become gas long before it could conduct all the charge. After that the foils could touch ... but that's a relatively high resistance discharge path, it wouldn't occur everywhere at the same time, again without any real potential for any supersonic cascade failure.

[hayatepilot]

Those supercap modules from KiloWatt Labs look suspiciously like the modules from Maxwell:
http://www.maxwell.com/products/ultracapacitors/48v-modules

[amspire]

I don't think any capacitor has the potential for detonation. You can obviously get some pressure buildup in an enclosure by evaporating liquids, but you could do that just as easily with Lithium Ion, just slower.

For a start, there will be a temperature at which the dielectric fails - at this temperature, the energy is released instantly. At the failure point, it could be nanoseconds.

Secondly, when you have very high energy stored in capacitors (I am talking at least 10x the current best), there is enough energy when released to vapourise the capacitors materials.

It becomes really hard to engineer the capacitor so it doesn't explode.

Now why would the capacitor be that hot? Well have you ever heard of a capacitor that goes leaky? When a capacitor like this goes leaky, then energy involved can be more then the mass of the capacitor can absorb. The temperature shoots up and the leakage gets worse.

The thing is this. There is just no reason whatsoever to think that this can be safe. The hardest design job will be to make it safe, and you always have to consider the energy has to go somewhere. If the energy in such a battery is released in 1ms, it is a bomb. Exactly the same as TNT.

It is impossible to think this is a perfect, trouble free technology. It will be far more dangerous then batteries or petroleum fuel.

If there is a way with brilliant engineering to make it safe as long as nothing lets the capacitor gets too hot, what if you end up with a cheap clone version that is not so brilliantly designed?

Now here is another scenario. Your house is on fire and your charged capacitor powered car is in the garage. You call the fire brigade. The first thing they ask is "Is your car capacitor powered?" You say yes.

The only thing they can then do is to evacuate the block and get all the fire trucks and other cars out of the area. Then let your house and car burn. There is no way they can let anybody near an overheated car that may be storing energy equivalent to a few hundred kilograms of TNT. There is not this problem with petrol or batteries.

A fire in a tunnel pile up or office building basement car park? There is just nowhere for released energy to go in a confined space - it has to be a disaster.