TheEEStory.com

Matt, If my thinking is correct I figure 2,600 amps at 240 volts for a five minute charge.

2600 * 240 = 624,000 watt hours in a one hour charge or 624kwh
divide by 12 for a five minute charge
624 / 12 = 52kwh
I have no idea about the heat generated by 2600 amps.

And this part is just silly:

Problem number two, he's operating at the breakdown strength and you never do that with a capacitor because you always have avalanche breakdown. The rule of thumb is you drop it down an order of magnitude in voltage and your energy goes as the voltage squared so that's 100 times lower.

Obviously, in an energy storage application, you're not going to tell people to store 1/100th of the energy that can theoretically be stored. Weir says 50%, which seems much more reasonable.

at 98% efficency, heat generated in a full charge would be 1 kwh, about 3400 btu in 5 minutes, almost enough to boil half a gallon of water. better put a fan on it.

WeirD_science wrote:

Matt, If my thinking is correct I figure 2,600 amps at 240 volts for a five minute charge.

Note that, as you have shown, you can't charge in 5 minutes from a wall socket.

larry, where do you get 98% efficiency from?

And so we're left with dielectric saturation as his only reasonable basis for claiming that the EESU is impossible. Mr. Miller is more adamant about it than anyone else we've heard from, but I'm not really moved by that, because he was also pretty shrill about the non-problems above.

So, we are where we were before. All the experts say you can't do it, because the dielectric saturates before it can store nearly that much energy.

total charging efficiency might only be 90-95%, but most of loss is in inverter/charger, not the battery, so picked a number; couldn't find one just for battery resistance heat loss. but whatever the number less than 5%, the heat is a manageable prolem even in rapid charge and a non-issue during use.

larry wrote:

total charging efficiency might only be 90-95%, but most of loss is in inverter/charger, not the battery, so picked a number; couldn't find one just for battery resistance heat loss. but whatever the number less than 5%, the heat is a manageable prolem even in rapid charge and a non-issue during use.

Well 5% works out to 33kW to dissipate if doing a full charge in 5 min. for a 55kWHr device.

Robert

And Miller said the whole thing would melt at 99.5% efficiency? That just doesn't make sense. The EESU is 300lbs. 0.5% of 52KWh would heat up 300lbs of water by less than 2 degrees C.

EDIT: fixed the math

Last edited Sun, 10 Aug 2008, 12:06am by matt

matt wrote:

And Miller said the whole thing would melt at 99.5% efficiency? The EESU is 300lbs. 0.5% of 52KWh would heat up 300lbs of water by less than 30 degrees C.

Remember this is essentially an insulator with some conductors threaded through it. The heat is not going to be distributed uniformly, not without a fair amount of time to equilibrate. How non-uniform will it be is likely to be an interesting question.

Robert

I am curious as to when EEStor is going to have a web sight. Can any one speculate why the haven't got one yet. i am trying te see the glass as half full at this stage. Some negative people seem to think EEStor doesn't even have a glass... mmmm watching these posts with great interest.

I do not have a science back ground like most on this post, so much of what is said goes over my head. but I am very interested in the prospect of this technology becoming a reality. Lets hope so.

Robert, Matt,
Heat capacity of water is very high compared to CMBT, still the geometry of the enclosure would likely not be a cube so cooling on rapid charge should not be an issue. Power electronics has much lower efficiency but engineers design them to handle the heat. I like nekote's jpg on the IGBT, power electronic devices have advanced so far that convertors that Eestor needs are a piece of cake compared to when they started. Amazing how fast these things have advanced recently. For so long the power end of things advanced like a turtle, now that is not the case.

Book 'em Danno

Right on.

BTW...for any of our american friends that are not fond of NBC only showing the time delay olympic coverage, may i recommend

http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/

It is our national channel "Canadian Broadcasting Corporation", and it had 8 direct feeds online that cover virutally any event in real time online. I was recently in Havana, and i was socializing with a couple of CNN correspondents that reminded me how lucky I was to be privy to such independent journalism (not that they didn't enjoy Murdoch/Turner's perspective ;)

Heat: RC=0.11, C=31, R= 0.11/31 = 0.0035 (someone was claiming 115 ohms but i didn't check it).
Watts = 0.0035*(350 amps)^2 = 434 watts, no problem, so EEStor patent and comments are internally consistent. I see good team-work and smarts above in calculating that JM comments on heat were not correct. He said 99.9%, so it makes him way off. I got 2 C change. JM is speaking from an experience point of view in dealing with BT materials. He knows from experience a lot of heat is generated and apparently the materials he's seen always have more resistance. If he had seen the WIPO, it would be nice to get his comments on such a low resistance, not too mention a k measurements that did not go down. Satya, a 0.25% decrease in k is not much of a decrease.

I also imagine work-arounds for reliability. For example, the aluminum or copper wiring between components could be thick enough to accept 5 min charge, but thin enough to melt like a fuse if there is a short.

So, like someone else said, we're still back to energy density as the only theoretical problem. Oh, OK, production too.

JM's comment that charges have to move and bonds have to be broken is what I've been saying about the surface charge (dipole) calculations indicate charges have to move outside the unit cell. Someone found that this does in fact occur, against y_po's wishes. This breaking of the Ti-O partially-covalent bond moves charges out of the unit cell and along the chain of Ti-O atoms to possibly create the large dipole I have been looking for. But I am very doubtful that it contains enough energy.

The big power companies have the best electrical engineers. To do the most advanced research in electrical energy, their institute, EPRI, will hire the best consultants in the business. I've seen some of those white papers the consultants write. It's top-notch research. It would be great if someone could find that.

JM seems to be guilty of 2 exaggerations, the heat and the 10^-5 less energy density. The latter is kind of an insult. 10^-4 is possible, 1 J/cc instead of 10,000 J/cc. He might be frustrated with people investing in a Joe Schmo who will not allow anyone to test it. No one has posted any info about R Weir's past outside of the publicity announcements by EEStor and Zenn, except for two SEC statements where companies lost money investing in his companies. It is unknown if anyone other than R Weir has profited from R Weir's work. I assume he made a little money prior to closing the 3 previous companies that I have seen. I have not seen any peer-reviewed papers he has published. Where is his biography info? Does he not publish it anywhere? Where did he go to college? What degree did he get? Do you know anything about him outside of EEStor and Zenn?

I'll let you know if I sell Zenn tomorrow.

Re power electronics,

Not my research field but is that of my colleagues. Yes technology has got much better, but requirement here for DC-DC conversion up to v high and varying voltage is not easy. In particular, not easy to with high efficiency (say 95%). Even if 95% efficient then heat dissipation is big problem when charging for 5 minutes - though anything can be managed at enough cost.

The point is that all these issues must be solved before device is produced and if eestor were 12 months away from production they should be tackling them now with prototype devices. I see no prototypes, no sign of these problems being tackled, all effort at eestor is on production engineering of capacitor - strange since no sign of prototype material yet let alone full capacitor!

I agree with zawy the only 100X major theoretical problem is energy density. And that breaking Ti-O bonds does not help - can not produce larger displacement against constant electrostatic force. Basically, once bond is broken you can move as far as you like and it will not add energy storage. Also, if such a weird mechanism were to work it is strange that it is seen in something so conventional, rather than a completely different material.

Credibility gap is also that the claims look like they are based on shallow theory and ignoring many practicailities. Why say 5 min charging when implementing a unit with 30 min charging would be much less challenging?

The most plausible answer is that the original and never revised spec has never been subjected to the daylight of detailed engineering analysis, or experimental verification.

PS - Zawy. my problem with the "large dipole" idea is that you need not just large distance moved but also single sign force against which to move (not the external electric field but some internal intra-molecular or intra-atomic field) and the same charge density (so that large volume needs higher total charge to result in larger storage). It just can't add up.

Last edited Sun, 10 Aug 2008, 10:51am by ee-tom

The most telling thing in the interview was that RW was really confident in his technology back in 2001. We're all assuming that if this works it is because of some breakthrough since the original patent. We know that RW was really confident when all he had was that original patent, which was ridiculous. This suggests RW's confidence is divorced from reality.

Tom, if an electron is stripped from the BT and moves d meters, the energy it absorbs from the field is E*d eV. In a metal, E is always about zero, so this does not store energy. If the electrons don't break free until E is like 200 MV/m, though, then it stores a lot of energy -- 200d MeV

matt -

I think an electron moving long distance against the external field does not help matters. Imagine no dielectric, and electron moving through vacuum between plates. Yes, the movement releases energy (since electron is moving with field) but it does not store energy as in a dielectric. What stores energy is setting up a big total dipole moment through the solid in response to the applied voltage which allows much greater charge storage on plates for given voltage. The electron is only storing energy when its movement is resisted by intra-atomic forces greater than the externally applied field. (Normally in a lattice intra-atomic forces are greater than the external field, which is why electric fields do not catalyse chemical reactions).

The exact mechanism whereby dielectrics store energy is not obvious. At zeroth approximation you say that they do so by deforming intra-atomic bonds in a lattice (say). Under applied field the (electrostatic) chemical energy of the material thus increases, storing energy. At a better approximation level you say that the volume dipolar moment masks the external field from plate charges in such a way that greater charge can sit on plates for given external voltage. This does not seem like energy storage mechanism but the moving of the dipoles against internal forces is what actually stores energy.

Best wishes, Tom

Well, as long as the electron isn't conducted to the plate, then it has to be stopped, right? If its energy isn't lost as heat, then it is stored as potential, regardless of what force acted to stop it.

Is it stopped by an electrostatic barrier at the BT/alumina boundary, against which the electrons pile up? I don't know, but I would naively guess that limiting the distance it travels to < 1um would limit the amount of heat it could transfer to neighbouring atoms

ee-tom, we had found a site that said covalent bonds were modified so that you had a net charge move up the chain apparently in frictionless manner so that the covalent bond changes were the source of the stored energy.

There are sufficient questions from the viewpoint of science and commonsense, to raise rational doubts about the EEStory. Taken together Burke and Miller have raised sufficient questions, to leave any rational person with the gravest of doubts about the truth of the EEStory.

This morning I have posted to more EEStory posts on Nuclear Green. Those posts are based on my analysis of information coming from the EEStory blog. The titles are "Fear and Loathing of Science in the EEStory" (http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/08/fear-a..., and "John Miller Drops another Shoe at EEStory" (http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2008/08/john-m....

I take your point about this. There is a mechanism here that is theoretically possible at a classical level.

Al2O3 is a good insulator with tightly bound lattice and the conduction band of this is likely to be higher potential than the conduction band of BaTiO (does anyone have figures for the energy gaps?). Hence the energy stored is more. If we can assume that with increasing field more electrons will be dislodged from their equilibrium position and move to the edge of a nonaoparticle where they are caught by Al2O3 barrier we have increasing polarisation with field. The effect is however quite non-linear and would result in k value non-constant with V - not as per Weir measurements.

The system is probably not elastic since some (most?) of the K.E. of the electrons will be turned into heat. Also, it requires a lot of electrons to so move if we are to get high k.

This sort of situation happens routinely in semiconductors, where energy gap from valence to conduction band is small, but the total number of electrons moving is very small compared with the humber in the lattice as a whole, and so it can't do what is wanted here.

I do not have the expertise to evaluate this quantitatively without further research. My sorrow is that this statement will be taken by others as positive evidence that the eestor device exists - whereas the reality is, I am 99.9% sure, very different.

Best wishes, Tom

zawy -

I see why you find this interesting. I think you need a chain like this together with at either end a higher and lower potential equilibrium resting place (one end at 0v, the other at high voltages). Now let us compare this very roughly with a lattice containing dipoles. The total polarisation is similar, because an n-atom chain length d = nd0 takes the place of n separate dipoles (length d0). The polarisation P = sigma d.q is broadly comparable.

If we say that practically energy density is limited breakdown voltage and polarisation (at near breakdown) this does not seem to help? But I agree it is a potentially completely different mechanism for making a dielectric from conventional.

PS - do you have keywords for the reference?

Zawy,
RC = .11 for only one component C = .000979F R = 112 ohms

http://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/amat/semi_en/k...

This is somone's lecture notes on semiconducting polymers, with some nice theoretical arguments about why long chains of covalent bonds might make one-d semiconductors

jam, 31,000 components in parralel:
R = 1/(31,000*1/112) = 0.0035 ohms, same as the result I got by doing the whole thing. A component is 10 elements. An element is 100 cells. A cell is a 10 um layer. They're in parallel all the way down to the layers so that the highest voltage is 3,500 V and so that the capacitances can be added.

Here's the link that discusses the charge movement:
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9805013v1

"These transfers
of charge will propagate all along the chain, so that even if the net charge on the atom is not modified, a current of
electrons will be associated to the atomic displacement. The direction of this electronic current is opposite to that of
the displacement of positive atoms, so that it reinforces the change of polarization associated to this displacement and
may generate an anomalously large dynamical charge."

"Born effective charges should deviate substantially from the amplitude of the static atomic charge.
Surprisingly, this result remained in the dark until first-principles calculations confirmed that the components of Z∗(T) [Born effective charge tensor - aka transverse charge] are anomalously large in these oxides [11–13]. It was observed that the components of Z∗(T) can reach twice that of the nominal ionic charges. This result reopened the discussion on the physics of the Born effective charges and different recent studies tried to clarify the microscopic processes monitoring the amplitude of Z∗(T).

Last edited Wed, 31 Dec 2008, 10:22am by zawy

jam, if you read the patent, the capacitor was cycled for life evaluation. I concluded the 112 ohm resistor was external and used to limit maximum test current in the mythological capacitor.

ee-tom wrote:

Re power electronics,

Not my research field but is that of my colleagues. Yes technology has got much better, but requirement here for DC-DC conversion up to v high and varying voltage is not easy. In particular, not easy to with high efficiency (say 95%). Even if 95% efficient then heat dissipation is big problem when charging for 5 minutes - though anything can be managed at enough cost.

Yep, over a 5 min charge the heat probably won't have much of an opportunity to actually make it outside of the semiconductors (for the active switching components).

Similarly the heat generated inside the capacitor is going to be concentrated at the immediate point of generation, that point probably being interfaces between different conductors. That will spread to the conductors as a whole but will only slowly spread through the bulk since the bulk is insulator.

ee-tom wrote:

The point is that all these issues must be solved before device is produced and if eestor were 12 months away from production they should be tackling them now with prototype devices. I see no prototypes, no sign of these problems being tackled, all effort at eestor is on production engineering of capacitor - strange since no sign of prototype material yet let alone full capacitor!

I agree with zawy the only 100X major theoretical problem is energy density. And that breaking Ti-O bonds does not help - can not produce larger displacement against constant electrostatic force. Basically, once bond is broken you can move as far as you like and it will not add energy storage. Also, if such a weird mechanism were to work it is strange that it is seen in something so conventional, rather than a completely different material.

Credibility gap is also that the claims look like they are based on shallow theory and ignoring many practicailities. Why say 5 min charging when implementing a unit with 30 min charging would be much less challenging?

There seems to be a belief that if EESUs ship it's just a matter of plugging them in. I don't know of any motors or motor controller readily available to do the job. ISTR Weir remarking off-handedly that they use a bi-directional DC-DC converter in the box with the EESU to bring the voltage down but I've seen no indication that anyone is actually developing one. Such an item won't be developed in a day.

Robert