Dec
24
EEStor Looks To Be Closer To Market
December 24, 2014 | 3 Comments
Over the past few days EEStor and the company holding better than 70 percent of its ownership, Zenncars, have released an independent test of it composition modified barium titanate ultracapacitor powders.
Zenn Car Prototype. Click image for the largest view.
The interest is increasing because Intertek Group Plc (“Intertek”) rigorously tested an extensive sampling of EEStor capacitor layers across multiple voltages (250vdc, 450vdc, 700vdc, 1000vdc and 1500vdc) using its own equipment and testing protocols. Additionally a 250vdc, six layer injection molded part was fully tested to demonstrate the performance and stability of an assembled multi-layer part. That is significant in the operating voltages.
Ian Clifford, Founder and CEO of ZENN and the President and CEO of EEStor stated, “The independent testing by Intertek represents an important validation of the potential of EEStor’s technology for capacitor applications and confirms internal testing results achieved by EEStor. The Company and its stakeholders will benefit from the comprehensive protocols and procedures developed by Intertek at its facility in Dallas, Texas to ensure that the test results are complete and accurate. The work took several months to complete, and now allows the Company to begin to pursue commercial partnerships based on the independent data and comparative testing against existing incumbent technologies.”
Curiously the Intertek test results must have been circulating privately for some time. Neil Linsdell of Industrial Alliance Securities interviewed Dennis Zogbi who elaborated on the EEStor technology and opportunities as discussed in a 131 page Paumanok Publications, Inc. report issued December 17, 2014. The thirty minute interview is now available on the EEStor website.
The Paumanok report suggests that commercial marketing efforts get underway. The report concludes that “the unique combination of both high capacitance and high voltage characteristics evident in the EEStor capacitor layers are unique and should be considered particularly disruptive to the $6 billion electrolytic segment of the worldwide capacitor industry today.” The report goes on to say, “ . . . the Intertek report emphasized the superior performance of the EEStor capacitor layers when compared to that of traditional aluminum electrolytic capacitors. The added fact that the EEStor technology has an inherently lower cost structure when compared to aluminum capacitors makes the EEStor technology particularly disruptive to the global aluminum capacitor establishment.”
Zenn set out to use the impending EEStor technology to build cars and somehow wound up with a huge share of EEStor ownership. When the technology failed to make the planned timeline it looked quite grim for Zenn, who never got a customer’s tire to roll. Somehow the small remaining team held on with the EEStor ownership. It must have been a very difficult period.
EEStor through exuberance and inexperience let slip way too much hope for a timeline and projected results that has soured badly to the press and interested parties. With surely some relief, EEStor has been progressing quietly for a few years.
Its with some pleasure to see that a milestone has been reached. No, we don’t have an installed product operating, but at long last a third party test series has been done and the results are in out in the open.
More time will be needed. We really won’t know what EEStor offers consumers until a few engineers and product designers put some things up for sale. That’s when we’ll know what the EEStor technology is worth to us.
But your humble writer isn’t expecting this to upset Elon Musk’s giga battery factory plans. We’re still going to need both technologies and the improvements to come.
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Happy New Year 2009 from all the good folks at Eestor!
The energy stored in a capacitor is
0.5CV^2.
C is capacitance
V is voltage.
Capacitance is KA/T
Voltage is ET
K is absolute permitivity
A is area
T is thickness
E is field strength.
This gives us energy
0.5 KATE^2.
Dividing by volume gies us enrgy density
0.5 KE^2
relative permitivity of 18,000 would give an absolute permitivity of 18000 * 8.85 pF/m = 160nF/m.
electric field is given as 70V/um leading to energy density:
392 kJ/l.
A joule is a watt-second so converting to familiar units energy density is:
109 watt-hour/liter.
Wikipedia gives a density for barium titanate of about 6 g/ml = 6 kg/l. So, we come out to :
18 watt-hour/kilogram.
Although the battery in the Nissan Leaf holds 24 kwh, EEstor ESU’s are only supposed to hold 15 kwh. So, the weight of the active dielectric will be 833 kg, nearly one american ton.
We still need to insulate it, protect it from accidents and manage edge effects.
Another very big IF is dielectric saturation. It will need to maintain permitivity at the rather high electric field. A spring stores energy. Stiff springs store more than weak ones. In a dieletric, the electrons are held to the protons with the molecular equivalent of tiny springs. Weak springs give higher permitivity than strong ones.
I designed high voltage energy storage capacitor for many years. I designed many capacitors in the large lab about the country. Every so often so often some one comes up with a super capacitor. Most of them never make it to the market. They describe their designs with their own set of unit which are hard to decipher. Ancient nerds comments are easy to understand.