Dr.  Xie Xian Ning from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Initiative has developed the world’s first energy-storage membrane promising greater cost-effectiveness in delivering energy.

The researchers used a polystyrene-based polymer to deposit the soft, foldable membrane that, when sandwiched between and charged by two metal plates, could store charge at 0.2 farads per square centimeter. This is well above the typical upper limit of 1 microfarad per square centimeter for a standard capacitor.  That’s coming from 0.000001 to 0.2 – a lot more than a doubling.  The question is then raised why isn’t the idea a super or ultra capacitor?

Polystyrene Based Energy Storage Membrane. Click image for the largest view. Image Credit: Credit: National University of Singapore.

The membrane is a part of a capacitor, not a whole, offering many designs a huge improvement.  Most simply said, polystyrene membrane-based membranes will be easier to scale up than the current alternatives. Unlike more conventional supercapacitor electrode materials with large surface areas and high porosities, the new hydrophilized polymer network uses ion-conducting channels for fast ion transport and charge storage.

The cost involved in energy storage is also drastically reduced. With existing technologies based on liquid electrolytes, it costs about US$7 to store each farad. With the NUS energy storage membrane, the cost to store each farad falls to an impressive US$0.62 – less than 10% of current costs.  This translates to an energy cost of 10-20 watt-hour per US dollar for the membrane, as compared to just 2.5 watt-hour per US dollar for lithium ion batteries.

Now the NUS capacitor membrane is looking like a big deal.

Dr Xie said: “Compared to rechargeable batteries and supercapacitors, the proprietary membrane allows for very simple device configuration and low fabrication cost. Moreover, the performance of the membrane surpasses those of rechargeable batteries, such as lithium ion and lead-acid batteries, and supercapacitors.”

Dr Xie and his team started work on the membrane early last year and took about 1.5 years to reach their current status, and have successfully filed a US patent for this novel invention.

The discovery was featured in Energy & Environmental Science and highlighted by the international journal Nature.  The research paper, “Supercapacitive Energy Storage Based On Ion-Conducting Channels in Hydrophilized Organic Network” has been published in Journal of Polymer Science Part B: Polymer Physics.

The research team has demonstrated the membrane’s superior performance in energy storage using prototype devices. The team is currently exploring opportunities to work with venture capitalists to commercialize the membrane. So far reports have it several venture capitalists have expressed strong interest in the technology.

“With the advent of our novel membrane, energy storage technology will be more accessible, affordable, and producible on a large scale. It is also environmentally-friendly and could change the current status of energy technology,” Dr Xie said.

The technology looks really good. Lets hope the commercial scale up works out and the natural greed leads to massive licensing in the high volume production route to wealth.

Today supercapacitors are used in solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicle car batteries, but the material the capacitors use to store energy, activated carbon, is unsustainable and expensive. Biochar, on the other hand, represents a cheap, green, and natural alternative.

The team designed, fabricated, and tested a prototype supercapacitor electrode. The group demonstrated biochar’s feasibility as an alternative to activated carbon for electrodes targeted for use in hybrid electric automobile batteries or home energy storage in solar panels.

Dr. Lee said in the press release, “While the team’s findings are preliminary, the approach taken by us represents a small, but potentially very important step in realizing sustainable energy future over the next few decades.”

With EEStor still out of the market the current technology continues to be refined.  Biochar is viewed as a green solution to the activated carbon currently used in supercapacitor electrodes. Unlike activated carbon, biochar is the byproduct of the pyrolysis process used to produce biofuels. That is, biochar comes from the burning of organic matter. As the use of biofuels increases, biochar production increases as well.

Liana Vaccari said, “With our process, we are able to take that biochar and put it to good use in supercapacitors. Our supply comes from goldenrod crop, and through an intellectual property protected process, most organics, metals, and other impurities are removed. It is a more sustainable method of production than activated carbon.” Another significant advantage is biochar isn’t toxic and will not pollute the soil when it is tossed out. The team estimates that biochar costs almost half as much as activated carbon, and is more sustainable because it reuses the waste from biofuel production, a process with sustainable intentions to begin with.

There is direct application to savings right now.  The main concern for solar panel production today is the raw cost of manufacturing supercapacitors. Current photovoltaic arrays rely on supercapacitors to store the energy that is harnessed from the sun.  While the growth rate of supercapacitors is advancing at 20 percent a year, their cost is still very high partly because they require activated carbon. Biochar, on the other hand, is cheaper and readily available as a byproduct of a process already used in energy production.

Katie Van Strander said, “My favorite part of this project was seeing the creation of the prototype. It was cool to be able to hold it in my hand and test it and say that I made this. Using this technology, we can reduce the cost of manufacturing supercapacitors by lowering the cost of the electrodes. Our goal is eventually to manufacture these electrodes and sell them to a company that already makes supercapacitors. Once supercapacitors become cheaper, they will become more common and be integrated into more and more devices.”

Ms Van Strander is right.  The solar panel and electric vehicle battery markets are not the whole market.  There are far more uses and many can use improvements today.  The trick for the students is they need some more lab time to get to a production process and hard numbers for the values that biochar offers over the activated charcoal.

It’s also not so simple to just use any old waste biochar.  There will likely be parameters to the pyrolysis process that yields the most effective biochar carbon. Some types of organic matter will be better than others, and the other ash components in the biochar will need consideration.

The students and the professor deserve a notice.  From today’s simple motor start capacitors to the exotic devices of the future a better cheaper and more environmentally friendly capacitor will be a good thing.  It would be great if the biochar design would have a much longer lifespan.  The Stevens Institute team has a good idea and its working in a prototype, lets hope those in the business can help it along and make today’s expensive supercapacitor more affordable and more widely available.

Stach and Su at Brookhaven. Click image for more info.

The excitement is about a new material recently created at The University of Texas at Austin.  Called Activated Graphene, it can be incorporated into “supercapacitor” type energy storage devices. Activated graphene properties offer remarkably high storage capacity while retaining other attractive attributes such as super fast energy release, quick recharge time, and an astonishing lifetime of at least 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.

This is major news on the electron storage front.

Eric Stach, a Brookhaven materials scientist and co-author on the paper describing the material published in Science yesterday May 12, 2011 effuses a bit saying, “Those properties make this new form of carbon particularly attractive for meeting electrical energy storage needs that also require a quick release of energy – for instance, in electric vehicles or to smooth out power availability from intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar power.”

A quick recap on super or ultra capacitors: these devices store electrical charges packing up charged ions on the surfaces within the device.  It can be a metaphor to your own body storing up static electricity and fast dumping it when you touch a lower charged person or ground.  The surfaces in a capacitor are electrodes, a positive and negative.  Between them is an electrolyte.  The electric charge coming in is stored in the ions at the interface of the electrodes and the electrolyte.  The more surface area of the electrodes the more total capacity is available for a given volume.  Today’s common capacitor will take up a comparatively small amount and discharge really quickly – not your ideal storage arrangement like a battery where the total charge would seem to be huge.

But batteries are chemical reaction chambers, where the charging and discharging effect chemical reactions within the battery.  You can get a lot in, but getting it in and out is a slow process compared to a capacitor.  Big total charge – battery. Fast charge and discharge – capacitor.  Long life and big cycling – capacitors.  The electron storage predicament described in a few words, but get them both together and change history.

That’s what the EEStor interest is about.

Activated Graphene Atomic Resolution Electron Micrograph. Click image for more info.

The new material developed by the UT-Austin research group may change that. The experimental supercapacitors made from activated graphene have an energy-storage capacity, or energy density, that’s approaching the energy density of common lead-acid batteries.  At the same time the experimental units retain the high power density, or rapid energy release that is a characteristic of capacitors.  The claimed 10,000-cycle life equates into more than 27 years of daily charge and discharge cycles.

Look out EEStor.

University of Texas team leader Rodney Ruoff sums that up in an understating way saying, “This new material combines the attributes of both electrical storage systems. We were rather stunned by its exceptional performance.”

This end of the story is even more interesting.  The Texans had set out meaning to create a more porous form of carbon (lots more surface area for ions) by using potassium hydroxide to restructure chemically modified graphene platelets, a form of carbon where the atoms are arrayed in tile-like rings laying flat to form single-atom-thick sheets. Such “chemical activation” has been previously used to create various forms of “activated carbon,” which have pores that increase surface area and are used in filters and other applications, including other supercapacitors.

But the Texan’s new form of carbon was testing so much more superior to others used in supercapacitors, the UT-Austin researchers knew they’d need to characterize its structure at the nanoscale.

To exploit the new material much deeper understanding is required.  Ruoff theorized that the material consisted of a continuous three-dimensional porous network with single-atom-thick walls, with a significant fraction being “negative curvature carbon,” similar to inside-out buckyballs.  There’s the amazing idea.

So Ruoff turned to Stach and his colleague Dong Su at Brookhaven for help with further structural characterization to verify or refute the hypothesis.  The Brookhaven team conducted a wide range of studies at the Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), and at the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The three facilities are joined by support from the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science.  Stach said, “At the DOE laboratories, we have the highest resolution microscopes in the world, so we really went full bore into characterizing the atomic structure. Our studies revealed that Ruoff’s hypothesis was in fact correct, and that the material’s three-dimensional nanoscale structure consists of a network of highly curved, single-atom-thick walls forming tiny pores with widths ranging from 1 to 5 nanometers, or billionths of a meter.”  Lots of places for those ions to be charged.

The study includes detailed images of the fine pore structure and the carbon walls themselves, as well as images that show how these details fit into the big picture. “The data from NSLS were crucial to showing that our highly local characterization was representative of the overall material,” Stach said.

“We’re still working with Ruoff and his team to pull together a complete description of the material structure. We’re also adding computational studies to help us understand how this three-dimensional network forms, so that we can potentially tailor the pore sizes to be optimal for specific applications, including capacitive storage, catalysis, and fuel cells,” Stach said.

Meanwhile, the scientists say the processing techniques used to create the new form of carbon are readily scalable to industrial production. “This material – being so easily manufactured from one of the most abundant elements in the universe – will have a broad range impacts on research and technology in both energy storage and energy conversion,” Ruoff said.

But what would it cost to build a 1000 amp capacitor?

This is major news, if still a little hard to grasp, this material has good numbers, no mystery, no secrecy and is in the open. Maybe the activated graphene solution isn’t so energy dense as the EEStor capacitor might be, but its competitive and it seems much more likely to get to market and much sooner as well.

For those in the field, the press releases at Brookhaven, The University of Texas at Austin and the paper published in Science are must reads.  The Science page of Supporting Online Material even includes a video. (It’s a very large file.)

That maximum condensing comes from the Bariumtitanate.blogspot.com where news and posts are just difficult to get. A click over there I’m sure would be welcome.  Having a blog with a single topic must be frustrating, even here with the full spectrum of energy and fuel some days getting a worthy post out can be a challenge.

Bill Joy. Click image for the largest view.

On with the news.  Bill Joy or William Nelson Joy famed for his exploits as a programmer notably the vi program that is used to edit code, and as a co-founder for Sun Microsystems is a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.  It’s also being reported that Joy is a principal in the firm’s investment in EEStor.  When Joy talks about EEStor ears perk up.

Last Thursday April 21 2011 Joy attended the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge. During the open question and answer period an audience member asked about the progress at EEStor.  Joy spent about 5 minutes discussing the EEStor effort in very general terms and offered his own thoughts.

Joy confirmed that Kleiner Perkins is still invested in EEStor and hope remains EEStor will get to market.  Meanwhile, Joy is still looking and investing in other energy storage mediums.

The Bariumtitanate.blogspot author has also prepared a transcript of the conversation Joy had with Jason Pontin who is the editor in chief of MIT’s Technology Review.

Noteworthy quotes heavily edited:  “I like to think the future isn’t gonna just be electrochemistry – that we could have solid state energy storage, something that’s based on you know maybe early 20th century stuff. . .  And EEStor is an example of something solid state. I always say in investing I prefer solids to liquids and liquids to gases.  And we prefer… semiconductors is our favorite kind of solid. . .  Whereas a solid state, it is the basis of electronics and it can last basically forever.”

“Energy storage is the same thing. I’d like to see it go from liquid phase chemistry essentially to solid-state physics. That would be very desirable. And then you limit cases of energy storage that should be solid state.”

“. . . when we had this list of 25 grand challenges…when we went out looking for things, we didn’t think we would find them all. And if we find investable things that are (predicated?) on one of those grand challenges, we don’t necessarily expect it to work.  If the list of 25, 10 of them work, that would be a miracle. Because they are set to be very aspirational. So solid-state energy storage would be on the list. And that’s an example of an investment that is trying to …with an improvement on an existing technology essentially because barium titanate is used as a material, common material in capacitors.”

“One of our sayings is…we prefer things that work in practice to things that work in theory. It’s nice if they work in theory but we can always invent the theory afterwards.”

“. . . we can’t always simulate things and we are willing to lose a couple millions dollars to try and see if some effect is plausible or will work ….that we don’t have a close form computer simulation. But it’s plausible to people trained in the art that it’s not…..they can’t explain to me on a napkin why it wouldn’t work.”

After the conversation with Pontin, Joy spent over an hour taking question from a small crowd.

Question:
So, are you still hopeful about EEStor?

Bill Joy:
Oh yeah. I mean these things are hard so there is always a chance they won’t work. But we’re very uh……We’ll see. I don’t know anything that isn’t in the press.

(Okay . . .)

“Now what they (EEStor) are proposing to do is wild. And there’s lots of reasons in which some of these things could fail to be commercialized. I’m not saying whether it’s worked or not and if we’ve announced it or not, I’m just saying it’s hard.  What they’re trying to do…obviously, it’s took years…to get…. since they….first….it’s not easy to do these things. So…but the worthwhile things usually are hard and they always take longer.”

One can take most anything except negative results and failure at EEStor from Joy’s comments.  The technology may well be working at lab produced unit scale and the commercial scale issues are just problems, many perhaps, extremely difficult perhaps, or just the resources as a startup coming from the lab to mass production hasn’t found the experience and know how, if there is any to be found.

EEStor has a way to go, that much is clear.  Prior optimism seems based in enthusiasm rather than the cold hard design, engineering, and process development needed to get from research to mass production.

Hope is eternal after all.  But one thing is very clear, the intellectual property is very safe and that competition or reverse engineering is going to very difficult indeed.  EEStor may as well leak a bit of real time status – it can’t hurt and would only help.

It’s not a lot of news or even good news.  But there isn’t any bad news.

The comments and emails over the past year deserve some response and the notation above, familiar to those who’ve seen prepared legal documents will see the humor, explains the situation.  Looking for EEstor news and information in 2010 is a very thin activity.

But does it mean anything? It surely implies a great deal.

EEstor is a year overdue for a promise made to get some info out at the end of 2009.  In the circumstances of 2010 that overdue situation is more of a common matter in development as money has dried up.  Thus in the global sense the ‘way late’ EEstor disclosures could have a firm basis in financing as most others do as well.

Yet the ‘vaporware’ viewpoint has certainly gained ground.  Opposing that is the probability that a technical issue or issues has surprised the EEstor group.  All the best of lab expectations may simply not be getting to any kind of scale.  In fact, as the days, weeks and months pass by; the supposition is that the lab results that raised so much money and attracted so much attention are for the research team at EEstor insurmountable development problems.

That notion pleases this writer, the EEstor matter isn’t replete with indications of an investor fraud, a close tight lid was kept on the public view, and there don’t seem to be the usual suspicious moves of a scam in progress.  We on the outside are exchanging a disappointment or our own into something dastardly of someone else.  That’s not a mature position to take.  Actually what little news there is hints or directly suggests that behaviors are moving to protect observer’s positions instead of providing useful information.  We are the news, not EEstor.

This writer is leaning to the technical matters of scaling up the technology for the delay.  Keep in mind that EEstor is or maybe its a ‘was’ now, trying to handle the electrical energy value of 10 gallons or so of gasoline in an energy density at or better than the chemical reaction potential.  Handling that kind of energy density is going to be quite a challenge and easily quite dangerous. The notion it can be handled simply with resistors overlooks capacitors nature of running at high voltages.  It’s one thing to handle a battery cell at less than 5 volts and quite another to handle voltage in the hundreds or thousands of volts.  There will be heat involved as well, lost during a charge as well as discharge.

The problems of going to scale, can be expected to be very daunting.  EEstor isn’t alone in the research; others are at it as well.  One can expect that the patents that EEStor has filed are and will in all likelihood, be granted setting forth a good chunk of the theory that made EEstor so interesting.  The secrets EEstor and the backers hope to keep under wraps are increasingly likely to escape or be found by others with each passing day.

So far, there is no common use of capacitors as storage for electricity over a long period at high energy density in slow charge and discharge conditions.  For all we know, making up EEstor ultracapacitors is a success, but rigging them for use a mind bending problem.

There is little doubt that ultracapacitors are going to have a worthwhile role in the coming years.  As the information that EEstor seeks to keep under wraps is revealed in the patents and as others come upon them in their own research many more minds will bear on the problems and solutions will appear.  It’s going to take a lot longer than everyone thought.

Meanwhile, the development of materials charges on.  The tiny bits of metal in hard drives continues to shrink, technology to disperse them improves, anode and cathode materials in battery research bounds ahead in great leaps, and electrical components will catch up.

In all likelihood the EEstor basic science might just be to far along for the technology of today to put it to work at scale.   Or maybe EEstor is vaporware.

But this writer’s confidence is about where it was a year ago.  Remember though, there are some good minds at EEstor, and the firm hasn’t closed up shop just yet.  Even if they do, the ultracapacitor story isn’t over; it’s just getting underway.

Chmiola idea is to use an electrode material called carbide-derived carbon (CDC), in which metal atoms are etched from a metal carbide, such as titanium carbide (TiC), to form a porous carbon with very high surface area.  Chmiola and his colleagues had experience with CDC in powdered form so the team took some cues from the microelectronics industry, starting with conductive TiC substrates, then etching a very thin electroactive layer (Ti-CDC) to store the electron charge. Thus a new microfabrication-type technique.

The genius innovation here is in connecting up technologies in the use of “bulk” thin films.  Chmiola explains, “In the traditional sandwiched construction, the electroactive materials that store the charge are loosely held together particles pressed onto some metal that transports electrons to and away from these materials and separated by some other material that keeps the individual electrodes from shorting to one another. The whole sandwich is then rolled up and put in a little soda can or plastic bag.”  That’s just what most everyone else has been working on.

Chmiola and his colleagues avoided many of the pitfalls of the “sandwich” method, such as poor contact between electroactive particles in the electrode; large void space between the particles, which contributes significantly to mass and volume because it is filled with electrolyte, but does not store charge; and poor contact with the materials that carry electrons out of the electroactive materials and to the external circuitry.

The team uses a high-vacuum method called chemical vapor deposition to create thin films of metal carbides such as titanium carbide on the surface of a silicon wafer. The films are then chlorinated to remove the titanium, leaving behind a porous film of carbon. In each place where a titanium atom was, a small pore is left behind.

CDC Electrode Microscope Image. Click image for more info.

Chmiola’s advisor group leader is Yury Gogotsi, professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel University explains the film is like a molecular sponge, where the size of each pore is equal to the size of a single ion. This matching means that when used as the charge-storage material in an ultracapacitor, the carbon films can accumulate a large amount of total surface charge.

The Drexel researchers complete the device by adding metal electrodes to either surface to carry current into and out of the device and adding a liquid electrolyte to carry and dispense the charges. They found that the performance of the device is best when the carbon material is about 50 micrometers thick, about the same as the width of a human hair.

CDC Film Electrode Graphic. Click image for more info.

Thin film deposition solves some major issues.  Conventional ultracapacitors are made from powdered activated carbon. But powders can’t be used to make large, thin films because they won’t stick to a surface.  Other groups have developed printable thin-film ultracapacitors based on carbon nanotubes, a technology with lots of potential too.

Gogotsi says the Chmiola team’s devices can store more charge.  Gogotsi notes that in theory there is no limit to the size of the films that could be made using these methods that are used by the solar industry and display industries to make panels as large as nine square meters. Because the carbon films are thin and can be made at temperatures as low as 200º C, it might be possible to integrate them with flexible plastic based electronics.

Even if the Drexel team’s work isn’t double or triple the current stage of ultracapacitor capacity they have solved the difficulty getting high enough total energy storage using practical fabrication methods using films.

This is important – Eestor seems to be fading, and the ultracapacitor field has trouble with for applications that require steady power over a long period, such as running a laptop or a motor.

A well-built ultracapacitor has a virtually unlimited lifetime, capacitors can live longer than any electronic device and some designs never need to be replaced.  A steady long time period drain with near instant charge is electron charge storage nirvana.  If they are cheap to make, and can match or better batteries in volume and weight the electron issue as energy storage, transport and use is over.  It will be interesting to see how this develops.

The full Drexel team includes John Chmiola, Celine Largeot, Pierre-Louis Taberna, Patrice Simon, Yury Gogotsi for the Science paper entitled Monolithic Carbide-Derived Carbon Films for Micro-Supercapacitors.

Chmiola is on his way; he received a National Science Foundation IGERT and Graduate Research Fellowships for his Ph.D. studies, and is now a postdoctoral researcher in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The effort is his second paper in Science magazine.

Now that this innovative design is out what others can do will be fascinating. The materials have already been licensed by Pennsylvania startup Y-Carbon.

San Diego-based Maxwell thinks it has a cost-effective solution for carmakers. The company makes the K2 2000 ultracapacitor a unit about the size of a soda can that could be of excellent strategic use with electric vehicles.  Maxwell Technologies is supplying a major European automaker that expects to release a hybrid vehicle this year that couples advanced batteries with the company’s ultracapacitors.

Maxwell's Ultracapacitor. No larger image available.

Maxwell is suggesting they have a partner in the European deal, the $30 billion Continental AG parts supplier, who is a competitor to Bosch in Europe. Continental expanded recently with acquisition of another high-profile European auto supplier, Siemens VDO, in 2007.  These are not firms that go to market with immature technology.

Maxwell CEO Dave Schramm said of the project, “They’re ramping up the car now,” adding that he expects the model’s volume to double by 2012. “We’re already shipping product.” Schramm said that starting the car’s gasoline engine, especially in cold weather, is the largest load batteries go through. Ultracapacitors allow a much smaller pack. “We’re definitely taking cost out of the system,” Schramm said. “Batteries don’t like the kind of power spikes you get with the start-stop cycle, but that’s the way ultracaps work best.”

The primary driver for Maxwell is the European fuel economy standards, which strongly incentivizes “start stop technology” where the engine is always shut down for a stop.  The technology is expected to be employed across Europe in the majority of new cars by 2015 in addition to the “Micro-hybrids” that are already selling well. For the U.S. start stop isn’t likely, as the fuel economy advantage isn’t credited by the EPA’s system –no incentive payoff – technology denied.

Maxwell’s ultracapacitors are installed in about 2,000 hybrid buses with regenerative braking.  The firm is involved in the Ford Transit Connect electric van with Azure Dynamics.  These and other automotive ultracapacitor projects have pushed Maxwell sales from $57 million in 2007 to $100 million in 2009.

Meanwhile, Eestor has gotten its saga into trouble.  Words like ridiculous, mystical and sham are coming out from various writers.  The hard facts are Eestor has missed its own promise to introduce and show the world a working ultracapacitor by the end of last year.  Now that a full calendar quarter has passed and most of another month, the credibility matter is the lead Eestor item for news and blogs.  To add injury to the situation, a major source of information, the tiny ZENN Motors, has stopped building their cars entirely, leaving the firm with nothing other than its license with Eestor for any form of revenue.  ZENN seems to dream of being the sole supplier of Eestor ultracapacitors to automotive capacitors.  The question is quickly becoming will there be a ZENN at all if the Eestor products do come to market.

Technology never waits, even when you’re Eestor.  Last week saw Popular Science cover the “Electric Luxury Racer” an exercise in engineering with the latest technology.  Of note the vehicle sports a graphene-based ultracapacitor—a device currently being developed in university labs, which uses sheets of carbon only one atom thick to store twice as much electricity as today’s capacitors offering immediate bursts of power.  The question is will the unnamed university labs come up with production prototypes.  Doubling capacitor storage might not get the idea to ultracapacitor status, but graphene-based caps seem quite possible.

The face of the capacitor market is changing fast.  Ioxus of Oneonta New York has announced 1,000-, 3,000- and 5,000-Farad (F) ultracapacitors.  These are quite different numbers from micro or pico farads.  Ioxus prides itself with smaller dimensions packed in rectangles that offer more power density than the competition.

Ioxus Ultracapacitors. Click image for the largest view.

Right now ultracapacitors can be used as rechargeable energy storage devices to prolong the lifespan of other energy sources, such as batteries. They are lightweight, weighing one-fifth the weight of a comparable battery, and their manufacture and disposal has no detrimental effects to the environment.

Ultracapacitors can take on all of the power functions, except for extended time operation, and this is actually only dependent on the ultracapacitor system size.  The state of charge of the battery array does not affect the characteristics of ultracapacitor energy delivery capability.  Due to buffering by the ultracapacitor array, the battery array is not subjected to large current loading, which makes its operating conditions, under all conditions of line and load more moderate, extending the battery life.  It’s very hard to imagine a smart electric power storage system without ultracapacitor support.

One of the more interesting capacitor applications can be seen on the Ioxus site where they offer a white paper about capacitor use for starting diesel locomotives in Russia.

Will Eestor get from stealth mode to supplying working samples to amaze and impress all of us?  Time will tell, but a near four-month delay on a one’s own announcement doesn’t encourage folks.  In the meantime there are ultracapacitors out there.  Maybe the available products are not so amazing as the Eestor leaked power, but the real products are intensely valuable for supporting electrification of transportation.

Many will recall the vacuum tube has been around for decades and for most uses was made obsolete by transistors.  We tend to think ‘switch’ when vacuum tube comes to mind.  But electrical activity in a vacuum has also led to the fusion field where Bussard’s research is getting close to power production.  Other electrical devices can be made inside a tube holding a vacuum.  Devices can be made filling the tube with gases such as florescent bulbs, or simply installing a filament and burning it with electricity for light and heat.

For better than eighty years it’s been known that a bit of energy can be held in a vacuum when an anode and cathode are present.  Too much energy in and they arc, dumping the energy.  What’s curious but factual is the smaller the distance between the electrodes; proportionally the more energy can be inserted.

Digital Quantum Battery Layout. Click image for more info.

Thus Alfred W. Hübler and Onyeama Osuagwu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have worked out a theory with supporting math and applied materials science that they believe can be built into a capacitor. Using the math, the assertion is such a capacitor could be two to ten times as great for energy density as the very best lithium-ion battery.  Their idea would use conventional silicon chip manufacturing to build capacitor sets on chips by the billions or trillions.  As the volume for the energy density is a vacuum, the weight will be in the structure, the energy will stay in the tiny vacuum, so the devices could be quite lightweight.

Quantum Capacitor Comparitive Properties Charts. Click image for more info.

Because they are capacitors without a chemical reaction as in a battery the speed of charges and discharges would also be very high.  The two main property requirements for energy storage have good answers.

It sounds almost to good to be true, and for years researchers have recognized that nanoscale capacitors exhibit unusually large electric fields, suggesting that the tiny scale of the devices was responsible for preventing energy loss. Hübler says, “people didn’t realize that a large electric field means a large energy density, and could be used for energy storage that would far surpass anything we have today.”  Realization is the innovation’s first step here.

The materials science needed is compelling.  Hübler says, “If you look at it from a digital electronics perspective–it’s just a flash drive. If you look at it from an electrical engineering perspective, you would say these are miniaturized vacuum tubes like in plasma TVs. If you talk to a physicist, this is a network of capacitors.”  Built on silicon chips, the digital part of the moniker comes from the fact that each nano vacuum tube capacitor would be individually addressable, so the devices might be used for memory as well as storing power.

Hübler hasn’t built anything yet.  But he points out that in 2005 a group of Korean researchers showed that nano capacitors can be fabricated.  Just remember the numbers needed to get to worthwhile scale will be billions and trillions.  Not a threatening number, today’s common processors have transistors in the tens of millions now for a few dollars each.  And if not over heated, last a very, very long time indeed.

Vacuum nano tubes can hold electric energy without any losses for many years, and can be charged and discharged rapidly. The largest charging-discharging rate is proportional to the ratio between the gap size and the speed of light. They’ll be quick.

The key design parameter is the gap size between the anode and cathode.  As noted electrical breakdown in vacuum gaps has been studied or more than 80 years for gap sizes above 200nm.  But little is known for certain about vacuum gaps in the nanometer range.

Hübler and Osuagwu show that in reverse bias, the electric field near nano-tip anodes can be orders of magnitudes larger than the breakdown field of conventional capacitors, varactor diodes, and nano plasma tubes. Their premise is the electrodes are spaced at about 10 nanometers (or 100 atoms) apart so the quantum effects ought to suppress the arcing.

With the current glut of chip fabrication worldwide and the technology at 45nm heading to 28nm, and if the concept can be made to work at such needed scale, small electronic devices like cell phones their could be a path for marketing the technology.

Hübler has applied for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding to develop a prototype, but the concept presents significant challenges.  The questions about the materials staying together when loaded with power and when working what other phenomena might appear have been raised.  It’s a risk, for sure.

Keep in mind, the silicon chip build would have management and telemetry reports ready almost instantly.  A thermistor could send out information for charges and discharges.  The chips would run with little concern for colder temperatures. It could be a great solution.

But the potential is huge.  Once shown to work, it’s going to be an engineering race.

Ioxus Ultracapacitors. Click image for the largest view.

Better yet in many applications, the use of ultracapacitors to provide peak power will extend battery life by a factor of four and in some cases even more. That kind of improvement will have a dramatic effect on the recycling and waste disposal problem associated with the batteries being used every day in portable and hand-held devices on up to the largest lead acid or nickel cadmium sets.

Ioxus is calling their product an ELCD Electronic Reservoir System or EERS.  In the forklift design each module is a set of 60 ultracapacitors, control electronics, safety circuitry, the interconnects and a safety enclosure.  The customer gets a complete stand-alone power assist module.   The kit offers such a boost those electric lifts in cold warehousing situations can run all day.  The kit installs in about an hour.

The effect is that the battery set can run 30% longer and avoids a deep discharge, an enemy to lead acid cells life expectancy.  If not in a deep freeze ware house customers can reduce the total battery set size by 15% or so.

The instructive value here is that forklifts draw minor power when moving about but deeply need power when lifting heavy loads.  That is when the ultracapacitor set kicks in, supply the electrons in a rush while the battery chemistry is steadily discharging away oblivious to the sudden draw down of power.

This gets more interesting when considering a regenerative braking system.  The charging effect is magnified in a fast braking effort.  A lot of energy is suddenly loaded into a system – a reverse of the discharge.  As readers know, the battery chemistries don’t like those fast charges and discharges.  The Ioxus design does just what is needed for those fast cycles.

With orders in hand Ioxus has cracked an interesting market by bringing the special characteristics of ultracapacitors to a product.  Leading the marketing was the ultracapacitor’s wide temperature range, so exploiting the difficulties of electric drive sets in cold locations such as the refrigerated warehouse.  The Ioxus design also uses the low resistance to gather back the energy from lowering a load taking up a lot of current in a very short time frame.  The company is also simplifying the packaging with multiple cells wired so that most any voltage requirement can be satisfied.

Until something like EEStor gets market penetration, which might be delayed by setting their price too high, there will be for years or decades to come a huge number of battery powered devices in need of an efficiency update.

Ultracapacitors essentially offer moving and holding a charge and ions.  Unlike a battery the chemical bonds need not be made and broken for an energy absorption or release.  That aspect and the leveling of a charge or discharge rate extend battery life giving a lot more things than first though a new lease of a useful life.

Ioxus makes carbon-carbon ultracapacitors where both electrodes are carbon, as opposed to the hybrid (asymmetric) ultracapacitors in which in one of the electrodes is carbon and the other electrode utilizes a different material. Energy densities of hybrid ultracapacitors can be significantly greater than that of carbon-carbon ultracapacitors, but power densities are lower.  Thus the company made a choice, leave the density to a cheap battery and the fast moving electrons to an ultracapacitor.  They seem to be going the wrong way, but Ioxus has customers and real world results on existing equipment.  Maybe they are going exactly the right way.

But Ioxus isn’t slack in the research and technology area.  To achieve its power densities Ioxus is essentially using multiple types of carbon to pack the material as best as possible and using a variety of different types of carbon with different conductive properties. Ioxus has also optimized binders to adhere to special foils inside the canisters.  They are making the typical cylinders as well as prismatic shapes.

Ioxus has 12 patents to date with others in proceedings or preparation.  Like everyone in the business they are interested in transportation applications—mass transit, hybrid-electric, train/light rail, and stop/start applications.  Where Ioxus is different is the applications closer to the load such as replacing power steering with electric steering using ultracapacitors, smart airbags, instrument clusters, multimedia/telematics, seatbelt releases, and power seats, locks and windows – all short term high current loads.  They might even consider the air conditioning matter, one that was sure to bedraggle the electric powered car for years to come.  One hopes they see the opportunity in the overnight chargers as well.

The opportunities seem boundless today, with the EEStor product perhaps being the one market gorilla in the future.  But there is a lot of things holding the EEStor project back, the license terms seem strange, the investors are sure to try for ubar billionaire status from the breakthrough so reducing the EEStor effect and delaying the growth in return for the big bucks.  Somehow this writer doesn’t see EEStor being so shrewd as to go to the lowest cost maximum volume as fast as possible.

That makes the Ioxus business very attractive.  Not just for the existing fleet where the technology can be installed quick and cheap, but for new equipment as well.  The problem of energy density and power density offers consumers a great opportunity with innovation such as Ioxus is offering.  You can have both.  Now – with no waiting for the EEStor products and if EEStor tries over pricing, who cares?

The power converter would be effectively a transformer, a device that steps down the ultracapacitor’s high voltage to a lower voltage that can be used in motors and other devices.  Reports have it that the EEStor capacitor’s voltage peak is about 35 to 37 hundred volts, much more than electric motors are currently designed to cope with.  Although high voltage allows smaller wires, lighter weights, and other attributes, insulating for high volts has it own issues such as more dimensional needs meaning a larger physical size, voltage insulation that can contain the “pressure” as high voltage much more easily jumps away to grounds, penetrates insulation, and can heat conductors very quickly.

The power converter speculation is supposed to reduce the voltage to the more familiar 600-volt range.  Many insulation types can deal with voltages in that range at low cost and the dimensional issue nears optimal with today’s technology.  At to 400 to 600 volt range, particularly using alternating current very high power output can come from very small packages.

This writer is also assuming that Polarity will offer the power converter with an internal method of providing steady output voltage from capacitors that one expects have voltage drop as they are drained.  Thus the transformer inside would be a variable type that adjusts to the available voltage while the load voltage is a constant.

Some sites are crediting Polarity’s photos, links and products to the EEStor contract.  Those assumptions are certain to be in error, even if interesting.  A little closer reading of the Polarity site makes clear that the products on hand have existing markets.  Most products have generator or battery input voltages; no mention is easily seen of ultracapacitor input products.  As noted the voltage decline will entail certain design modifications to extract the maximum available charge.

Polarity HVLV600 Converter.

Meanwhile snoopy reports have it that EEStor will prove publicly the capabilities of their technology before the end of September 2009.  The context of these, blogs, hypetype news media, etc. tend to overstate the ‘proving” but EEStor may well have announcements in that area.

Factually though the whole thing is based on Polarity’s tight acknowledgment saying on their site,  “Awarded contract from EESTOR to integrate Polarity’s high power HV to LV converter into EESTOR’s EESU that will be used in Zenn Motor Company’s small to medium size electric car.” EESU would be “electrical energy storage unit.”

It seems to be time for those seriously interested in electron storage to come up to speed with EEStor. This is a link to a transcript of Mr Weir, of EEStor and Tyler Hamilton, senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star. Significantly, at 14:04 where Weir says,

“We’ve taken those specifications to our circuits company that builds our circuits for us. A company called Polarity. They’re out of California. ZENN has gone there and came back very impressed. I was lead to them by the Air Force Research Labs because they’re so effective in building high performance converter circuits for them. However there are multitudes of companies around the world that could build these circuits in high volume. But, I got started with them so … they’re building our circuits right now. They’re actually putting the ZENN circuits together literally as we speak. I’ll be going out there, if not next week the following week after that to have a long session with them to talk about getting the parts in here quickly so I can not only do … I don’t want to stop and build circuits for component testing I want to use their circuits for full EESU testing. Which is also component testing. So I kill 2 birds with 1 stone there. And get that in here and get that tested and get UL in here start looking at it. So, that’s going quite well.”

Of major note, Weir is suggesting that UL aka Underwriters Laboratories has been invited in to start their process.  Things are much further along than thought.

While much is made of the impact the EEStor device might make across the whole of the electric spectrum Weir reminds us at 24.28 that:

“You can take the grids of the world and put our batteries on it and charge ‘em at night and dump ‘em during the day. Well known fact you can put 45% more electricity on the grid and do nothing more than put our batteries on there.”

This could be a very advantageous development for consumers when peak demand generation has serious competition.

The transcript is a significant read and I’ve only toughed on the highlights.  It’s a few minutes well spent with a lot of answers there.