Electric Car Conversions
By | April 13, 2009
RESEARCH
February 10, 2009
Electric car conversion kits are hot these days. They’re helping thousands of people take part in the evolution of a new frontier in transportation. Just recently, Nissan announced they will have an electric car on the market in 2010. And the mayors of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose have revealed their plans to make the Bay Area the electric car capital of the United States. Even celebrities like Tom Hanks and Neil Young are advocating the use of electric cars.
There are many advantages to driving an electric car, but the primary one is gas independence. Imagine never having to pay for gas again. You’d save thousands of dollars a year. Plus, you get huge federal and state tax rebates. Driving an electric car is totally clean. It’s great for the environment. And it decreases this country’s dependence on foreign oil.
There’s been a recent boom in home electric car conversion kits. It’s now possible to convert any car into an electric car-including yours. And it’s something you can do at home for a few hundred dollars.
No, electric car conversion kits aren’t some kind of scam. In fact, I urge you to watch this brief video of actor Tom Hanks talking about his own electric car. These vehicles are for real.
As electric car conversion kits gaining more momention they still have the same problem all electric cars have that’s the limited driving range 50 -100 miles and then up to 12 hours recharge time. Those issues are now solve with our Carbon Nanotube Battery technology giving the vehicle a range of 300/380 miles between charges and will fully charge in 10 minutes. We offer an early investement opportunity in this new battery technology if you click on the investment application at the information bar on this website for more detailed information.
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Hybrid Carbon Nanotube Metal Oxide Arrays to Improve Lithium Battery Technology
By | April 12, 2009
This reent article from Rice University just backs up our claim that carbon nanotube technology is the future for battery technology:
Researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have created hybrid carbon nanotube metal oxide arrays as electrode material that may improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries. The research group combined highly electrically conducting carbon nanotubes and manganese oxide in a novel formation in which the nanotubes are grown to look, and act, like the coaxial conducting lines used in cables. The tubes have a manganese oxide shell, which is high capacity but low conductivity, and a nanotube core, which is high conductivity and absorbs lithium, with the resulting combination producing enhanced capacity and efficiency. According to Pulickel Ajayan, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice University, “Although the combination of these materials has been studied as a composite electrode by several research groups, it’s the coaxial cable design of these materials that offers improved performance as electrodes for lithium batteries.” Improved battery technology is a necessary part of the increasing demand for electric cars and other gadgets that last longer between charges. The Rice researchers say that electrochemical capacitors and fuel cells would also benefit from their findings.
Summary posted by Meridian on 2/10/2009
Source: AZoNano.com
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New Carbon Nanotube Battery puts electric cars on equal footing with gasoline cars.
By | April 12, 2009
Up until now the battery has been the weak link in the electric car. But with our new Carbon Nanotube Battery technology this will advance the electric car to the forfront. With a driving range of 350-380 miles and recharge time of 10 minutes this puts us on an equal footing with gasoline powered cars.
Right now, it seems impossible that gas could ever get expensive again. Well, it didn’t seem that outlandish a few months ago! If the recent past has taught us anything, it’s that we should be prepared for anything. And becoming independent of gasoline is one of the smartest things we can do as we head into an uncertain future.
It used to cost $5,000 to $10,000 to convert a gas car into an electric one. That’s not the case anymore. In fact, new electric car technology has made it possible to do a conversion for only a few hundred dollars. Home electric car conversion kits show you how to find tools and parts, such as batteries, very inexpensively, sometimes even for free.
Using battery technology to run your car is where the future is. In a recent column in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote “Big batteries that can store electricity for transportation and wind and solar generation are the indispensable enablers of the Energy Internet of the future. Europe, Japan and China are already dominating this industry. It’s the key to clean-tech, and ultimately our national competitiveness. We can’t allow ourselves to be battery importers in the 21st century the way we were oil importers in the 20th.”
I think people are beginning to sense the truth in this. It’s one of the main reasons why electric car conversion kits are all the rage these days. While electric cars save both money and the environment, it’s really the desire to be part of the future that is motivating people to build their own electric vehicles.
We offer an early investement opportunity in this new battery technology if you click on the investment application at the information bar on this website for more detailed information.
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Paper battery could be future power
By | April 11, 2009
Flexible paper batteries could meet the energy demands of the next generation of gadgets, says a team of researchers.
They have produced a sample slightly larger than a postage stamp that can store enough energy to illuminate a small light bulb.
But the ambition is to produce reams of paper that could one day power a car.
Professor Robert Linhardt, of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said the paper battery was a glimpse into the future of power storage.
The team behind the versatile paper, which stores energy like a conventional battery, says it can also double as a capacitor capable of releasing sudden energy bursts for high-power applications.
While a conventional battery contains a number of separate components, the paper battery integrates all of the battery components in a single structure, making it more energy efficient.
Integrated devices
The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Think of all the disadvantages of an old TV set with tubes,” said Professor Linhardt, from the New York-based institute, who co-authored a report into the technology.
“The warm up time, power loss, component malfunction; you don’t get those problems with integrated devices. When you transfer power from one component to another you lose energy. But you lose less energy in an integrated device.”
The battery contains carbon nanotubes, each about one millionth of a centimetre thick, which act as an electrode. The nanotubes are embedded in a sheet of paper soaked in ionic liquid electrolytes, which conduct the electricity.
The flexible battery can function even if it is rolled up, folded or cut.
Although the power output is currently modest, Professor Linhardt said that increasing the output should be easy.
“If we stack 500 sheets together in a ream, that’s 500 times the voltage. If we rip the paper in half we cut power by 50%. So we can control the power and voltage issue.”
Because the battery consists mainly of paper and carbon, it could be used to power pacemakers within the body where conventional batteries pose a toxic threat.
“I wouldn’t want the ionic liquid electrolytes in my body, but it works without them,” said Professor Linhardt. “You can implant a piece of paper in the body and blood would serve as an electrolyte.”
But Professor Daniel Sperling at University of California, Davis, an expert on alternative power sources for transport, is unconvinced.
‘More difficult’
“Batteries and capacitors are being steadily improved, but electricity storage is much more difficult and expensive than liquid fuels and probably will be so forever,” he said.
“The world is not going to change as a result of this new invention any time soon.”
Professor Linhardt admitted that the new battery is still some way from the commercial market.
“The devices we’re making are only a few inches across. We would have to scale up to sheets of newspaper size to make it commercially viable,” he said. But at that scale, the voltage could be large enough to power a car, he said.
However, carbon nanotubes are very expensive, and batteries large enough to power a car are unlikely to be cost effective. “I’m a strong enthusiast of electric vehicles, but it is going to take time to bring the costs down,” said Professor Sperling.
But Professor Linhardt said integrated devices, like the paper battery, were the direction the world was moving.
“They are ultimately easier to manufacture, more environmentally friendly and usable in a wide range of devices,” he said.
The ambition is to produce the paper battery using a newspaper-type roller printer.
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Nanotubes promise better battery electrodes
By | April 11, 2009
Grow carbon nanotubes inside manganese dioxide nanotubes and you’ve got high-capacity, potentially inexpensive electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.
The electrodes are made by forming manganese dioxide nanotubes in a template, then growing carbon nanotubes inside the manganese dioxide nanotubes. Manganese dioxide is an abundant material, but researchers have had difficulty making efficient electrodes from it. The carbon nanotubes help the manganese dioxide withstand repeated charging and discharging, and they increase the electrical conductivity of the electrodes.
The nanotubes have a relatively high capacity because both the manganese dioxide and carbon nanotubes hold lithium ions. The coaxial nanotube electrodes hold about 500 milliamp hours per gram. The graphite electrodes used in today’s lithium-ion batteries hold less than 400 milliamp hours per gram.
The coaxial nanotubes could be used in high-capacity lithium-ion batteries that power vehicles and store electricity generated by renewable sources.
Research paper:
Coaxial MnO2/Carbon Nanotube Array Electrodes for High-Performance Lithium Batteries
Nano Letters, published online February 2, 2009
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Carbon Nanotubes Could Lengthen Battery Life
By | April 10, 2009
Carbon nanotubes tiny tubular structures composed of a single layer of carbon atoms could lengthen the life of batteries, according to new research. Findings published in the current issue of Physical Review Letters suggest that the diminutive tubes can hold twice as much energy as graphite, the form of carbon currently used as an electrode in many rechargeable lithium batteries.
The reduction and oxidation reactions that occur at the electrodes of batteries produce a flow of electrons that generate and store energy. Conventional graphite electrodes can reversibly store one lithium ion for every six carbon atoms. To investigate the storage capacity of carbon nanotubes, Otto Zhou and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, first created bundles of the single-walled straws. They then shortened the tubes and opened their ends by immersing them in strong acids. Subsequent tests of their energy-holding potential, conducted using electrochemistry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, revealed an electrical storage capacity approximately double that of graphite. In explanation, the scientists note that the tubes’ open ends facilitated the diffusion of lithium atoms into their interiors. Indeed, the tiny straws managed to reversibly store one charged ion for every three carbon atoms.
As with many findings in the nascent field nanotechnology, commercial devices based on the work remain a ways off. “We’ll have to work on and overcome other practical issues before we can make real devices,” Zhou says, “but we are very optimistic.”
This article was published in 2002 on Scientific America by Sarah Graham. Mr Zhou was optimistic that we would overcome other practical issues to make this commercially viable and we have, this is the technology that we are now bringing to market.
Investment opportunities are available in the exciting new green technology just click on the investment application at the top of the page for more information.
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What is Nanotechnology
By | April 10, 2009
We have all heard the word nanotechnology have you ever wonder what is nanotechnology here is a brief description in layman’s terms.
Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes.
Today’s manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It’s like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can’t really snap them together the way you’d like.
In the future, nanotechnology will let us take off the boxing gloves. We’ll be able to snap together the fundamental building blocks of nature easily, inexpensively and in most of the ways permitted by the laws of physics. This will be essential if we are to continue the revolution in computer hardware beyond about the next decade, and will also let us fabricate an entire new generation of products that are cleaner, stronger, lighter, and more precise.
It’s worth pointing out that the word “nanotechnology” has become very popular and is used to describe many types of research where the characteristic dimensions are less than about 1,000 nanometers. For example, continued improvements in lithography have resulted in line widths that are less than one micron: this work is often called “nanotechnology.”
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Nano Tube Battery Technology
By | April 10, 2009
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MIT Carbon Nanotube Research
By | April 9, 2009
This is an interesting article that was publish in 2006 about MIT’s development of carbon nanotube technology and they mention that the “The markets that we serve are price-enabled. If our product stored a hundred times more energy, but cost a hundred times more, there might not be any market for it.” Well we have just brought this technology to market at a price compatible with the current product.
A version of this article appeared in “MIT Tech Talk” on February 8, 2006.
A breakthrough technology is holding forth the promise of charging electronic gadgets in minutes, never having to replace a battery again, and dropping the cost of hybrid cars. Indeed, the technology has the potential to provide an energy storage device ten times more powerful than even the latest batteries in hybrid cars — while outliving the vehicle itself.
The new technology, developed at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems, should improve ultracapacitors by swapping in carbon nanotubes, thereby greatly increasing the surface area of electrodes and the ability to store energy.
Ultracapacitors, a souped-up version of the capacitors widely used in electronics, have been around for decades. They’re well-known for being powerful, that is, able to quickly absorb and release electricity. But they can’t store much energy so their stored electricity is depleted in a matter of seconds. As a result, they’ve been limited to niche applications, such as providing quick bursts of power in some hybrid transit buses.
Now researchers at MIT have found what they believe is a way to improve the endurance of ultracapacitors several-fold — allowing the devices to retain the power and longevity advantages, while storing about as much energy as the batteries used in hybrids.
The amount of energy ultracapacitors can hold is related to the surface area and conductivity of their electrodes. The researchers have increased surface area by “more than an order of magnitude” by using carbon nanotubes, says Joel Schindall, professor of electrical engineering at MIT and one of the researchers on the project. One square centimeter of conductive plate when coated with the nanotubes has a surface area of about 50,000 square centimeters, compared with 2,000 square centimeters using the carbon in a commercial ultracapacitor today. The highly pure carbon nanotubes are also extremely conductive, which should increase power output over existing ultracapacitors, the researchers say.
The technology may find applications beyond hybrids, too. Ultracapacitors could allow laptops and cell phones to be charged in a minute. And unlike laptop batteries, which start losing their ability to hold a charge after a year or two, they could still be going strong long after the device is obsolete. “Theoretically, there’s no process that would cause the [ultracapacitor] to need to be replaced,” says Professor John Kassakian, another of the researchers.
The main hurdle the new technology is likely to face is not technical but economic. “The nonmaterial’s are probably a hundred or a thousand times more expensive, today, than the materials that we use,” says Michael Sund, spokesperson at Maxwell Technologies, San Diego CA, a maker of commercial ultracapacitors. “The markets that we serve are price-enabled. If our product stored a hundred times more energy, but cost a hundred times more, there might not be any market for it.”
However, the MIT researchers hope that over time, and with help from economies of scale, nanotube ultracapacitors can be made for the same cost as batteries.
The next step is to measure the performance of a device using the carbon nanotubes and to grow the nonmaterials on a flexible substrate that can be rolled into a large-scale ultracapacitor.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology think they’re on the verge of making traditional batteries obsolete.
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Use of Lithium-ion Batteries for Large Scale Applications
By | April 9, 2009
Implications
After nine years of research and billions of dollars of testing ideas it is obvious that there is no technology or manufacturing process extant or on the horizon that can bring to the market a practical, economically competitive, lithium-ion battery that can be used in a power train for an electrified private passenger carrying motor vehicle. Why does the research continue?
Analysis
The article that I am discussing here uses experimentally derived numbers, not hype or emotion, to prove its point that the enormous amount of time and money, which has been dedicated to determining whether or not the theoretical conclusion that a lithium-ion battery should have more energy density on a weight for weight basis than any system based on nickel or lead electrochemistry, has failed to establish that such a conclusion, even if true, can be used to manufacture a practical device.
Endless announcements that one or another manipulation of, or discovery in, materials science has solved one or another of the problems holding back the production of an economical, durable, reliable, safe, and long lived battery of sufficient energy density and power delivery capability to be used in the electrification of a private passenger carrying motor vehicle have now become, frankly, boring. They all miss the point, which is that no one of them or any combination of them makes enough difference to make a difference.
Small rechargeable lithium-cobalt oxide batteries have been produced commercially since 1990 for use in portable personal electronics. These batteries work well enough and are better enough than other rechargeable batteries of their size and weight to justify selling them for a higher price than the traditional zinc carbon one time use batteries, which they replace.
For the simple reason that the length of time that a battery can deliver a constant power is key to the use of “portable” computers the rechargeable lithium-cobalt-oxide battery also became standard for laptop computers where its ability to deliver enough power for longer than a rechargeable nickel metal hydride battery overcame its higher production-not raw materials-cost.
It turned out that nickel metal hydride rechargeable batteries (NiMH) could be scaled up to a sufficient size to be used in a hybrid power train for a small car. But the inability of such batteries to survive deep discharge has eliminated their usefulness for fully electric-all battery-vehicle propulsion. A Toyota Prius, for example, can only be driven for a couple of miles at any useful speed if it is operating on battery power alone.
The lithium-ion battery was developed before the NiMH battery yet it has not yet been incorporated into a mass produced hybrid vehicle power train. Why not? The answer is that the scaling up of lithium-ion batteries gives inconsistent results, and this type of result cannot be used as the basis of a mass produced technology. The risk of failure is too high either for safety or investment.
The answer to this inconsistency in most technologies would be to put the technology on the shelf until the problems can be resolved, if ever. In a world with unlimited wealth continued trial and error might even be a good idea.
But we do not live in a world of unlimited wealth nor in one of unlimited engineering and scientific talent.
It is time to put a limit on the manpower and money that has been used to try and find a practical solution to the electrification of cars by onboard rechargeable batteries.
Fuel cells don’t work either because present technology is severely limited by natural resource availability.
The practical and economic answer is to use lead-acid batteries for the bulk of vehicle electrification, nickel metal hydride batteries for longer range and power in a hybrid configuration, and lithium-ion for high performance or where price is not an object.
I have come to this conclusion through reasoning based on experimentally derived numbers, because as the philosopher said reasoning based on any other basis is sophistry and illusion.
Author: Jack Lifton is an Independent consultant, focusing on the sourcing of nonferrous strategic metals. His work includes exploration and mining, and the recovery of metal values by the recycling of not only metals and their alloys but also of metal-based chemicals used as raw materials for component manufacturing….
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