I look forward to seeing what the hot-rodders will come up with, though.

To all of you lefties that think that the military will hog the tech and not release it to anyone else, you must have snoozed your history class. Hello… internet, radar, plastic surgery, computers.

And then there’s the story about a couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio, back in the day…

BillyBob

But that’s not the way chargers work. You could end up with the same math if you used a capacitor to charge a standard battery — it’s a very inefficient charging method to simply short two devices together if they’re at different potentials. Most chargers (even the little ones for your cellphone) use reactive elements to step up/down the voltage and current-feed the battery. Most often this involves storing the energy in a B-field (inductor) with losses at only a few %. It can also be done with switched-capacitor techniques, although this is only really used in low-power applications due to the size of the cap’s required.

BTW: I doubt EESTOR will come out with anything revolutionary….

The Tesla Motor Company is now offering a challenge to the auto manufacturer’s petrol waste, but the problem is being solved at an outrageous price. Tesla claims it’s because of the high engineering cost along with the very high cost of the lithium batteries. EEStor can now possibly offer an antidote to this very clean, purely electric car being so overpriced. However, weather Tesla Motor Company will ever be allowed to enjoy using the EEStor technology is of great concern. Now that EEStor is sitting pretty with a defense contractor is a warning, that it’s only going to be made available to the highest bidder, the gov and special interest nicely seated government contracting.

To finally get away from the inside gov cozy dealing like where EEStor is headed, is to look at zero point energy now being offered. As an example, Steven Mark replicated what Nikola Tesla invented ages ago.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=167210479374903373&hl=en
His last known device produced approx 20 amps at 850 volts producing over 16,000 watts, simply by taping in to the earth’s magnetic field and converting it into electricity. This is done with a coil without core, a switching circuit and a couple of magnets. Will this ever be available to the consumer? Not likely!!!!

Claims have been made that only 5 to 10 minutes will be needed to recharge an EESU. I thought it would be instructive to actually calculate what that would mean for fast charging from a previously charged capacitor and slow charging directly to a cars EESU.

Fast charging
The charge, q, on a capacitor, C, is directly proportional to the voltage, v, across the capacitor

q = Cv

To do a quick charge from a “station” capacitor with total charge Q, capacitance C, and voltage V to a car’s capacitor with charge q, capacitance C, and voltage v at equilibrium between the station and the car we have:

Q = q + q   (charge conservation)

or

CV = Cv + Cv    (equal equilibrium voltages)

hence

V = 2v

So if we want the car’s voltage to be v=350 volts then the station must be set at

V = 700 volts

Ok, not too bad since this is still well below the breakdown voltage of 1,100 volts mentioned in the certifications. But consider the energy exchange. The energy, e, stored in a capacitor is proportional to the square of the voltage

e = 1/2 C v^2

which we will call the unit energy of the car’s capacitor. Then the energy in the station before discharge is

E' = 1/2 CV^2 = 4 e

Yes, four times the energy in the car. After discharge and equilibrium between the two capacitors has been reached we have

E = e + e = 2 e

So E’ > E . Where did the other 2e of energy go? It went into resistive heating and electromagnetic radiation (if the capacitors are made of super conductors and they are joined by a superconductor switch then at discharge the charge will simply oscillate back and forth between the two capacitors BUT there will be electric and magnetic fields oscillating which is an antenna that will radiate the energy away eventually. If there is resistance in the circuit then this will create heating and more rapid energy loss).

Conclusion: First charge up of the station takes 4 e units of energy. At first discharge 1 e unit is sent to the car and 2 e units are lost. The second and subsequent charging of the station take 3 e units to recharge (to get back to 4 e) and then again 1 e unit is transferred to the car and 2 e units are lost. Hence

3 e IN => 1 e OUT

hence this type of charging is only 33% efficient!

Slow charging
What if we do a slow charge directly to the car’s capacitor? Well, how is this accomplished? It is assumed that standard house hold alternating current is rectified and passed through a step up voltage transformer. How efficient is this process? I have no idea but let the efficiency be called f. That is, e’ units of energy from the grid are transformed into e=fe’ units of energy in the capacitor. If it is assumed that this was the process by which the station was charged then we see that

e = fe'    (energy to directly charge car's capacitor)
3e = f"(3e') (energy needed to charge station's capacitor above voltage v)

where now f” is the efficiency of transforming to twice the voltage, which I assume has f” < f.

So we see that direct slow charging is at least 3 times more efficient than indirect fast charging. The absolute energy efficiency will depend on the values of f and f”.

Doug Danforth