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Dead battery? Just refill it
This radio-controlled model car is powered by a battery that can be refilled with an electrolytic fluid.
(Credit: Fraunhofer Institute)Imagine that you're driving your future electric car down the road, and it gives you a low battery warning. What do you do? Instead of spending a few hours at a recharging station, new battery technology being developed by the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany would let you pull into a service station and refill the battery with an electrolytic liquid.
The Fraunhofer Institute is using a redox flow battery, a type of cell that uses two electrolytic fluids exchanging protons through a membrane. This process generates electricity. Although this type of battery isn't new, the Fraunhofer Institute improved the energy density, making it equivalent to that of a lithium ion battery.
In production cars such as the Tesla Roadster, the lithium ion battery pack requires almost four hours from a quick charger to go about 200 miles. A redox flow battery service station would pump out the discharged electrolytic fluid from your car's battery, replacing it with charged fluid, most likely in a matter of minutes. Instead of getting new shipments of charged fluid, similar to how current service stations rely on tankers full of gasoline, the station could merely recharge the fluid on its premises, even using solar cells or a wind turbine.
Other companies are working on redox flow battery technology for stationary energy storage.
Being able to recharge the fluid at the station using solar or wind would help keep costs way down and still provide a decent profit for the station. Re-use the fluid, greatly cut down the cost to ship in new "fuel" to replenish stock, etc.....
Of course there would be some small loss of fluid during the transfer to and from vehicles, but replacing that would be so much cheaper, and so much more infrequent that what it takes to continuously truck in gasoline.
With an energy density several orders of magnitude below that of gas, that means you'll be pumping 10x as much of it into your car to see 1/10th the mileage.
Still waiting on somebody to pair those ultracapacitors with a turbo diesel--if you want a realistic way to boost mileage without paying an extra 5 grand and ending up with an anemic box, there it is. But it doesn't make for "green" small talk at your next political fundraising dinner.
Yes I know the dangers and toxicity of gasoline and diesel fuel. I am just asking about this. What are the electrolytes involved?
ZYX. with electric cars there wouldn't be any crashes. They can't go that fast. (sarcasm)
It's go electrolytes!
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It's what cars crave!
LOL!
OK, so its an old technology that needs current engineering. That does not make it bad, but why is it out of favor? Energy flow, energy losses, energy density, expense, hazards, etc. A gallon of gasoline has a lot more energy in it than a gallon of battery. How much energy is in this stuff and how much of this stuff do I need to travel 200 miles? This past week I traveled to Fresno and my Civic Hybrid reports a trip average of 42.7 MPG.
Let's hope the people that brought us MP3s can bring us better batteries.
No doubt the density is less than gasoline, but if it really can be reused and recharged then heck, it definitely has potential!
Imagine this fluid being used to make electricity to re-charge the "flat" fluid. Self-sufficiency!
Please review the laws of thermodynamics and get back to us.
On a more serious note though, I know technology reduces in price over time and with adoption, but you have to wonder what the production costs would be for vehicles themselves and the charging stations. It is an absolutely awesome concept though and I would love to see it as an everyday reality.
The charging stations would be a different story though. It would take a solid one-time investment to convert a refueling station to this technology (recovery of depleted electrolytic fluid and charging said fluid), but then the costs could be minimized quite easily (recharge recovered fluid with solar or wind technology feeding an energy storage array).
If they can make this viable, it would be a game changer.
I understand your point as far as vehicle cost, but like every new technology the cost is always premium until widely adopted. I just wonder how much this premium would be, particularly as you quite rightly state 'this would be a game changer' Lets hope so!
Now the only major "business" to rebel against EV are the auto mechanics and fluids (oil, coolant, trans, brake) industry. Think about all the things you do NOT need when you do not have an internal combustion engine.
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by amoreno73
November 11, 2009 11:44 AM PST
- Interesting tech, now lets get it up to practical use to see what happens. Talk is cheap.
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