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THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND



 
 
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  #21  
Old June 16th 18, 07:46 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Charlie M. (UH & 002 owner/pilot)
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND

Tagging on here, not picking on you.......

So, where do the volts come from?

In some major US cities, yes, there are charging stations.
What about in "east bumfvck" US when your battery is low?

You are SOL........

I have read Tesla threads, where they are too far far away from a quick charge.
The microstructure is not there yet.
Maybe someday.
A gas/electric is likely a better option, for now.

Solar works fine in some parts of the US.
Geothermal works in some countries.
Hydro works in some places.

I still lean to nukes, accepting some of the downsides for now. Look to some Euro countries.

AFAIK, no "perfect solution" everywhere. Each has it's challenges.
  #22  
Old June 16th 18, 07:47 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Jonathan St. Cloud
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND

There has not been an nuclear power plant approved for construction since the Three mile island near meltdown in March of 1979. I was a sophomore studying nuclear engineering at Oregon State and that event lead me to change majors to Chem E, in very short order. I wanted a job post college.

On Saturday, June 16, 2018 at 10:57:13 AM UTC-7, jfitch wrote:
Another problem with mass conversion to electric cars: the public believes the electricity comes out of trees or something. In fact in most of the US, fossil fuels (coal or diesel) are used to generate the power. Many of these plants are turbines, and are not as thermally efficient as a modern car engine. Hydro power is pretty much fully developed (as much as the public will stand anyway) and there hasn't been a nuclear plant built in decades. Solar may be an answer, but it requires energy storage systems that are not currently in place. Fusion IS the answer, but someone has yet to crack that nut.




  #23  
Old June 16th 18, 10:00 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Charlie M. (UH & 002 owner/pilot)
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND

My opinion, FWIW.......the US seems to start with a blank sheet for every nuke site.
To me, what do I know, design maybe 3 power sites, then apply as needed. Do a small, medium and large.
Then you have a common approved design, within a decade or so, the design should be OK.
Why reinvent the wheel for every site?

Yes, there are issues of the waste, but the killer, in my mind for the US, is reinventing the wheel for every Frikkin site.....

Alternatives are there, but vary across the US unlike most other countries.
  #24  
Old June 17th 18, 01:38 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Darryl Ramm
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND

On Thursday, June 14, 2018 at 7:31:22 PM UTC-7, wrote:
There is a small company based outside Marseilles, who will by mid 2019 be mass producing a new type of battery, the advantages of which will blow your mind apart. The French company believe their products offers massive advantages to Electric Vehicles – i.e. self-launching motorgliders.

By combining the unique strengths of lithium batteries with an all new crazy-fast charging and carbon ultra-capacitors, the combination results in massive weight savings of more than a third of current power supplies. Recharge times can be measured in seconds. (Like half the time it takes to fill your tank with fuel). To this add the life span of this new power storage - it will accept up to a million charge cycles.

This is a story that “will blow your mind” and it appears in complete detail in the July issue of Gliding International.

You can buy of renew your subscription at our web site -

www.glidinginternational.com


Ah if only gliders could be powered by hot air rising from soaring magazines. :-O

  #25  
Old June 17th 18, 01:40 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
[email protected]
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND

On Saturday, June 16, 2018 at 1:57:13 PM UTC-4, jfitch wrote:
On Saturday, June 16, 2018 at 6:03:27 AM UTC-7, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Fri, 15 Jun 2018 18:54:18 -0700, moshe.braner wrote:

On Friday, June 15, 2018 at 5:23:14 PM UTC-4, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Fri, 15 Jun 2018 11:54:26 -0700, Steve Koerner wrote:

On Friday, June 15, 2018 at 10:39:26 AM UTC-7,
wrote:
On Friday, June 15, 2018 at 12:18:30 PM UTC-4, Steve Koerner wrote:
Go ask your electrical utility for a price quote on that sort of
connection...

Well Moshe, when the supercapacitors become workable in cars, why
wouldn't they also become workable for buffering at the filling
station? Megawatt connections won't be the issue.

You'd need a heck of a lot of those supercapacitors. The reason
they are being talked about in cars is to provide acceleration or
regeneration for a few seconds, a small amount of energy relative to
what's stored in the main battery. Sort of like a now-old-hat
"hybrid"
car uses the battery for short-term acceleration and regeneration
while the gasoline tank stores most of the energy. The supercaps
have a much lower energy storage density, and much higher price per
energy unit, relative to batteries. Also, at a "filling station"
you'd want to allow one car to fill-er-up after the other, not much
time for buffering. So you'd still need megawatts of supply.
That's actually perhaps economically feasible at a dedicated filling
station, but not at home.

Makes sense. I've not looked at numbers. It's fun to read the
tidbits in Gliding International about carbon nanotube materials and
super dense battery technology -- even if it's mostly fictional and
none of it will come to light. Numbers just spoil the fun. I'd
rather continue to contemplate supercapacitors that will be tiny and
cheap and hold enormous energy.

A very quick bit of playing with numbers (service station with 18
chargers, assuming that each recharge was the equivalent of a tankful
of petrol, 60 litres, and charging averages one full charge sold per
charger each hour over a 10 hour day) looked like an equivalent
electric charge point would need a continuous power input of around 0.1
MW.

Assumptions:
- 60 litres is a full tank: that's roughly what my Focus takes.
- The standard energy content of a litre petrol is 10 KWh.
- The number of pumps matches my local supermarket.
- The average fill rate of one tankful per pump per hour is a guess
based on how full the service station is at various times combined
with a guestimate that the average stop for a full tank of gas is
10-12 minutes.


--
Martin | martin at Gregorie | gregorie dot org

Martin: check your numbers. 60 liter * 10 KWH/l * 18 pumps * 10 hours =
108,000 KWH, or about 10,000 KWH per hour, i.e., 10 megawatts (if
supplied over those same 10 hours).

Yep. I forgot to convert KWh to MWh. I was having a slow day.

And one tankful per pump per hour is very slow for a gasoline filling
station,

Sure. Based on my usual timing, a fill seems to take around 10 min if you
include queuing at the til - pay at the pump has only just appeared at my
usual service station and I haven't yet got my head around how long it
takes now. But, it would seem unlikely that a pump could deal with more
than 20 cars an hour, but average over a whole day the throughput has to
be less when you consider that for much of the time maybe only 25% of the
pumps are in use.

although fairly fast for
battery charging with current non-vaporware batteries.

Agreed.

The actual
filling of a tank takes about 1/18 of an hour, so that flow rate of fuel
into your tank is 10 megawatts! Yes, it's hard to beat fossil fuels in
energy density.

Yes, exactly so. Another point is that building the generation capacity
to replace the refineries producing petrol and diesel and adding the
cabling to get that power to the charging stations is going to take quite
a lot of time and money. That process will be slow and expensive enough
here in a physically small country, so I wonder how long and expensive it
will be in a place as big as the USA. Have the people planning your
carbonless future thought about that? I don't think ours have.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org


I've watched them build the Tesla charging station near my home. The power service looks like a small power substation. I think they only have 10 charging stations, supposed to be able to get a Tesla to something like 80% in 30 minutes.

Tesla also proposed, and began to build, battery swap stations for their cars. I'm not sure it was every made operational. The Tesla batteries are underneath and apparently quickly swappable - not slide out, but put on a lift and R&R with some special equipment. One problem you will run into is the battery pack you get might have 5000 cycles on it, vs. yours with only 500.

Another problem with mass conversion to electric cars: the public believes the electricity comes out of trees or something. In fact in most of the US, fossil fuels (coal or diesel) are used to generate the power. Many of these plants are turbines, and are not as thermally efficient as a modern car engine. Hydro power is pretty much fully developed (as much as the public will stand anyway) and there hasn't been a nuclear plant built in decades. Solar may be an answer, but it requires energy storage systems that are not currently in place. Fusion IS the answer, but someone has yet to crack that nut.


Actually, diesel is very rarely used for large scale generation, except on islands. The most common energy source for electricity generation in the USA is natural gas. State of the art natural gas generators ("combined cycle") are MUCH more efficient than a car engine (almost double). (But electric cars have some additional losses in the charge/discharge cycle of the battery, and a huge amount of energy embedded in the manufacturing of the battery.) As for fusion, "it is the energy source of the future, and always will be" :-)

The "answer" is to use far less energy, and to use it when it's more readily available (while the sun shines), to avoid the need for much storage. Like it or not, we'll be forced into that route, through the economics. Cheap fracked gas (over-supply due to over-investment) is a fleeting anomaly.

But we're getting farther and farther away from soaring in the discussion here. The thread about electric winches is more relevant.
  #26  
Old June 17th 18, 02:04 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Martin Gregorie[_6_]
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEENFOUND

On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 17:40:39 -0700, moshe.braner wrote:

But we're getting farther and farther away from soaring in the
discussion here. The thread about electric winches is more relevant.

Picking up on that, my club looked at the possibilities shortly after the
German ESW2 winch http://www.startwinde.de/ became available. Our field
was a WW2 bomber field. We use the triangle of runways between the
crossing points of the original runways (04/22, 16/34 and 09/27), which
wer dug out, the rubble used for build motorways and the runways widened
quite a lot and put down in grass. We normally fly on 04/22, because our
prevailing winds are SW and NE, less often using 16/34 if the get
northerlies or southerlies and rarely on 09/27 because its the shortest
and narrowest run. The consequence is that there are four places where
the winch is set up depending on wind direction, and so we'd need to need
to provide power at all four points.

The ESW2 winch requires a 400v supply capable of providing 7-20kW. The
cost of installing this cable made electric winching uneconomic for us.
The far ends of 22 and 16 are 1600m and 1250m from our clubhouse, which
would be the mains endpoint. While the supply for 34 could be taken off
the cable to 22 and the cable run to 04 is only 340m, these don't offset
the cost of the two longer cables or the possible upgrading of the club's
mains supply.

Since the ESW2 winch uses 1.2 kWh to launch an ASK-21 to 400m (1300 ft)
and its motor can draw up to 200 kW, there's a fair amount of battery
buffering onboard - I believe they use lead-acid truck accumulators. In
theory at least you should be able to run one off a construction-site
generator trailer rated at 7-20 kW and parked behind it, but I have no
idea how the cost of doing that compares with wiring up the airfield.

FWIW I think the original electric winches were installed at alpine
airfields which had a single runway and only ever launch in one
direction. Unterwossen has a four drum winch installation situated well
off the end of the airfield. IIRC I've seen photos of similar winches
installed in brick winch-houses. Of course this minimises the cost of
cabling, especially if the winch is at the same end of the airfield as
the club house and hangars.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org
  #27  
Old June 17th 18, 05:19 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
[email protected]
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND

On Sunday, June 17, 2018 at 9:04:17 AM UTC-4, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 17:40:39 -0700, moshe.braner wrote:

But we're getting farther and farther away from soaring in the
discussion here. The thread about electric winches is more relevant.

Picking up on that, my club looked at the possibilities shortly after the
German ESW2 winch http://www.startwinde.de/ became available. Our field
was a WW2 bomber field. We use the triangle of runways between the
crossing points of the original runways (04/22, 16/34 and 09/27), which
wer dug out, the rubble used for build motorways and the runways widened
quite a lot and put down in grass. We normally fly on 04/22, because our
prevailing winds are SW and NE, less often using 16/34 if the get
northerlies or southerlies and rarely on 09/27 because its the shortest
and narrowest run. The consequence is that there are four places where
the winch is set up depending on wind direction, and so we'd need to need
to provide power at all four points.

The ESW2 winch requires a 400v supply capable of providing 7-20kW. The
cost of installing this cable made electric winching uneconomic for us.
The far ends of 22 and 16 are 1600m and 1250m from our clubhouse, which
would be the mains endpoint. While the supply for 34 could be taken off
the cable to 22 and the cable run to 04 is only 340m, these don't offset
the cost of the two longer cables or the possible upgrading of the club's
mains supply.

Since the ESW2 winch uses 1.2 kWh to launch an ASK-21 to 400m (1300 ft)
and its motor can draw up to 200 kW, there's a fair amount of battery
buffering onboard - I believe they use lead-acid truck accumulators. In
theory at least you should be able to run one off a construction-site
generator trailer rated at 7-20 kW and parked behind it, but I have no
idea how the cost of doing that compares with wiring up the airfield.

FWIW I think the original electric winches were installed at alpine
airfields which had a single runway and only ever launch in one
direction. Unterwossen has a four drum winch installation situated well
off the end of the airfield. IIRC I've seen photos of similar winches
installed in brick winch-houses. Of course this minimises the cost of
cabling, especially if the winch is at the same end of the airfield as
the club house and hangars.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org


Thanks for that info Martin. I am surprise it only takes about 1 KWH for a launch, that's the equivalent of 1/10 of a liter of gasoline, using the conversion number you gave above.

If the launch requires 200KW and the supply is 20KW then most of the launch power is coming from the batteries. That means that you could supply it with less power and it will still work, although it may need a longer time to charge between launches? E.g., if a launch uses 100 KW on the average and takes 1 minute (1.6 KWH) and you do one every 20 minutes (not ideal) then you need a supply of 100/20 = 5 KW.

BTW 5 KW of solar panels is only about $5,000 these days. That would do about 3 launches per hour. Possibly an alternative to running the expensive wires? (For only one location though.) Add more batteries and you can run the first few launches of the day on energy stored from the morning, the previous day, or overnight (with modest grid connection). And you don't need fancy vaporware batteries, any type will do, since they stay on the ground.
  #28  
Old June 17th 18, 08:49 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Martin Gregorie[_6_]
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEENFOUND

On Sun, 17 Jun 2018 09:19:33 -0700, moshe.braner wrote:

If the launch requires 200KW and the supply is 20KW then most of the
launch power is coming from the batteries. That means that you could
supply it with less power and it will still work, although it may need a
longer time to charge between launches? E.g., if a launch uses 100 KW
on the average and takes 1 minute (1.6 KWH) and you do one every 20
minutes (not ideal) then you need a supply of 100/20 = 5 KW.

From experience with Supacat and Skylaunch twin drum winches, the actual
launch takes around 35-40 secs in normal conditions, but then theres a
fair amount of throttle applied to pull the cable down before it drifts
too far, so 1 minute of run-time per launch seems reasonable.

On our field (1000m cable run, twin drum winch) the best launch rate we
ever achieved was 18 an hour - and apart from the winch driver and launch
marshal that required 3-4 extra full-time helpers, i.e. one guy in the
cable truck and at least two extra people retrieving landed gliders,
moving the launch queues up to the twin launch points, AND for no
briefing delays and other fannying about at the head of the queue.

A bunch of us, all recent solos and flying the club's SZD Juniors used to
get stuck in while waiting for a Junior to land, and no matter how we
tried we couldn't top 18 launches an hour. It didn't need much in the way
of long landings, and briefings etc to drop that rate quite a bit.

BTW 5 KW of solar panels is only about $5,000 these days. That would do
about 3 launches per hour.

We routinely do more than that - 100 launches isn't unusual for a decent
day.

And you don't need fancy vaporware batteries, any type
will do, since they stay on the ground.

Agreed - wet lead acid would be fine, particularly as it all helps to
hold the winch down.

However, as I said, we went to other way and have two winches - both are
7-8 litre V-8s running on LPG and using Spectra cables. One is a Skylaunch
and the other is a Tost which was rebuilt by Skylaunch. Since we operate
7 days a week, mostly winched flying from the start of April to the end
of September, we've found that having only one winch loses a bit too much
time on servicing etc, so we got the second one. This lets us alternate
them so the offline one can be serviced etc.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org
  #29  
Old June 17th 18, 09:51 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
AS
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Default THE LONG AWAITED BREAK THROUGH IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN FOUND

I am surprise it only takes about 1 KWH for a launch, that's the equivalent of 1/10 of a liter of gasoline, using the conversion number you gave above.

Our winch uses on average 1 cup of gas (~240cc) per launch. The engine is a 7.5l V8 with a carburetor. Going to fuel injection would lower that consumption but we would have to do a lot of launching, before we recover that investment.
There is a very promising electric winch project on the way in the US. Stay tuned for news in the near future...

Uli
'AS'

 




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