"Research doubles electric car range" claim #4,381 - but who's counting?

[wtmusic]

[div style="float: left; padding-right: 12px;"]"Researchers at the University of Wollongong have developed an electric car battery that allows vehicles to travel more than twice as far.

The battery, which charges in a couple of minutes, may also eventually be used to power remote devices like mobile phones, iPads and laptop computers more effectively.

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She said they recently made the breakthrough with the development of a new Germanium-based material with five times more energy storage than the batteries now used for electric vehicles."

http://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/1482421/research-doubles-electric-car-range/

I'm poking a little fun, but with the quantity of research on EV batteries underway (especially relating to nanomaterials) a bet against major improvements in the next 5 years is not a wise one.

[OnlinePoker]

1. Price per kilo of Germanium is around $1800 and climbing

I don't know how much would go into these batteries, but it could end up being very pricey if they need a large quantity.

[wtmusic]

4. They published in the ACS journal Nano Letters in February

You have to pay for the article, but here's more info:

"Researchers from the University of Wollongong, Australia and the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), S. Korea, have developed a germanium oxide/germanium nanocomposite (GeO2/Ge/C) anode material for Li-ion batteries that shows a high capacity of up to 1860 mAh/g at 1 C (2.1 A/g) rate and 1680 mAh/g at 10 C rate. A paper on their work is published in the ACS journal Nano Letters.

They attributed the good electrochemical performance to the increase in reversibility of the conversion reaction of GeO2 by the presence of the elemental germanium nanoparticles present in the composite."

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013/02/seng-20130210.html

[itsrobert]

2. Have they been road tested yet?

Sounds promising. If people can travel 400 km and and recharge the battery in two minutes, this is a game changer.

[Fumesucker]

3. You aren't going to be recharging 400 km range batteries in two minutes any time soon

Even if the batteries are available the voltages and currents required to recharge them that quickly are nearly astronomical.

100 wH/km would be a pretty decent figure for an electric car, times 400 km makes 40,000 wH battery capacity.

To recharge 40,000 wH in two minutes would take 40,000 * 30 (2 minute periods in an hour) or 1,200,000 watts which at 240 volts means 5,000 amperes of charging current.

A 4/0 copper cable is just under a half inch in diameter (finger sized roughly) and will carry 260 amps, that means you would need 20 4/0 cables for each polarity so 40 copper cables altogether.

If you were to double the voltage to 480 volts you would still require 20 4/0 copper cables to recharge the car in two minutes.

[itsrobert]

5. Or a person could just drive by the clock tower at precisely 10:04 p.m.

Last edited Fri May 10, 2013, 12:35 PM - Edit history (1)

n/t

[Warren Stupidity]

6. I'd settle for commute there and back again range + overnight charging.

100 - 200 miles and competitive pricing (not tesla prices) is the game changer.

[wtmusic]

7. +1