OT: Lithium ion battery developments

And I have also said that its no worse than a railway substation to feed a railway line

Its predictable in terms of time cost and technology. Either its commercially viable or it isn't but technically its standard crap

Bless!

Quite the ArtStudent aren't you?

Gas turbine efficiency as such us where it was from the get-go - about

Missing the point. We were not discussing GT thermal efficiency, we're talking about fuel per passenger mile. Which goes down with each new Trent (composites and aerodynamics helps too).

I think you're probably right about aero-engine efficiency improvements. Not spectacular, but very important to the airline industry nonetheless.

True, but think how many petrol stations there are doing this. Practically every supermarket branch.

That still leaves room for aerodynamic improvements, plane weight improvements and reducing the number of engines. So he may be right about overall passenger carrying cost minimisation over recent years.

But what matters is how it compares with the cost of petrol.

If you say a good pump can deliver 50L/min, and petrol has an energy density of about 35MJ/L, that's 1,750 MJ/min so divide by 60 to get a delivery rate of ~29MW.

So if you allow for the inefficiencies of the IC engine you could say you would need an electrical delivery rate of ~10MW per pump for an equivalent fill rate.

They could also have substantial local "batteries", to smooth out the delivery spikes a bit.

And that all happened over a period of years. In fact there are many less petrol stations than there used to be.

Look: to 'do electric cars' requires a 3:1 grid upgrade give or take. So you are looking at massive amounts of cable laying - probably underground and probably at the 33kv level for major charge points rather than 11kv anyway...

Well we have seen fibre optic cable go from the lab to something a bog standard openreach engineer can install...once the roads have been dug up... in less than 40 years.

IF there is a good reason to do it, infrastructure can be laid down and pay for itself.

Telegraph, telephone, railways, canals, paved roads, electricity grid, Internet, gas grid, water supplies, sewage systems - all were inconceivable but got built anyway.

So I have no problem with charging electric cars. If it needs to be done it can be done. What can't be done in my opinion is to make batteries sufficiently good to fully replace fuel, and indeed there are severe limitations on the supply of lithium to do it.

That is the critical question - not charging. To wit "Can we develop a battery that is good enough, cheap enough (especially in how much energy it takes to manufacture) and does not exhaust available resources?"

My claim is that we cannot, at least with electrochemical batteries.

God saw fit to give us hydrocarbon fuels and an abundance of Oxygen, he did not see fit to give us a decent method of storing similar quantities of energy in batteries.

It is a bummer, but that is the reality we have to deal with.

If we had decent batteries, all else necessary would be possible. Trouble is we don't, and we almost certainly never will.

If the wind blew steadily and constantly windmills would be a reasonable way to generate electricity, trouble is it doesn't, and never will.

If it were sunny day and night, solar panels would be a reasonable way to generate electricity, trouble is it isn't, and never will be.

If we had a containment system that could keep a plasma hot enough and at high enough pressure to sustain nuclear fusion, we could have access to huge amounts of carbon free energy, Trouble is, we don't, and ther is no guarantee we ever will have.

As an engineer, technology has to pass several tests. None of which are applied by ArtStudents?

The world is awash with clever ArtStudent? ideas that fail one or more of these criteria.

Universal electric cars are probably a great example.

you never made that clear

Aerodynamics and materials outside the engine dominate. The engines themselves are scarcely any more efficient at all. Lighter possibly. delivering power in a slightly more useful way perhaps

Your point was that engine efficiency had advanced in double digits. I am saying that engine *efficiency* has hardly changed,. The engines are a bit lighter, and fine tuning of bypass ratios improves efficiency a bit, but all the advances in aircraft design have come from slightly better aero and better materials, and electronics, not massively better engines.

Moore's law fits the introduction of new technology: asymptotic advance towards 'as good as it gets' is the norm for mature technology. Aircraft, jet engines, steam engines, car engines...electric motors and batteries - all these are 'mature technology'

I have a server based on a mid noughties entry level motherboard and a desktop that is based on 2015 entry level tech . A decade between them. Back in the 90s that would have meant 100 times better performance. In this case its barely 4.

Computers are now mature. Moore's law has ceased to apply.

Electric cars and batteries are mature technology. Moore's law does not apply.

yes, but that is not 'aero engine efficiency'

we were discussing car batteries, and he was using that example to imply that car batteries would likewise improve. In fact he and you do the exact opposite. By pointing out that the best way to imnprove electric car range would be - and is - to work not in the battery but on vehicle weight, aerodynamics and drag reduction in all possible ways, as well as regenerative braking...

...Because battery efficiency ain't going anywhere,

That will be determined by politics

I think what they need to look at is the number of cycles and their ability to still be as good ten years on, this is particularly the case for those running vehicles. Brian

fewer

Sure, but then that will also require a 3:1 increase in the number of power stations. Where's the planning for that?

:-)

Buried in the small print at defra

Last white paper had IIRC 65GW of new nuclear in the footnotes and headlined 120GW of pointless wind

With Carrie Symonds running Britain's energy policy, it will stay in the footnotes for a while...

Not with the price of petrol and unlikely with the price of the recharge.

It's going to be massive problem for the second-hand market. I was reading up the other day on fast charging of EV batteries.

It appears that the manufacturers warrant the batteries for various periods 5 years, 7 years or whatever. The more rapid charges someone does, the shorter the battery life, so they have included software that limits how many times a battery can be fast charged.

Don't do it often, no problem, do it often and the system will eventually stop you fast charging, on at least some occasions, to protect battery life and prevent in-warranty failures.

However, they are balancing convenience against warranty claims, so allowing the maximum number of rapid charges for an acceptable number of warranty claims, therefore a second-hand vehicle, that is just out of warranty, could be very close to battery failure, depending upon how it has been used. So you could buy a 5 year-old car and within months have it written off as uneconomic to repair due to battery failure.

I thought the price of petrol was mostly determined by politics, specifically by how much tax is imposed by Govt.

Oh purlease.

I can buy heating oil that would run my car for 40p a litre. its £1.30 in the pumps as road fuel

the difference is political. If the government decided to tax vegetarian food instead of petrol it could be less than 50p a litre