EStor

girl charging electric car

EEStor is a company based in Cedar Park, Texas, United States that claims to have developed a superior type of capacitor for electricity storage, which EEStor calls ‘Electrical Energy Storage Units’ (EESU). Its CEO and president is Richard Weir, who is also a co-inventor named on their principal technology patent.

These units use barium titanate coated with aluminum oxide and glass to achieve a level of capacitance claimed to be much higher than what is currently available in the market. The claimed energy density is 1.0 MJ/kg (existing commercial supercapacitors typically have an energy density of around 0.01 MJ/kg, while lithium ion batteries have an energy density of around 0.54–0.72 MJ/kg).[2]

Based on these claims, a five-minute charge should give the capacitor sufficient energy to drive a small car 300 miles (480 km). However, standard household wiring is not capable of delivering the power required for this, so charging times this short would probably require purpose-built high capacity dispensing stations.  Overnight charging at home should still be practical, as is using a second EESU for the home which could be charged overnight using cheap, off-peak electricity to then charge the EEStor unit in the car in 5-10 minutes on demand. Also according to Ian Clifford a normal household outlet with 110 volt supply can fully charge the EESTor powered CityZENN in 4 hours for a 250 mile range and a normal household outlet with 220 volt supply can fully charge the EESTor powered CityZENN in 2 hours for a 250 mile range. CityZENN target price is around $25000 – $30000.

Not sure if this will ever actually work, or if it is just hype?  I think LS9 has a better chance to revolutionize our energy supply. 

 

3 thoughts on “EStor

  1. guy

    Well, on the one hand we have some professor claiming that some theory prevents EEStor from acomplishing what it says. On the other hand we have a real company apparently making real devices that apparently work as designed. I’ll believe the guys actually working on the devices first, until they fail to produce what they say they they will. Theories and laws generally follow innovations to explain what happened

  2. emossion

    Unfortunately EEStor never made and will never make the supercapacitor described in the patent

    http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT7033406&id=cjx3AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&dq=eestor#PPA3,M1)

    because they ignore a well known physical effect, called “dielectric saturation”.

    Barium titanate has been used in capacitors for decades, due to its high dielectric constant:

    http://www.avxcorp.com/docs/techinfo/mlcmat.pdf

    However, the dielectric constant drops as the electric field strength increases:

    http://www.nap.edu/books/NI000488/html/49.html
    http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v71/i12/p890_1

    At a hypothetical field of 3500 Volts over a thickness of 12.76 micrometers, as proposed in the patent, the dielectric constant of barium titanate would be orders of magnitude lower than the claimed 18500, reducing capacity and energy density by the same factor…

    This has been discussed in more detail by Prof. Anatoly Moskalev on December 24th and 26th, 2006 in
    http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/index.php?p=43

    with an update on January 20th, 2007:
    http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/?p=46

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