FrenchShark wrote:
There is something better than NiMH : the aluminium battery, check that out:
http://www.europositron.com/en/index.html
There has not been a proof of concept, the battery has not been demonstrated yet. The technology has not been described, so scientists cannot comment on it. The patent is only available in Finnish, which keeps peope from clicking on it. When clicking on it, the link is dead. My guess: Investment scam. The page talks too much about patents, business plans and licensing. There is no product!
Combine this battery with a fuel burner and a combustion chamber covered with very efficient thermo-electric chips
from Borealis: http://www.powerchips.gi/ and you have a 1L/100km car.
Powerchips promises 40% efficiency, yet, didn't ever show anything that works anywhere close to a fraction of that. Sure, there's solid-state effects that produce electricity from heat, but they cannot be used to havest usable amounts of energy.
I also do hope that we will have solved the energy crisis thanks to Mr Eric Lerner and its amazing dense plasma focus fusion device : http://www.focusfusion.org.
Another of those investment scams. If you read about the research fusion reactor located in Jülich, Germany (about 50km from where I live), they are using about the same approach: Catch a plasma in a magnetic field and compress it with the magnetic field. Let the fusion happen, reduce magnetic field and harvest the excess heat.
Problem 1: The toroid ("donut") must be HUGE in order to have a good volume/surface relation. TEXTOR is already a two-story building, but needs to be at least five times as big in order to output more energy than you put into it.
Problem 2: The machine will be instable, as the speaker also suggests. In other words: It'll be a huge ratteling box with the danger of wearing out, setting radioactive material free.
Problem 3: FocusFusion suggests not to use the excess heat, but the moving ions in a kind of "high tech transformator" to produce electricity. At a few million degrees, there are limitations to magnetic transfer of energy.
Question: If building a big unit is really only a few hundred thousand dollars, then why don't they get a loan on their house and build it?
The only answer can be that they do not believe in their own ideas. The speaker in the Google video mentions all the problems (which sound not solvable to me, as for example
there is no path for the energy to be harvested), yet suggests that other people put money into it. Hell, the speaker even draws wrong conclusions - he says that the difference between the estimated and the measured values of the magnetic field effect is 10%. Yet the numbers SHOWN are about 6keV estimated to about 4keV measured. Back to class, I'd say. What does he expect investors to do - trust his words or trust his numbers?
I trust in existing technology:
- solar
- wind
- water
- geothermal
As a transition from fossil fuels to completely renewable energy, combined heat and power is a good way of using a good 95% of the energy content of fossil fuels (compared to about 25% use in the average car). Combined heat and power is available today, you can buy such a unit for your house with 10kW heat and 5.5kW electricity out (German company Senertec, product is called Dachs).
If any investor wants to put money into something, then think economical: Buy up one of the failing car companies and re-model their engine plant to build stirling engines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engineStirling engines
can be scaled down and up. They don't care about the heat source: Solar, burned waste or geothermal. There are model engines that run from the heat of your palm (numerous videos on utube). The principle is almost 200 years old, no patents involved (any more). Build a unit with 20kW heat input and 5kW electricity plus 15kW heat output, and you'll have millions of homes as your customer. This might be something that really happens until 2019.
Jens
