ElectricMotorcycleForum.com
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Richard230 on September 28, 2017, 03:52:45 AM
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According to an article in the business section of my newspaper today, James Dyson (the guy that sells fancy and expensive vacuum cleaners and hand dryers) says he will be investing $1.34 billion to develop and build an electric car by 2020, which he says will be "radically different" than any other car on the market. ??? Perhaps the more interesting news for me is the comment that he will invest the same sum of money to develop and manufacture "solid-state" batteries to power the car. He says that his solid-state batteries will be smaller, more efficient, easier to charge and potentially easier to recycle. I wonder how those batteries will differ from the current lithium batteries used in current electric vehicles?
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They are probably referring to super capacitors, labs have been trying to get them right for a good 20 years or more. Fisker is also working on a very radical EV to utilize Super Caps, long rage and super fast charging, and of course mega-bucks! Damn fine looking though.
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Dyson bought Sakti3 a few years ago. Very exciting to see that things are moving forward with the solid state batteries that were developed by Sakti3. Luke Workman, the engineer we all owe a great thanks for the amazing Battery design in our Zero's, spoke about this company to motorcycle.com a few years ago.
https://youtu.be/MZg237IUdFk
Current lithium ion Batteries in all EV, including Zero's, use a liquid electrolyte to separate the anode of the battery from the cathode. When you drain the battery electrons separate from the lithium in the anode leaving a lithium ion. The electron goes to the EV motor and the lithium ion goes through the electrolyte to the cathode where it meets back up with it's electron friend.
The liquid electrolyte reacts chemically with the carbon in the anode creating Dendrites and it resists movement of the lithium ions. This is bad for the battery and limits charge and discharge rates and creates heat. The liquid electrolyte is the source of the fire in a battery when things go wrong. Replacing the liquid with a solid eliminates the chemical reaction and if you find a solid that also has low resistance to movement of the lithium ion also reduces the amount of heat generated.
The challenge is finding the right solid that has just the right sized holes to allow the lithium ions to travel through with low resistance and is non-flammable. Finding the right solid has historically been done by using educated guess about what might work then testing. This is a slow trial and error process.
What makes Sakti3 different is that they used super computers to analyze hundreds of thousands of combinations to find a handful that had the highest probability of success and then tested those. They focused the the efforts of the super computers on materials that are cheap and easy to make using existing mass manufacturing techniques. They claimed to have found a winning combination that would give a single brick Zero FX/S a 200 mile range.
A super capacitor is different because instead of using lithium ions the electrons are stored via surface charge (i.e. just has a build up of extra electrons).
I left out a lot of details but the important thing is solid state batteries can be more energy dense, higher power, generate less heat and are safer. They are the holy Grail of energy storage.
After Dyson bought Sakti3 he was rumored to be planning to build a factory to make Sakti3's Batteries. If he is in fact moving forward on that this is very exciting news indeed. [emoji16]
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I would have bet money it was GM that bought Sakti3. I don't remember where I heard it but if it was Dyson and they are moving forward on the solid state batteries they will leap over the rest of the market.
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I would have bet money it was GM that bought Sakti3. I don't remember where I heard it but if it was Dyson and they are moving forward on the solid state batteries they will leap over the rest of the market.
The deal with Sakti3 apparently fell though. The article says: "In April Dyson said it was abandoning its agreement to license Sakti3's patented battery technology from the University of Michigan, which had spun out the company." The article goes on to say: "Dyson said Tuesday that his company now has two competing solid-state battery development groups: Sakti3 and a separate team working on a different approach. The U.K. government has given Dyson a 16 million-pound grant to help it do battery research." (Which may have had something to do with his decision to dump his purchase of Sakti3. ;) )
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I would have bet money it was GM that bought Sakti3. I don't remember where I heard it but if it was Dyson and they are moving forward on the solid state batteries they will leap over the rest of the market.
The deal with Sakti3 apparently fell though. The article says: "In April Dyson said it was abandoning its agreement to license Sakti3's patented battery technology from the University of Michigan, which had spun out the company." The article goes on to say: "Dyson said Tuesday that his company now has two competing solid-state battery development groups: Sakti3 and a separate team working on a different approach. The U.K. government has given Dyson a 16 million-pound grant to help it do battery research." (Which may have had something to do with his decision to dump his purchase of Sakti3. ;) )
The article is misleading. Fake news! LOL
He didn't dump Sakti3. They didn't renew some Sakti3 patents that they determined to be non-essential to their development of solid state batteries and which University of Michigan also had a stake.
http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1109784_dyson-walks-away-from-sakti3-solid-state-battery-patents
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I would have bet money it was GM that bought Sakti3. I don't remember where I heard it but if it was Dyson and they are moving forward on the solid state batteries they will leap over the rest of the market.
GM and Dyson were both Sakti3 investors (I think Microsoft too). That was before Dyson bought Sakti3 outright.
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Dyson? What would his cars cost, $1M or so? This is the guy with the $400 hair dryer!
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