lydia mazzie: my nameis lydia mazzie. i work in internationalengineering operations, and i'm responsible for setting upoffices around the world for google, engineering offices. so i came across these guys ayear ago while attending an emerging technologyforum for russian and ukrainian startups. and we had this idea to bringthem in here and present it to you guys the technology thatthey're working on.
so jim nickerson isan interim ceo. he has many years of experience,as in 20 plus years of experience, inultracapacitors industry, or high tech industry, andmade most recently in ultracapacitors. and i think last year, he spentat maxwell technologies. and vladimir and sergey willbe available for questions. they're investorsin the company. so with this, i'm goingto hand it off to jim.
jim nickerson: thankyou lydia. let's just turn thisone off, i think. lydia mazzie: great. you have your own. jim nickerson: theygave me my own. good afternoon. my name is jim nickerson. as lydia mentioned, i've been inthe technology industry for more than 20 years.
much of my career washere in the valley. i was in the semiconductorindustry working for national semiconductor, and [? xr ?],and others. but about 10 years ago, i wasintroduced to the technology called ultracapacitor. i'm not sure if you've beenkeeping up with that. this talk is described as energycrisis management using a new technology to enablesome of the current alternative energy options thatare being bandied about.
to call it a new technology isa little bit of a misnomer because the firstultracapacitor, if you go back to a radio shack self-help guidethat they published in 1967, they showed how to buildan ultracapacitor using paper towels and lemon juice. so the technology, the idea ofa double layer capacitor, has been around a long time. it's just been trying to getthat technology to a point where it's actually usable byother industries other than
people that read radioshack publications. so the problem that theultracapacitor is trying to address is the fact that as wehave watched the global energy crisis developed, one of thethings that's come out of that is the idea that we need to findmore efficient ways to use the energy that we have,rather it be oil, or solar, or wind power. we need to be able to mostefficiently use that energy as it's generated.
so this technology ofultracapacitors is designed to help enable that type oftechnology by providing a high power burst capability toprovide fast charging and discharging type technologiesand then also to enable peak load leveling. one of the biggest problems inthe energy industry is how do you generate power, forexample, solar power? it's easy to get power duringthe day, but at night it's pretty difficult.
so the ultracapacitor is atechnology that on a smaller scale, and even to some extenton that scale, enables you to balance your power and energy sothat you can deliver power at times when it may not be mostefficiently available. so if you look at the commontechnologies, you'll see conventional batteries in thebig yellow galaxy up there. and you can see that looking atthat, if the left hand axis is energy density, the bottomaxis is power density, so how much energy can you storeversus how much
power can you deliver. conventional batteriesreside up there in that yellow galaxy. fuel cells as they're arebeing developed are even further up in the lefthand corner. a conventional capacitor whichdischarges very quickly can give you a lot of powerbut very quickly. so it doesn't have much energystorage capacity. so the ultracapacitor, the redgalaxy there, lies in the
midst of all that as atechnology that will help you bridge from one applicationto another. many applications usebatteries, many use conventional capacitors. but those are often times sizedfor the opposite axis. for example, if you need a lotof energy capacity, but you have a capacitor-type powerdelivery requirement, you may have to use two large acapacitor for your application just to hold the energyyou need.
or you may have to oversize yourbattery because you need to deliver more powerthan you want to. so this is kind of the top ofthe universe that we're talking about. comparing them side by side, iwon't go through all this in great detail, but if youlook at a battery, an ultracapacitor, and a capacitor,you can see that there's orders of magnitudes of difference in the two columns.
some of the critical ones arethe cycle life where a battery can be charged and rechargedon the order of thousands of times. ultracapacitors are in thehundreds of thousands of times, primarily, because abattery is a chemical device, and an ultracapacitor isa mechanical device. it's just moving ions andpushing them back and forth, so there's no breakdownof a chemical. the efficiency of charging anddischarging, in other words,
if you charge it and dischargeit, how much efficiency can you get in that cycle? the ultracapacitor and thestandard capacitor are much higher than what you canget out of a battery. now there are some new batterytechnologies, lithium ion technologies, that arevery expensive. they're pushing up the top endof that 85% for batteries. but you still have to keep inmind that most of these applications are cost-driven.
so you have to keepthat in mind. the other thing is because ofthe mechanics of charging, a battery take typically takeshours to charge, where an ultracapacitor takes seconds,and a capacitor you can do almost instantaneously. and another nice feature for theultracapacitor is you can operate it much lowertemperatures. so if you're in a car that'shaving a hard time starting with a battery, you can easilystart it with an
ultracapacitor if you'reliving in minnesota. this is a kind of a model of howan ultracapacitor works. it's much like a battery. you have a positive andnegative electrode. you have charged ionsin the electrolyte. when you close a switch, they goto the opposite poles, and they're stored there. this is the electrode. the important part is how manyof these ions can you store in
the electrode. so where a battery might havea plate there and the charge is stored on the flat surface ofa plate, an ultracapacitor has almost like foam or asponge, so there's all sorts of nooks and crannies, so youcan put many more ions in against the electrode,hence the higher ability to store energy. this is an equivalent circuit,and all that's meant to show you is that in anultracapacitor, because you've
driven those ions into thisthree-dimensional electrode, it takes a little bitto pull out of it. so you have some internalresistance to pulling that out. so you need to think of anultracapacitor as being capacitors and resistorsin series. when you build anultracapacitor, you have two current collectors,an electrolyte. your electrode is your porous,normally carbon-type material.
you see there is theyellow circles. and then the electrolyteis what is immersing the whole thing. there's a separatorbetween the two. so the separator is what'skeeping your positive and negative apart once you'vestarted charging it. now one of the things that youhave to keep in mind is that this electrode materialis very dense. and this is what normally otherindustries be called a
starved cell in that there's solittle electrolyte in there that if you punch a hole init, nothing will drip out. it's so starved. so what are the majorapplications for using an ultracapacitor? if you think of an application'suse of power, many types of applications-- and i'll use an old one. we were talking today that it'sa little outmoded because
blackberry has gonewell beyond that. but their original two-waypager, the motorola two-way pager, you would have a constantrequirement for power, and then you press thebutton, and all of a sudden you get a burst of powerrequirement to do a transmit. and then it would waitfor a little bit, then you burst again. there are many types ofapplications that you could apply to this.
you could apply this to a car. cars traveling along, all of asudden you need to accelerate, you step on the gas, and youneed a burst of power. so this is just kind of ageneric description of what an application might look like. and normally, that applicationhas some constant power supply, a battery, an engine,a fuel cell, just about anything, that's applyingpurposely a standard level of power.
and you have to size the powerso that it's always above your minimum requirement, thebottom red line there. and you want to try toaccommodate your burst requirements. so maybe in reality, 80% of thebursts of power required in this application mightactually come in below the black line. but it's the occasional one thatgoes above that is really going to damage yourenergy supply.
so what the ultracapacitordoes when you put that together with this system is theultracapacitor stands by and fills those gaps wheneverit's required. now it may not seem intuitive,but if the black line is a battery, a battery has aresistance to delivering power, so you just can't saygive me x number of watts immediately, because the batteryhas resistance, and it resists dischargingthat power. you've probably seen that inmany types of applications.
the ultracapacitor, becauseits resistance is so much lower than a battery when put inparallel with the battery, that load sucks the energy outof the ultracapacitor rather than the battery. so the battery goes along, andit doesn't even know what happened because theultracapacitor took care of it. and we'll talk about thateffect a little later. now there's the oppositeside of this spectrum.
what if your power requirementis constant? what if you're a hospital? what if you're any type ofcomputer system or raid backup type system, et cetera? we all know that the powercompany is not very good at giving us very clean power. now on this scale, these dipsmight be milliseconds rather than seconds or minutes. or it could be a brownouttype of situation.
so in this case, yourapplication is sized right at your constant power. but if the power drops off, onceagain, the ultracapacitor will discharge to fill in thatsag in available power. so this is a type of case whereyou would have a power requirement, and the incomingpower for some reason crackles, or dips, or goesthrough some sort of disruption, and you can't affordto have that happen, so you have an ultracapacitorin line with that power.
and when it sees all of a suddenthe power has gone away, it discharges soit fills those gaps. so this type of technology canthen be applied to a wide variety of applications. it can be applied to consumerelectronics where you have something like a digital camera,that when you take the picture, you have a surge ofpower because it needs to write all those bitsall of a sudden. normally, it's justsitting there
keeping the display opened. you have applications like windpower, solar power, and even standard hydroelectricpower plants or coal fired power plants where you need totemporarily store energy in order to be able to deliverit in a smooth way. they would like to be on theopposite end of that last slide where they get paid morefor cleaner energy delivery. so if they have factories thathave critical processes in their path, they want to makesure that they deliver the
cleanest power that the canwithout any dips or jumps. so they would like to putultracapacitors right outside their door so that as they'refeeding power out, they can take care of those upsand downs themselves. they charge more forcleaner power. so for them, it's aneconomic incentive. if we look at the globalmarket, it's growing. the technology has been aroundfor a long time, but people have had a hard timeimplementing it in a way that
is cost effective and will letthese applications take good advantage of it. this year, you'll see itbasically this kind of a breakdown between consumer,industrial, and automotive transportation typeapplications. and we'll describe thosea little better. but it's going to be growingsignificantly. and you'll see that wasforecasted to grow the most is the automotive or transportationside with the
advent of electric vehicles,hybrid electric vehicles. when i first got involved10 years ago with ultracapacitors, we weretalking about electric vehicles and how ultracapacitorshelp them. as we went through the nextfive years and the hybrid started becoming more of whatthe automotive world wanted to go to, we got more excitedbecause hybrids use ultracapacitors even betterthan electric vehicles do. so as the market develops, theonly thing holding it back is,
is it too costly to implement? on the consumer electronic side,we talked about some of these types of applications andwhere the ultracapacitors is really pumping power into theapplication, either to on a small level balance the powerrequirements, do the power balancing. but one of the major things totake note of here is that the ultracapacitor, because it canbe cycled so many times, it has the ability to be rechargedalmost at will.
so if you have a burst powerapplication that might be sending a transmit to agsm satellite for-- the air force has emergencyradios that send a one-second burst to their satelliteevery minute. so if you have a long one-secondburst, but then it's quiet for 59 seconds, ifyou put a battery in next to it, you can get theultracapacitor to provide that burst, and then the battery justkind of trickle charges the ultracapacitor backup to capacity.
over the next 59 seconds,it's ready to go, and boom, off you go. the battery never gets degradedbecause it's having those high power requirementspressed on it. so it's an application that'san example of how the ultracapacitor put in parallelwith the batteries, even the little c cell, d cell typebatteries, if there is a burst requirement-- we've demonstrated on cellphones, and toys, and other
applications that you can extendthe life of the battery by up to four times solely onthe basis of the fact that the battery is not seeing those highpower requirements and having to chargeand discharge. most all battery tech chemistryare going to degrade over time. and that's why you have limitedcycle life on a battery is because it'sconstantly degrading that chemical reaction that'sbuilding the energy that
you're trying to dischargein the form of power. so on a smaller scale, there'smany applications in the consumer electronics world. we talked about industrialpower management. once again, this is a case wherethe power companies see a big advantage. i've spent several trips, goneout into the fields of utah where you have power grids thatare stretching for miles. and there's nothing in betweenthe two relay sites for either
power or telecommunicationsites. and you get out there, andthere's this shed that's probably 20 by 20by 10 feet tall. and it's full of leadacid batteries. and those batteries are sittingthere so that if there is a drop on the power grid thatcould potentially start cascading, they need to holdit up as long as they can, normally, so that they can starta generator to start feeding power backinto the grid.
so if this stack of lead acidbatteries, hundreds of lead acid batteries, start leaking,or they have bad batteries in the middle of the stack, orwhatever, the power companies and the telecommunicationscompanies spend ungodly amounts of money with peopletraveling around in trucks doing nothing but maintainingthose stacks of batteries. and they're expensive. and they're ecologicallyhazardous having all that lead out there.
and they leak all the time. in the case of the power grid,what we did was we set up a fuel cell next to anultracapacitor, put it on the grid. right off of the power lines,we just trickle charged the ultracapacitors sothat it always maintained its full charge. and the total box ofultracapacitors is about size of this table here.
so we had a box ofultracapacitors being constantly held at full chargejust by trickle charging off the power line, put a fuelcell next to it. now the fuel cell, because afuel cell generates power based on generally pressure ofhydrogen or whatever you're using in the fuel cell, if thepower goes away off the grid, all of a sudden there'sno power available. so the batteries or theultracapacitor would have to be there to startthe fuel cell.
well, the ultracapacitor isgreat for delivering power for a couple of minutes long enoughto get the fuel cell pressurized to the point whereit's delivering sufficient power that it can run. now you have a set here ofboth a fuel cell and an ultracapacitor set that needsbasically no maintenance activity, because theultracapacitors will charge, and discharge, and be fine for100 years and hundreds of thousands of cycles.
and the fuel cell is pretty muchinert until you fired up and start pressurizingthe hydrogen. so of course, after you do that,you'd have to go out and refill your hydrogen tank. but that's about it. and the other major applicationis transportation. we kind of focused on theautomotive side of transportation here, but theautomotive world includes things like forklifts,and many other
trucks, buses, et cetera. the ability of theultracapacitor to provide the burst power and do fast chargingis really critical to making an hev, a hybrid electricvehicle, successful. in order to sell these things,you have to have some performance. so you got to sell it to peoplethat know when they step on the gas, it's goingto jump and go forward. but you also want to capturethe braking energy.
in a hybrid electric vehicle oran electric vehicle, your wheels are driven byelectric motors. so when you go to slow down anelectric vehicle, you don't apply brake pads and loseall that energy. you reverse the motor, and youpull energy out of the wheel. so what you're doing thereis you're charging the ultracapacitor. so breaking a hybrid electricvehicle is charging the now, if you've gotten down tothe point where you actually
stopped, which is always a goodidea, now it's time to reaccelerate. well, you have a fully chargedultracapacitor sitting there with nothing to do but dischargeand give you as much power as you need. so we went up to los angelesand put a 300-volt ultracapacitor systemon the top of a city bus up in los angeles. now this was a diesel hybrid.
so it had a small diesel engine,and electric motors in the wheels, and batteries. we put ultracapacitors up on theroof of this thing, about 300 cells that were size ofaustralian beer cans. and just doing that, by feedingthe power through the ultracapacitors, we were ableto demonstrate that-- well, you've all seen a city buscome up to a bus stop and then try to leave. the firstthing you get is this big black smoke cloud as thebus tries to get
away from the curb. well, because the ultracapacitorwas there, it just discharged theultracapacitor. so the diesel engine didn'teven have to rev up. it just stayed in idle. the ultracapacitor providedenough power to push the bus away from the curb and get it upto about 20 miles an hour. at that point, the diesel enginejust kind of came in on a smooth accelerate andaccelerated, and then took
over driving the bus down tothe next bus stop where the ultracapacitor wouldbe recharged. and the whole cyclewould repeat. well, the efficiency ofcapturing that breaking energy in a bus and feeding it backinto the drive train lowered the emissions of that dieselhybrid, which already had a small diesel, by 60%. so it had a dramatic effect onhow much fuel and how much emissions were going throughthat diesel engine.
now there's another part ofthe automotive world that seldom gets a whole lotof attention from the ultracapacitor guys, butit's very important. most of the major automotivecompanies are now looking at putting in high voltagesubsystems. typically, it's 42 volts. and that's because in yourcar, you have a 12-volt battery, or maybe a 16 dependingon your car, but you have a 12-volt battery, andevery time you roll up your
power window, or do your powerlocks, or turn on your radio, or do this, that, or the otherthing, you are dragging down on that battery system. so the battery has got to dealwith all of those extraneous power requirementsgoing forward. the ultracapacitor put in serieswith a small battery, 42-volt battery, allows you toreduce the current runs, you deal with thinner cable, and youcan power all the safety things independent ofthe car battery.
so it becomes not only a moreefficient use of power and energy inside the vehicle, italso adds to the safety. because if you have an accident,and you disable the battery, you have backup powernormally located close to where the thing isgoing to happen. your window motor has theultracapacitor right there. we saw a demonstration at fordone time where recently somebody had driven their carinto a lake for some reason. and they couldn't get theirpower window down because as
soon as the front of the cargot in the water, started shortening up their electricalsystem, their power window wouldn't go down. but the ultracapacitor sittingthere right on the window motor, it doesn't matter. it immediately tookthe window down. in all the time i spent withthe automotive companies, there's probably 100 examples ofhow node power can provide a big advantage toan automobile.
here's an example of how thehonda electric vehicle uses an the motor power thatyou see there, that's the motor running. so those are the wheelmotors in some. so your ultracapacitor, whenyou accelerate the vehicle, because here's power going up,and here's the acceleration curve, so as your speed is goingup, the ultracapacitor is discharging to supportthe fuel cell as it comes up to its load.
and so the two combined allowyou to do a quick acceleration. and then you drive along,cruising along, until you start to brake. and at that point, you startshutting down your fuel cell. your speed starts droppingdramatically. but your ultracapacitorstarts charging. so now your ultracapacitor ischarging down in this area because it got depletedduring this cycle.
it was back downto zero power. now it's going to rechargeand be back and ready to accelerate again. so i've talked about all thesedifferent applications. and why aren't thesethings out there and everything already? they should be. i mean radio shack showed ushow to do it 45 years ago. so the problem is that the issuebecomes how much is the
cost of the deliveredpower from a specific energy density? now as i said early on, youcould always deliver power but from what energy source? so if you need to have reallyhigh peaks of power, and you can't live without it, youneed to size your battery large enough so thatit will supply that power peak on demand. if you don't, you can't get thatpower out of the battery.
now the other issues of thebattery cycle life and everything, and how much thathurts the battery are immaterial at this point. what we need to do is worryabout is the cost of putting the capacitor in there enoughto offset the cost of the larger battery that you had toput in there, combined with the weight that you're carrying,the efficiencies of miles per gallon, all the othereconomic reasons why you would want to worry about size,weight, and density.
also, the efficiency of thecharge and discharge cycle. how often do you have to changeyour car battery? maybe not that frequentlyanymore. they've improved thattechnology. but an ultracapacitor will gofor hundreds and hundreds of thousands of cycles withoutbeing changed. so there's a lot ofcharge/discharge efficiency that's going to benefitthe application. now, it may not be so obvious ina car, but how often do you
change the batteries in yourpagers or other applications that are using burst power? i've alluded earlier tothe temperature range, ultracapacitors, because oftheir starved electrolytes, will operate down in theminus 55 level even. the military, both in russia andin the united states, has for several years been testingultracapacitors as emergency start cold weather starting. so you just throw it into thebattery box of a diesel truck.
and when it's too cold for thebattery to start the truck, you just flip over and startit with the ultracapacitor, and off you go. by the time the truck warmsup, the battery warms up, everything's fine. then you recharge theultracapacitor. total cycle life andthen safety. safety, as you're pulling energyout of the battery, you're stressing it chemically,so it warms up.
you get very hot batteries whenyou have a lot of power requirements on them. the ultracapacitor will allowyou to lower the overall system temperature simplybecause the ultracapacitor generates no heat whenit's discharging. so apct, the company that we'reworking with, what we have tried to do and what's beendeveloped by this team based in kiev is a newimplementation of the ultracapacitor technology, wherewe can achieve a higher
power density, the ability todeliver those peak powers, based on modifying the currentcollector, that if you recall on that earlier diagram. we modify the current collectorin a way that reduces the resistance of thecurrent going through, so it makes it a much more efficientpower delivery device. the same team has also deviseda nanoporous electrode, which is a carbon electrode, that theycan precisely determine the size of the pores in there,make them fit the ions
that are being pushed in andout, so they can optimize the amount of energy that thatelectrode can store. so the two together means thatyou can deliver more power than competing ultracapacitortechnologies. and you can store more energythan competing ultracapacitor technologies. and then again, the low internalresistance helps with keeping the overheatingissue under control. if you look at ultracapacitorsthat are being delivered
around the world, there's twotypes of ultracapacitors. some are normally calledsupercapacitors. and those are delivered bycompanies like panasonic. a lot of the japanese consumerelectronics companies have small supercapacitors. now they are very inefficientin the terms of their power density. they're very cheap to makeand very easy to make. but they have no poweror energy density
capability to speak of. so they do work in certainapplications. you'll find one ineverybody's vcr. i remember not too long ago, ifyou had a brownout in your house, you had to go aroundand reset all your clocks, reset your vcr, reset everythingthat didn't have a battery backup in it. and now they put theselittle cheap supercapacitors into a vcr.
so if you have a glitch inpower, it will ride through that power glitch for as manyas 10 or 20 seconds. but beyond that,it's depleted. you'll have to fix the clockwhen the power comes back. but you can ride throughchanging out the battery. i'm always looking forultracapacitors. i found when i installed anautomatic thermostat in my house that had a couple ofbatteries in it, when it gave me the low battery signal, ipulled the batteries out.
i was going to lose allmy programming. but there was an ultracapacitorin there. and if it weren't for the factthat i would habitually dropped the batteries and notfind the new ones fast enough, i could have changed thebatteries without losing the programming. the apct technology, ifyou look at this, the ultracapacitor mass is on theleft hand, and the power delivered to a loadin kilowatts is
on the bottom axis. the apct versus the currenthigh power ultracapacitors like those made by maxwelltechnologies, the apct prototypes deliver at the highend here at about one quarter of the mass. and in the case ofultracapacitors, one quarter of the mass is one quarter thesize, is one quarter of the cost in very general sense. the further down you get,the more packaging
becomes part of the issue. so you lose some ofthat advantage the further down you get. but on the high end where you'relooking at automotive and industrial in particular,that significant difference translates into a much bettercost structure than is currently available. right now, to get a one kilowattultracapacitor on the current marketplace, the priceis a little over $300 and
coming down slowly. when i was at maxwelltechnologies six, seven years ago, i was selling a onekilowatt device for $2,500, size of an australianbeer can. now it's gotten downto the $300 range. but you need about 100 of themto make a hybrid electric vehicle work. so 100 times $300 isn'tvery conducive to hybrid electric vehicles.
if you come down and look atthis yellow one, that's the apct cost to manufacturethe same one kilowatt. so you can see that we reallybroken under the $50 per one kilowatt module range andhave the opportunity to keep going down. so what we're doing is makinga major jump in the cost structure of the technology thatwe hope will allow all these applications that aretaking advantage of new energy alternatives to become moresuccessful and more efficient.
apct, the company that's doingit, is a us registered company formed by a group of ukrainianscientists in kiev. over 50 man years of experience, i'veworked with parts of this team over the last 10 years. the seed investment came fromtechinvest, a vc firm based in kiev. and we're working on howto get this to market in the most effective ways. and we're looking at joiningand doing strategic partnerships with some us andasian-based companies that are
into manufacturing batteries andultracapacitors, and also developing our own manufacturingcapabilities, both in the ukraineand in the us. and some of the testing that'sbeen done, doctor andy burke out at uc davis is one of thegurus that i've known for 20 years that does allof the analysis. and he's, in fact, getting readyto do a presentation in florida next month that willshow apct's technology compared against theother competitors.
so that's our presentation. we're happy to takeany questions. these are the two locations, onein virginia and the main office in ukraine. i'm out of san diego. and i'm working with this teamto see how we can develop the us marketplace andget it rolling. i'll be happy to takeany questions. and the team from apct is hereto answer technical questions.
and we're open to any of yourideas or suggestions. yeah? audience: say i'm trying toget rid of a lead acid battery, 10 amp-hour,14 volts. what would be the size and costof something like that if i just went to all capacitor? jim nickerson: well, the firstproblem you're going to run into is getting rid of it,because it's got lead in it. audience: without recycling.
jim nickerson: yeah. but you have to recycle it. i don't know that i can sizethe ultracapacitor. 10 amps-- audience: 10 amp-hours. jim nickerson: 10 amp-hours. i can't answer that questionoff the top of my head, but why don't you see me afterwards,and we can sit down with a pencil andpencil it out.
audience: is there a somestandard size that i could get a handle on? i don't have a feel forsizing and cost. jim nickerson: one of the largercells made by almost all of the manufacturers rightnow is roughly a 2,500-farad a 2,500-farad ultracapacitoris roughly one kilowatt of delivered power. and it can be delivered overdifferent lengths of time. let me see if i cango back to that.
so on this slide, what yousee-- and all that acid battery generally falls withinthat battery complex. the power delivery is basicallywatts, and the energy is watt-hours. so what we have to do iscalculate the watt-hours and the delivery capability by goingthrough the map from your amps to create the sizethat you would need. audience: i know with batteries,you have to worry about thermal runaway andthings like that.
what are some of the concernsabout ultracapacitors, and how do they stand up to pressuretests and things like that? jim nickerson: ultracapacitorshave been tested pretty dramatically. because you're really onlymoving ions back and forth, you don't have any chemicalreaction going on. so you really don't have anyinternally generated heat in an ultracapacitor. now historically, theultracapacitors being made by
maxwell and others have usedacetonitrile as being the electrolyte in that cell. and acetonitrile includes, inother words-- slips my mind, what's the poison? a poisonous substance. so you don't want toget it on you. we always made the argumentthat the way you would-- i can't rememberthe word now-- the way you would cleanup a spill would
be with carbon cloth. and we have the carbon clothbuilt into the ultracapacitor. but because it's a starvedcell, the only physical reaction to being crushed wouldbe the potential to leak electrolyte. because there's no chemicalreaction going on, there's no danger of explosion or anythinglike that, the failure mechanism for mostultracapacitors that have been tested by a variety of companiesis they'll develop a
pin hole leak, and they'llget salt forming on the outside of the cell. honda, when i was working withmaxwell, we had a joint development agreementwith honda. the honda hev, and the hondaelectric vehicle, and the toyota prius are the majorproduction vehicles that have ultracapacitors at this point. and in testing, they weredriving nails through the ultracapacitor cells just tosee what would happen.
so it's proved to be a very safetechnology in automotive applications and othersmaller applications. yes? audience: so how well do theyhold the charge in sort of using the batteryreplacements? jim nickerson: we did some testswith disney because they wanted to put ultracapacitorsinto their parking lot trams and determined that a goodultracapacitor will hold its charge above 90% for72 hours or longer.
they will leak. i mean those ions willslowly start coming out of the electrode. however, you can chargeit back up almost instantaneously. so one of the requirements, orin most applications, you often see a rechargingcapability fairly close. i don't know if apct hasdemonstrated any charge holding testing recently.
but generally, you can hold itabove 90% charge for at least 72 hours but fully discharged,depending on the manufacturer, several weeks. so it's not an energy storagedevice for long term storage. audience: what's the limitingfactor for energy density? and what is the projectory forenergy density over time for let's say the last 10years going forward? jim nickerson: the limitingfactor on energy density is how much of that ion can youput into the electrode.
if you picture the electrodeas being like a sponge, the electrolyte is flowing throughhere, and as you charge it, those ions are working theirway into the sponge because they need as much surfacearea as possible. so the energy density is thetotal surface area that's available when you charge it. so as many ions as you can putup against the electrode, if you imagine a flat plateelectrode, you've got a flat surface in two-dimensions,you put as many ions on
there as you can. with a ultracapacitor electrode,a three-dimensional surface, you cram as many ofthem in there as you can. you have the problem that ifthey have to go in too far, if they tunnel in way in there,then they're going to be encountering and creatingresistance in getting out when you discharge it. so you have to balance thetotal surface of the electrode, which is your energydensity factor by your
desire to deliver power, whichis the resistance to getting them out of that. so that's one of the thingsthat you do with ultracapacitors as you balancewhat you want in terms of energy density against what youwant to deliver as power. and they've made somepretty good strides apct has demonstrated a dramaticnew ability to deliver power by having thisnanoporous electrode and this etched, specialized currentcollector, that when combined
together, both reduce theinternal resistance and provide more surface area. so you're dramaticallyincreasing your energy density and lowering your resistanceat the same time. audience: can youquantify that? it just seems like theultracapacitors [unintelligible phrase] just short of where you wantto be in terms of replacing batteries [unintelligible].
jim nickerson: the one thingthat an ultracapacitor will never do is replace a battery. audience: well, largelyreplace the battery. [unintelligible] significantlysmaller battery and a larger jim nickerson: right. that becomes a matter of cost.from a technology standpoint, it's been demonstrated over andover again, you can reduce the volume of battery by afactor of four in some applications that have high peakpower requirements, but
it costs you ten times thecost of the batteries. so you could be replacingbatteries for 50 years before you pay back theultracapacitor. so it ends up beinga cost issue. the technology has been there. it's just a matter of can youbuild it and have it reliably deliver the power you needin that application? and also, can you make it smallenough physically to fit that application?
so all the applications-- and i come from a marketingbackground. so i look at the ultracapacitors as being only a tool to solve an applicationproblem. so if the application canbe solved with the ultracapacitor, if it took anultracapacitor as big as this table to make a two-way pagerwork well and make it so you never had to change the alkalinebattery in a two-way pager, ok, that's thestarting point.
now let's get thisultracapacitor down in size by improving the energy densityand the power delivery capability. let's get that ultracapacitordown in size and cost to make it realistically go intothat two-way pager. so much of that has beendone except for the size and cost aspect. you're right. it has another orderof magnitude to go.
and that's what apct is tryingto demonstrate now with its prototypes is that they havemade that order of magnitude jump, almost an order ofmagnitude jump, for [? x ?] the power in a given volume. so the apc ultracapacitor ispositioned to be one that could enable many of theseapplications, not because it's more powerful, has higher energydensity, but because it can do the same power deliveryin one quarter of the volume. it takes one quarterof the material.
it takes roughly one quarterof the cost. so the real application requirement has beenmet with something that's one quarter the size and roughlyone quarter of the cost. so it enables then thatapplication to go forward. hybrid electric vehicles, asi mentioned, need about 300 volts worth of cells. ultracapacitors-- it actually never made itinto this presentation-- but an ultracapacitoris like a battery.
and it's pretty much limited it2.7 volts per cell or so. so you need to put about 100in a car to make it work. so right now, the hybridelectric vehicle wants that battery pack to be about onecubic foot, and it needs to cost less than $300. right now, it's about threecubic feet, and it costs about $20,000. so we're trying to get there. audience: so what is your first
standard commercial product? what size? how many farads is the cap, andhow many have you shipped? jim nickerson: sergey, i'mgoing to have to let you answer that. sergey loboyko: what jim wastalking about [unintelligible] technology, which is now gotseed investment to establish-- yes, thank you very much. i can speak?
so quick answer is thefollowing, when is the [? stage ?] for building themanufacturing plant? but what the [? stage ?] is nowwith this company, that it has developed a key protectorproprietary technology and prototypes which were tested andperformed those results. now we're talking about what isthe right business strategy to be because there aredifferent issues. there are very small,medium-size, large and they have different nichesand different markets.
and each of these niches needdifferent models of therefore your question, it wasnot easy to answer from let's say from the [? tribune ?]because it's [unintelligible phrase]to calculate. what is the real needto be satisfied? that is us. audience: so when are youanticipating beginning volume production? sergey loboyko: volumeproduction, the first, let's
say manufacturing capacity thatwe are now building, it will be about 30,000units per year. it will be ready until the endof next spring, next year. why am asking? are you a potential client? audience: i can ask the nextquestion is how many dollars per watt, [unintelligible]of the watt leaves cost? you would have to compete withbatteries where you always have the option, at least instationary applications, of
just buying more batteries tomeet your power budget. sergey loboyko: i wouldanswer the following. if you have seen the alreadyexisting market for ultracapacitors, which are veryexpensive, it's already about $300 million. and it's growing annually notless than 30% during plus three years. what we possess, thistechnology, which is at least 10 times cheaper if you comparecost, what will be the
market price we're nowthinking about? but it's cheaper and possessesperformance advantage compared to already existingmarket capacitors. therefore, it can compete forexisting markets as well it can create the new demand fromother potential clients, which would buy it if it willbe not so expensive. it is not. is it correct, jim-- jim nickerson: yes.
sergey loboyko: --mystatement? jim nickerson: well, as he askedthat question, this was the one slide that we actuallytook out of this presentation because we didn't think anybody would ask that question. so this is a slide that showsthe current ultracapacitors and the apct. the left hand axis is dollarsper watt-hour. and the bottom axis isdollars per kilowatt.
so you got energy on they and power on the x. so the dollars per watt-hour arefor the apct technology on the order of $20 per watt-hour,where they're in the order of $10 per kilowattfrom a power standpoint, versus competing technologies,if just for as an example, go to the way right hand side,the most energy efficient standard ultracapacitor on themarket were in the same energy level, watt dollarsper watt-hour. there's much higher costper watt-hour.
so from the apct standpoint,this is the money slide for us. it's not the technology, butthat's the money slide. vladimir bilodid: my nameis vladimir bilodid. i'm partner with techinvest,which has invested into this project. i would put it in avery simple way. we are not competing with anykind of batteries at all. what batteries do, theyprovide power.
what apowercap does,provide not energy. apct provides power. so it works togetherwith battery. it does not compete withbattery, therefore, batteries are better for storing joules. apct is great in providingwatts. and they are not competingwith each other. for your car, you have a bigbattery like 10 pounds, or even 20 pounds, because thisbattery needs to provide you
with power. it has a lot more energythan your car requires. but you need to have such bigbattery because you need to have a large surface to makesure your 300 [unintelligible] which are used by yourstarter are in place. if you have power capacitorwhich is twice or even four times less in size than thebattery, and the battery which is four times less in size,they will fit together. they will work like a powersupply unit for the car.
so we are not competingwith batteries. we are talking differentlanguages for the same reason. lydia mazzie: you guys,we're out of time. jim nickerson: yeah, weappreciate your attention. and we'll be here and answer anyquestions you have. thanks for coming.
Post a Comment for "toyota hybrid suv japan"