starry--blue-blog

[starry--blue-blog]

Week in sulfation

I've been occupied and thus the hiatus.  Between seeing reruns of Curb your Enthusiasm, election advertisements, along with the Giants world series matches, I want more time in a day.  However, all good things must come to a conclusion.  I expect to resume normal postings beginning today. This week, I was rudely reminded that only because you understand the batteries work does not follow you could address a battery issue.   Subaru's are exceptional cars and that I would strongly suggest purchasing one.   However, Subaru's also have little quirks which may be bewildering and a little infuriating.  Just like not using a remote trunk opener or with just 3 wiper rates.  Or with this 1 light that doesn't turn off when the ignition is off and is so concealed that you can not tell that its on from the first location. The lighting serves no actual function, except to be certain that you keep the battery sector flourishing.  Long story short, "somebody" abandoned that light on on Sunday (and I am not saying that).

I had been having a meeting on electricity storage for grid software (think storing solar and wind power) as an excuse to get somebody else to cover the trip.   Considers my grand strategy was crumbling because my car seemed to have a dead battery.  I immediately understood what had occurred. When professionals have been thrown into a crisis, they don't believe, they respond.   Only so there's not any confusion: I believe myself to be an expert. At a matter of moments the pieces began to fall in to place within my mind with no actual thinking.    I understood that when I jumped the car immediately I had a possibility of saving the battery life.  Additionally, I knew that when I left it at the discharged state all week, I'd likely sulfate it more and possibly wind up murdering the battery completely. Lead sulfate is fairly insulation.  However, it's a little solubility from the electrolyte (sulfuric acid).   When you control, these Pb2+ ions enable you to contact the billed chemical.  As you respond the Pb2+, more direct sulfate dissolves. This also contributes to a reduction of surface area.  This signifies is that you don't have sufficient place for the electrolyte to dissolve the direct sulfate to shape Pb2+.  So charging the battery has tougher.  Sulfation requires a while; possibly in the purchase or days.  Not hours. Sulfation is also reversible.  However, you need to control the battery really quite (very) slowly so that you gradually dissolve the big crystals of lead sulfate into Pb2+ and then convert them back into the charged condition.  However, with the patience to wait for all week to control a batterylife! This signifies is that discharged lead-acid batteries are terrible information.   Therefore the route was clearfor a jump start, push the vehicle for another hour and half to SFO and expect that the battery has back its life.  As I said, a specialist doesn't believe.  He/she reacts. However a professional additionally admits his/her limitations.  In my situation, my restriction was that I was very cheap and hadn't invested in jumper wires or AAA insurance.  An expert also typically doesn't have real friends.  I knew that not one of my "buddies" will be ready to stop by to give me a leap at 7 AM. So I responded to the difficulty by simply taking BART (i.e., public transportation) into the airport. I dont even know if you guys experience this, but occasionally once you have something in head it looks like the entire world is beginning to consider exactly the exact same thing.  So here I had been considering sulfation of lead-acid batteries also in this summit on grid storage, then there was all this discussion about the UltraBattery (that really is a trade name) as a way of preventing sulfation.  There were really two discussions completely committed to it. I talked about this progress some time ago.  The idea would be to bring some carbon to the negative plate whenever you make the electrodes.  Everything else remains precisely the same.  However, for some magic reason the sulfation declines significantly. The discussions were revealing data in which the battery has been cycled a little bit (such as a Prius battery does) in which the battery with no carbon tanks after a couple hundred cycles however, the one using the carbon functions much better (thousands of cycles).  Apparently, the carbon interrupts the sulfation problem. There's a version of the idea that involves connecting the negative plate in parallel into an electrode made from activated carbon.  Activated carbon alone is used to save energy at the dual coating (i.e., a dual layer capacitor).   What was astonishing was that they really didn't have a clue why this was occurring (though its been a couple of years since this first came out).  DOE is really financing a project to attempt and reach the bottom of the progress.  Its sad but true- there's a basic shift in a 150 year-old technology but we don't have any idea why this shift happened. Why does EVERYBODY earn more cash than scientists?)  However, this challenge isn't in precisely the exact same class.  I think that this lack of comprehension boils down to restricted funding for study together with the "herding" of study subjects. The one which I finally replaced my automobile with cost me $165/Kwh.  Assuming I have ripped off (is that even an assumption for matters auto related?)   Including a couple of percentage of activated carbon into the glue isn't likely to break your bank.  All throughout the conference I kept wondering why lead-acid's aren't being made using a little trigger carbon to make sure that sulfation isn't a issue. Instead, the least expensive battery we all know of is your lead-acid battery.  For grid programs, the idea is that we want batteries which cost significantly less compared to100/kWh.  Something fairly radical must occur for us to create these cost amounts.  Making batteries how we've made them previously won't permit us to arrive.   So would including a little bit of carbon end in the battery lasting the life span of the vehicle (say 15 years)?  The company that's commercializing this states it might last 7 or perhaps 15.  Meaning: they don't have any idea!  Problem without understanding why something works- there's not any way to forecast how much time it will work.  In addition, the information they reveal relies on Prius-like biking.  My car doesn't have exactly the exact same biking profile.  Unless we know what's happening, we don't have any way to understanding how altering conditions will alter functionality. In time, this information will appear and we'll understand when we will can create a far better lead-acid automobile battery.  But would not it be better if we knew what was happening? It lasted seven decades!  That is a very long time.  Plates rust plus they discard.  Perhaps I need not to expect more out of my electricity storage devices. However, being able control failure modes in batteries is vital in making sure that we're able to proceed to electrical drive.  And they'll be crucial if we ever wish to store the energy from sunlight.   Except to restrain the collapse, first you have to know them.  And oftentimes, we do not really have lifetime of batteries trapped.  They shift with chemistry, multiple failure modes occur in precisely the exact same time, and in certain newer chemistries we simply have not had the opportunity to accumulate the information to find out exactly what the failure mode is. So we've got hints and theory for collapse, but we can not quite predict failure rates with biking conditions.   Really that isn't correct.  There are lots of many life simulation applications for batteries.  However, not one of them really do the job! To me personally this episode highlights the value of basic research to comprehend real-world issues.  There's quite a little basic research; and there's not any dearth of actual world-problems.  What we do not do enough of is connecting both (The App in Berkeley is exceptional because its the only one which does so in the entire area of batteries). Additionally, it highlights the reality that I really should stop being so inexpensive, spend some cash, and get jumper cables.