The Death of Tesla?

nooshinjohn

New tech offers a possible end to the nasty business of the battery powered EV...




https://www.nanoflowcell.com/research-development/application-research/mobility/quantino-twentyfive

treitz3

That (honestly) looks to be more promising than the current crop (maybe hydrogen aside) but will it kill Tesla? I am quite sure the price would have something to do with that. Any insight on that?

Tom

audioluvr

Phuuk it. I'm in.

daddyjt

If the tech is solid, I could see Musk integrating it into Tesla, or doing a spin-off using the tech. He’s pretty versatile with changing landscapes…

F1nut

That looks very promising.

sucks2beme

If it gets into production, great.
Vaporware seems to be all too common lately.
Too good to be true?

Gardenstater

It uses what must be a pretty HUGE electrolytic capacitor to start the motors before the "nanoFlow" Bi Ion fuel can take over. How much is that going to cost to upgrade to a Sonicap? I'm out

pearsall001

Sweet...time will tell.

tonyb

Looks like it has some legs for developement. Unless refueling costs 1500 bucks. How much would refueling be, is never said. Or the longevity of the technology used. Another concern is weight, says it's lightweight, but also fast, could lead to safety issues. Cold weather/heat applications?

These types of things are usually done in ideal conditions under ideal weight restrictions. However, the tech does seem to kick the current EV market place square in the nuts. Has a way better appeal to more people just on the surface. You mean it won't randomly catch fire if it's plugged in inside my garage, which is under my kids bedroom? That alone is a huge selling point. The 2k miles to refuel is also very big. Worth keeping an eye on, for sure.

Jstas

They aren't burning hydrogen to power the car down the road.

They are doing like I've been talking about for year now.

The hydrogen fuel cells are powering a generator engine which produces electrical power that drives an electric motor that moves the car.

Every idiot who keeps telling me that hydrogen is a pipe dream, include Elon Musk, has no clue the kind of efficiencies that can be reached using a hydrogen fuel cell system to generate power for an electric motor.

There's no batteries in this design so there's no reason to plug it in unless you need an engine block heater or something.

Cold weather doesn't affect it nearly as much as even a gas or diesel vehicle because it's not relying on a fuel that is teetering on the edge of liquid to solid in anything below 20 degrees F.

The cost is going to be in the fuel cells but the idea that this thing is using multiple small ones to power the generation engine means that cost to produce, charge and ship would be reasonable. Additionally, the less hydrogen it needs to use to reach it's power and range goals, the better. Means less chance of a big boom and even better when captured in a fuel cell. Then there's no real boom at all, just a substrate falling all over the floor that you can pick up with a rag, mop or broom.

But the substrate appears to be water. Any water.

I haven't had time to really dig into the tech behind it but in all honesty, if this comes to market for a reasonable price, I'd get one just to support the tech and laugh at assbags like Sal and his batteries with some obnoxious license plate.

Gardenstater

Uhhhh.....

mhardy6647

all righty then.

Jstas

Alright, fine.

Hydrogen combustion works the same as gasoline combustion. Rapid oxidation creates heat which drives rapid expansion. That heat and expansion, in a piston driven engine or even a turbine driven engine, creates motive force. It's still a chemical reaction that releases energy by breaking molecular bonds through heat. That creates ions which are unstable and rapidly bond to stuff that is stable like oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and sulfur.

The bi-ION idea of the "flowcell" is not new. It's been around a long time. The biggest issue behind it has been energy density. In flowcells, the source of hydrogen has typically been water which is limited in the amount of hydrogen it can carry. It's stable as hell because when was the last time you saw water spontaneously combust or blow up?

Anyway, the bi-ION tech requires a heat source to kick off the reaction that creates the ions that the membrane uses to create the electric charge. So it's likely pre-heating the membrane before the reaction starts by passing an electrical current through the reaction membrane. But it is expending a electrolytic source to change a chemical energy source into an electrical energy source.

The fundamental definition of an engine is a machine that converts energy into mechanical force or motion. It other words, it changes potential energy into kinetic energy.

The bi-ION tech is an engine. Sorry for being overly general and liberal in my use of the term. Maybe the term reactor gives a better mental picture.

The flow cell tech, also called redox flow batteries or flow batteries, I was actually messing with it over a decade ago now from a company that was making fuel cells that you charged at home with a plug in hydrolysis system to create the hydrogen charge needed for the fuel cells. The fuel cells were sized to work in RC cars and they had twice the run time as similarly sized SCR/SCE types of battery cells. Li-Po cells stole their thunder because they were cheaper and easier with only marginally worse performance than the hydrogen fuelcells and that was still light years beyond the SCR/SCE style NiMH cells.

The hydrogen cell system took forever to charge a cell, not because of it's size but because of the low energy density of water compared to the capability of what the cells could hold. It required a significant amount of water to charge one cell that was about the size of 3 C-cell batteries. It also requires more energy to be put into charging the cell than the cell holds if you're just using water. The biggest problem with it was the reaction plate was in the cell and the reaction would start when the cell was grounded. So you were limited to the size of the plate in the cell on how much power you could get out of it. Two cells the size of 3 C-cell batteries was plenty to generate 10 minutes of run time at 6-7.5 volts. But having the reaction plate in the cell isn't really scalable as it creates a logistics problem when you get to Buick LeSabre sized fuel cells.

I don't know what they are using for their electrolytic substrate to hold the hydrogen in a stable state and achieve a 10 fold energy density increase over normal water but that certainly covers the recharging time and energy cost if it cuts it down to 1/10th of what those little RC car cells were doing with their flowcells.

The picture that's posted is a bit confusing on what a flowcell is.

It's more of a chemical battery than a fuel cell as a more conventional fuel cell has a hydrogen carrying substrate that releases hydrogen without changing the composition of the substrate. For instance, an aluminum oxide ion based fuel cell will capture hydrogen on it's ions and hold it, stable, in a fairly high density. It releases that hydrogen in metered amounts through a pre-heater or electrical charge that creates an environment where the captured hydrogen likes being free better than being stuck on an aluminum ion. It doesn't take much energy to release the hydrogen. It does take a bunch of energy to hammer the hydrogen into place on the ions which makes recharging a fuel cell cumbersome and expensive. But that aluminum oxide ion substrate is so stable that it has almost infinite recharge cycles provided it stays isolated from the environment so "free radicals" produced by UV damage to stuff like O2 and Ozone don't get in there and degrade the substrate by sucking up some of the available ions and never letting go.

A flowcell doesn't do that. A flowcell has two electrolytes that are composed of two dissimilar chemicals dissolved in the electrolytes. They are hydrogen dense as per their make up. One has ions of a positive nature, the other has ions of a negative nature. The two tanks get pumped into a reaction chamber with a conductive plate (or membrane in this case, probably a graphene mesh which is flexible so it's a membrane and not a plate...semantics...anyway) the two tanks get pumped into the reaction chamber. When they reach the chamber, the membrane separates them but allows the hydrogen ion payload to move between them. When the hydrogen ion moves across the membrane, it generates an electrical charge. That charge then runs up the circuit connected to the membrane to power stuff like motors or other electronics.

This is how a battery works as well. But, a flowcell doesn't have electrodes in a electrolyte. It has electrolytes with a suspended electrode chemical that provides the same function electrodes in a battery provide. The difference is that suspended electrode chemicals can be not only significantly lighter but support a much higher discharge rate which means higher current and voltage levels from a smaller package.

When the cell discharges, the anode electrolyte loses it's ion payload and left over ions bond within the electrolyte when the chemical reaction can no longer support the energy transfer. Again, same idea as batteries.

Jstas

The issue is recharging. Can this electrolyte be produced cheap enough and in quantities high enough to support major infrastructure? 'Cause the only way to do it easily is to either do a cell exchange or reclaim spent electrolyte from both tanks of the cells and then recharge with new electrolyte in both tanks. Old electrolyte can be recycled and recharged but you'll have to have a closed reclamation system to keep environmental factors from contaminating the electrolytes. The electrolytes can be recharged with the process reversed but that takes time, longer than a gas fill up and closer to a Tesla sitting on a home charger in time needed.

At only 48v, though, both options are possible in a home system that could safely sit in a garage and run off of a 120v, 15A AC circuit power source. But how economical is it to put the infrastructure on a home system? Would it be cheaper to just manufacture electrolyte and a refueling station would do a reclamation and recharge? I mean, 250 liters is only about 65-66 gallons but since it's a stable electrolyte that doesn't combust, a grounded fueling system could easily run at high flow rates that would cause excessive static electricity build up creating a high fire risk in conventional fueling stations. So refueling time could actually be shorter than gas or diesel despite needing more fuel.

But this is just a bunch of fancy engineering talk for what amounts to a chemical battery with an external reaction engine instead of having it in a cell. What's good and innovative about it is that you can have a reaction engine large enough to produce the voltage and current you need and you're not limited to the size of the membrane/plate you can have in a cell. That makes the cells smaller and lighter and you get an ability to support much higher power levels in a small footprint. That solves the scalability problem and the logistics problem. By having tanks that can be recharged, you can change tank sizes to match whatever range you want. Your power levels will be determined by the size of your reaction plate/membrane and the flow rate of the electrolytes through the reaction chamber. If your membrane is really efficient...wow, the potential applications are....yeah. Way cool.

The science and engineering is sound. The safety is through the roof and honestly, depending on how fast they want to recharge electrolyte tanks, one could run a recharge unit off a 400W solar power kit and inverter from Harbor Freight.

Additionally, there's zero emissions from the process because the entire chemical reaction is captured.

There's not much downside here outside of the lack of infrastructure. But you can bet your sweet patootie that Switzerland is all over this and will like flesh out and implement a scalable infrastructure system to support it.

The biggest issues with flowcells is that to generate significant energy with them, you either need a ton of electrolytic solutions or you need a large enough membrane/plate. So cell size and the energy density of the electrolyte are the limitations here.

If nanoFlowcell has managed to increase the energy density of an electrolyte by ten fold then that means they can significantly reduce the size of the membrane and still achieve the same power levels of a much large cell. The website says they are using cells the size of a briefcase and achieve 48V and 2K km range with a bank of those cells. That's entirely possible if they've found a way to create a 10 fold increase in energy density in an electrolyte.

xschop

Gotta brush-up on my speed-reading technique.

audioluvr

xschop wrote: »

Gotta brush-up on my speed-reading technique.

Do like I do and just read the first couple paragraphs. If it reads like pointless babble skip to the last sentence.

nooshinjohn

I think John’s responses deserve more respect…

xschop

In the end, 'The death of Tesla' will be at the behest of the imploded economy.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-tesla-stock-price-federal-reserve-interest-rates-hikes-2022-12

audioluvr

nooshinjohn wrote: »

I think John’s responses deserve more respect…

That's not lack of respect John. That's me not being able to pay attention.

mhardy6647

xschop wrote: »

In the end, 'The death of Tesla' will be at the behest of the imploded economy.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/elon-musk-tesla-stock-price-federal-reserve-interest-rates-hikes-2022-12

... which, I've gotta say, is what I thought that this thread was going to be about when I first saw the title.

I am enjoying seeing Musk going down in flames -- which he does indeed seem to be doing, in something even a tad faster than real time.

Gardenstater

So far I have only been able to track down 2 solar cell patents to the name of Nunzio La Vecchia. Supposedly there are 60 patent *applications* to his name and/or the company name. This article is 6 years old and has some mystery regarding how he uses fairly small wires in a high current low voltage drivetrain. 2900 amps with small cables sounds pretty sketchy to me.

https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/quantino/first-drive

Manufacturing cost of 10c per liter according to this other 6 year old article. That would have been $25 to fill 2 33 gal tanks:

https://eepower.com/news/nanoflowcell-restructures-and-plans-ipo/#

sucks2beme

So it's vaporware. In telecommunications, 48vdc high amps
means thick cables or copper connecting bars. That problem
Is why Edison's DC version of the power grid failed early on.
Maybe it uses pulsed DC?

txcoastal1

Edison and VDC was distance and the wire gauge needed to accomplish and maintain VA

Jstas

So, couple things here.

Nunzio is Italian but, the holdings company that Nunzio created is HQ'ed in Switzerland and nanoFlowcell Management AG is a private company that is share controlled. Swiss law is very strict on business matters and Nunzio would not be able to run a private AG in Switzerland without showing value for share holders. The holding company behind it, nanoFlowcell Holdings PLC is a limited liability company that has offered shares for sale to the public as well. So for both business entities, there has to be value to offer shares. You can invest in a PLC or an AG without holding shares but if you are offering shares as either, you need something of value to be shown for backing those shares. So in Switzerland, Nunzio would not be able to run as an AG or a PLC without substance. So there's got to be something bringing value there.

Switzerland is also very restrictive on intellectual property and has some of the strongest laws surrounding IP, patents and other trade restrictions. That's why the world patent offices and the WIPO are based in Geneva. So there very well may be some stellar patents with breakthrough tech but without a formal request to the Swiss patent officials, you're not going to see them because of the restrictions around IP.

As far as the "small wires", without seeing patents and specs, it's hard to speculate. Does small wires mean stuff 14 gauge and smaller or is it small in relation to what would normally be needed to run that kind amperage? It's hard to say and I've seen nothing about it anywhere.

However, I have been reading articles on Graphene nano tech and there are research facilities that have been building obscenely small structures capable of handling incredible amounts of power and heat without break down.

Given how Nunzio's prototype car has so few moving parts in it's power generation and drive systems, there very well could be some tech that is enabling small gauge structures.

That said, though, the prototype is about the size of a Ford Fiesta but tips the scales at around 3400-3600 pounds unloaded. A current model Ford Fiesta tips the scales at 2400-2700 pounds. So the prototype has over 1,000 pounds more junk in it. That's more than substantial. 1/3rd the weight of the car is additional to a coventional analog. That speaks to a very large additional tech presence in the vehicle.

With all the wire debates y'all get in to here, I would hope that somebody would realize that the longer the wire, the larger the gauge that is needed for a certain power level. With how tiny the Quantino is, there's relatively short runs for power lines. I mean, a Fiesta is 13 feet long or shorter and the Quantino is even smaller than that. Small enough that where, say, a 4 gauge wire that would be necessary in a Tesla SUV because of the distance from power source to motor, a Quantino being less than half the size might be able to get away with an 8 gauge wire because of the 60% reduction in necessary length.

Add in the idea that they are using new tech that is more conductive and less resistive than copper or aluminum or even silver and yeah, scientifically, it's entirely possible.

I know when I was in college and poking around the electrical engineering labs, one of the professors showed me some wiring they were working with that was jacketed and looked like regular wire but strip off the insulation and it was a core that looked like pencil lead. He then showed us a test rig and proceeded to push 60 amps of current from a 12v power supply through an 18 gauge wire.

A copper conductor at 18 gauge and standard insulation should only be able to push about 15 amps. If you have the Kapton PTFE FEP PFA Silicone insulation types, you can get up to 20-25 amps at best. They had the Kapton jacketed stuff in the lab too with a copper alloy conductor and they were measuring 32 amps of current in a 12 VDC application before wire failure. I know because he handed me a 60 foot length of "scrap" of the Kapton stuff and I wired a bunch of small amps in my truck with it. So to see this guy running 60 amps of power through such a small conductor that was decidedly not copper was astounding. He wasn't able to tell us anything about it, though, because it was a hush-hush DARPA project and all he could do was demo it as an educational aid. Access to the project and research was very restricted. That was in 1996, too. 26 years ago. Imagine what's out there now?

Given all of that and the fact that there is a prototype running on the tech that people can put **** to neoprene in and take a drive makes this feel like not vaporware at all.

I get that Nunzio isn't interested in building cars and given the tech he's working with here, to limit his applications to just cars is shooting himself in the foot. If he's been able to increase the energy density of regular old salty water by 10 fold then he's got something way more important than a car that runs on water.

sucks2beme

Building one is great, building it cost effectively and in large numbers is another.
Think Tucker just after WWII. Great car design, but it went nowhere. There's likely some underlying
reason that's hanging this up. Given all the crap EV designs out there right now being sold,
you'd think it would already be gearing up for sale. Until we see one for sale, it's vaporware.

Gardenstater

"Meanwhile, La Vecchia himself is busy touting his ownership of several patents – which is, in fact, true. Besides patents on solar technology from 1998 and 1999, he has also held one on a car-shaped “computer mouse, particularly a laser mouse” (EP 2 211 254 A1) since 2009."

Another 2016 article:

https://h2-international.com/2016/06/01/nanoflowcell-ad-campaigns-continue/

"In contrast to other research institutes, the work done by nanoFlowcell Holdings is entirely privately financed. For this reason, the company also does not wish to apply for patent protection for the chemical composition of the bi-ION electrolytes and the membrane structure of nanoFlowcell® prior to the start of commercialisation, nor reveal details of its production process. Other research institutes are working feverishly on mobile flow batteries, but the company estimates that it still maintains a comfortable technological lead over competing redox flow cell systems."

https://www.nanoflowcell.com/info-center/flow-magazine/bi-ion-energy-of-the-future

So when he referred to it as "patent pending" in the other article perhaps he was taking liberties, meaning patent not applied for lol. Seems contradictory when your stated goal is not to be a manufacturer but to sell licenses. Hmm. Just don't know......

mhardy6647

I am getting kind of a Theranos vibe from this outfit.
Theranos suckered a lot of people (not just investors) who should've known better.

Kex

From my personal perspective, I don’t care one 💩 whether Tesla survives or not. I don’t care one 💩 whether EV’s are the future, or hydrogen, or dandelion power. Whatever!

As long as they make their minds up before I have to buy another car or truck.

Currently, I own two Mercedes-Benz, one BMW, and two Chevrolet trucks. The newest vehicle is a 2015 Chevrolet. The oldest vehicle is a 1994 Chevrolet. The other three are from 2006, 2007 and 2009. The lowest mileage is 89,000. The highest mileage is 220,000. All of them run perfectly, so I’m unlikely to change any of them before 2030. Will that be enough time for them to figure this out. 🤷‍♂️

Clipdat

Nobody cares.

sucks2beme

Not ready for prime time seems to be a running theme right now.
And normal ICE vehicles are under pressure for insane milage goals.
Look at all the high tech(and unreliable) solutions out there.

God help you when a modern BMW gets some miles on it.

Recalls abound. For some reason, everything catches fire now.
Not just ev's, either. Or the airbags spit chunks of rusty steel in
your face. I plan on running my Camry into the ground.
Everything on that car is pretty much proven tech.

Jstas

https://www.hydrogenfuelnews.com/fuel-cell-electric-truck-toyota/8556460/