5-10% in the span of a few years is certainly not undetectable, but not necessarily relevant for everyday use. The debate is between 7% and 30% degradation around the 7 year mark, which is a big range.
Also, electronics suffer heavily from chip obsolescence because developers lazily develop for whatever has been released recently. Older chips have a hard time keeping up with bleeding edge chips in efficiency, and this effect in my experience (somewhat backed by fab node efficiency numbers) tends to dwarf battery degradation.
Peter wrote:
had a chip which integrated the energy in and energy out, custom made for them by Ferranti, IIRC.
A Ferranti ULA (uncommitted logic array, semi-custom logic). The ULA was made by manufacturing a bunch of identical wafers which were then stored, then the customer would specify the metal layer. The Ferranti ULA was CML (current mode logic) rather than CMOS, as CML was much faster at the time. Unfortunately Ferranti rested on its laurels and its lunch got eaten later on by those who went to CMOS and field programmability.
A friend of mine de-encapsulated some Ferranti ULAs (the ones inside the Sinclair Spectrum), and drew them to the transistor level, then gate, then block level and wrote a book about it. http://www.zxdesign.info/book/
@Graham wrote:
People are still unable to tell me how a battery can cope with intensive use over a period of several years and suffer almost no measurable degradation of capacity.
This goes against everything we know (or thought we knew) about rechargeable batteries. Every other battery out there suffers degradation of capacity if subjected to repeated deep-ish cycling. What makes care batteries different?
You are right. It’s more a matter of treating the battery properly, to limit the degradation and maintain usefulness of the car. Which may lead to some limitations in usability. If one needs the full range of the battery each and every day, and also happens to live in a hot climate, it will degrade faster.
This is interesting:
Now here is something that sounds a bit too good to be true, no?
That special fuel, how is that made? How much energy needed, and cost?
https://www.nanoflowcell.com/research-development/application-research/mobility/quantino-twentyfive
It seems pretty sound to me, but there’s no telling how complex the fuel is.
Nothing is said about where the electrolyte (fuel) goes when consumed, so I’m assuming it’s thrown in some exhaust, which seems very weird. For large quantities, anything other than the simple elements abundant on Earth (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen) is bound to have some ecological impacts and high manufacturing costs. What would be more reasonable is to swap the old fuel, keeping the heavy / metallic elements that have changed ionization in the meantime, and recycle / revert the process with energy.
And as always, brand new products from recent companies should be expected to have big hits on their initial promises as production gets closer (if they don’t fail entirely).
EDIT: a quick wikipedia search shows big controversies about the company’s claims (company which is not that recent):
So it’s likely pure BS (especially for range numbers).
maxbc wrote:
Nothing is said about where the electrolyte (fuel) goes when consumed
Usually with flow cell batteries, it is “recovered for recharging” or “recharged in situ”. Since they clearly don’t aim for in-situ charging, I assume you empty the tank of spent electrolyte, and replace it with new electrolyte. The spent electrolyte is just recharged and sold to another customer, or if you do it yourself, you use it next time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery#Design
maxbc wrote:
What would be more reasonable is to swap the old fuel, keeping the heavy / metallic elements that have changed ionization in the meantime, and recycle / revert the process with energy.
Exactly, our edits crossed.
Volvo abandons the all-electric by 2030 plan.
Just got back from a week in Norway. Spoke to a few people. Their electricity is about €0.02/kWh in the summer, rising to about €0.06/kWh in the winter. That puts a real perspective on why Norway is so different from everywhere else.
