The Electric Aircraft Propulsion idea fascinates. Add the possibility of superconductors for high altitude electic turbine propulsion.....?

"Physician, heal thyself?"

mdf, contrary to what you may be reading out of the tone of my post, I am no EV basher. The GCC article itself, and the abstract of the paper both give figures for the gasoline energy density after all the associated losses, whereas it doesn't for the battery storage. It is clarified later in the paper, but the point of an abstract is to give a concise summary of the work of the paper without embellishments to make one set of results appear in better light than another. I join you in wishing we could be freed of the chains imposed by Carnot. I just seek some objectivity in presentation of a peer-reviewed paper.

Reduction of the used up anode with Mg? This is a complete non starter. You merely shift the problem to magnesium production - electrolysis required to produce such a highly electronegative metal.

I will look more into VB chemistry but this is an exotic material and reduction of the oxidised anodes efficiently is the key problem. Otherwise, the best answer would be Aluminium Air which would probaly give us over 200Wh/kg today for a car and aluminium is widely available and relatively cheap. The problem is - reducing Al2O3 back to Al - requires far, far more electricity than released by the Al in a fuel cell. Rechargeable AlAir is impossible - unless Europositron are right, who deserve a Nobel Prize if they are.

Any scheme that requires swapping 50 kilo batteries every few hundred km is dead at the start.

The efficiency may then be described as recycling efficiency, so no advertising required the high thermal traditional reprocessing temp required seem to preclude home recharging, but not decentralised (workshop) or exchange as per LPG Regulated re reconditioning, with a replacement cartridge or reagent, removal and some process suggest a refinery type operation.
Although HV solar and the prospect of solar laser?

If you like similar in power demand to solar phase change salt storage, but more like smelting in process.
This may be time free or capable of using the grid surplus.

The competition is not that energy efficient, with hydrocarbon fuels needing high energy production, processing and environmentally costly disposal. Which means a rather large lossy well to wheel efficiency (30 -60%) could still us in front.

There appear to be reserves or access to the elements in sufficient quantity to establish this as an industry As long as efficient recycling is implemented.
Cost to produce would seem high but integrated with associated well managed resource utilization the main cost will still be the recharging over the life time.
The recyclable aspect could indicate that the one 'battery will outlast the owner'.
This appears very exiting from a number of angles, but unless the process is very energy efficient, cost will not be one.
Richard,
I for one would have agreed with you If someone had suggested 50 kilo refuels every... But we have all seen the automotive industry grow to where it is now.

Brilliant mind leap by oldNeil. I guess the old grey cells are still flashing bright.

I go with a common theme here.

Interesting for aircraft.

Non starter for automotive because of the specialised infrastructure.

I am way out of my league here but...

The weight of gasoline in airplanes decreases with time but not so I assume for the VB2 cells. That would need to be factored in, of course.

Could be useful for aircraft to run a taxiing motor int he wheels. This enables them to shut down the turbofans as soon as they have landed, and to move about the airport under electric power instead of huge fans.

You would need extra infrastructure, but airports could probably manage it (or they could just lug the used batteries back to the home base and renew them there).

Also as a range extender for an EV, only used in extrema.

With a range extender generator, a small lead-acid battery is adequate for most car uses. EFFPOWER,FireFly,Atraverda, Optima etcetera are working on or have light weight lead-acid cheap batteries. There are no supplies of these proposed fuels, even hydrogen, that are price competitive with natural gas even. Pure carbon black, made from waste organics to neutralize carbon release, might be a good fuel that even could be mixed directly with diesel. Ethanol made from the same wastes is a better automotive fuel. As much as is possible, the electriciy for charging cars should be made at home from natural gas if available, and the waste heat used for heating or cooling. ..HG..

It sounds like recharge is a somewhat specialized operation.

I think if the application were highway, and the batteries were on lease this might be a great system.

Has anyone shown these to Project Better Place?
I can see a fleet of highway trucks running on these things.

richard schumacher: Any scheme that requires swapping 50 kilo batteries every few hundred km is dead at the start.

Sounds about as horrible as a scheme where every 500 kilometres or so you have to install 50kg of new fuel. Can you imagine anyone tolerating that kind of affront?

TDIMeister: The GCC article itself, and the abstract of the paper both give figures for the gasoline energy density after all the associated losses, whereas it doesn't for the battery storage.

Again, this simply isn't true: the figures quoted by GCC are both include the "associated losses" -- they call it "practical energy storage" -- noted in the paper. It's right there on the screen, waiting to be read.

Liquid hydrocarbon fuels are delivered into vehicles with a hose. Removal of the depleted battery and installation of the new requires machinery, which for liability reasons will not be operated by drivers (no more self-service stations). Worse, the depleted 50 kg batteries will have to be stored at each service station and then hauled back to a factory to be recycled. Liquid fuels have no analog for that additional handling.

The first (maybe only) application for this might be replacements for small primary and secondary cells (AAA, AA, C, D) in small electronics.

richard schumacher: Removal of the depleted battery and installation of the new requires machinery, which for liability reasons will not be operated by drivers (no more self-service stations).

Well, I am again surprised: why are drivers, today, permitted to dispense their own gasoline? The liability should be worse. Consider the situation: a flammable, carcinogenic fluid delivered into the car by a completely untrained, unprotected operator with technology almost indistinguishable from a garden hose? Everyone in and outside the car breathing in the fumes the whole time?

Seems ridiculous. But there you have it.

I completely agree though that any battery switcheroo systems (if they ever materialize) will be done by robots. Why the heck not?

Worse, the depleted 50 kg batteries will have to be stored at each service station and then hauled back to a factory to be recycled. Liquid fuels have no analog for that additional handling.

Well, today, there are these things called "refineries". Every day they fill "tanker trucks" with large amounts of the aforementioned liquid.

Humans then drive these trucks to "gas stations" (some Europeans call it 'petrol'), where large underground reservoirs are replenished from the contents of the truck.

The tanker truck then drives, empty, back to the refinery for another load.

In a battery switcheroo situation, if the batteries can not be recharged at the gas station itself, then one surmises all of the above would still occur -- except that the trucks going back to the 'refinery' would not be empty.

Any extra 'handling' would one again be done by robots.

this article is better
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn14401-fuel-battery-could-take-cars-beyond-petrol.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news1_head_dn14401

Any scheme that requires swapping 50 kilo batteries every few hundred km is dead at the start.

Indeed. But there's no common sense filter for posting in blogs.

Ultimately, I am most concerned about the well-to-wheels efficiency of this system. How great are the energy costs of recycling the VB-air batteries? How does this compare to generation 3 lithium ion batteries?

There is a separate security concern, however.

1. Imagine having to swap out something as valuable as 200 computer batteries once a week.
2. Imagine a gas station having to store hundreds of them at a time.
3. Imagine how tempting a target that would be for theft.
4. When you buy gasoline, you don't have to swap out a component worth thousands of dollars for another which you hope is just as good.
5. All of that sounds like you want a chain of battery depots where your leased batteries can be traded in for fresh sets. Security issues would have to be addressed.

Energy density kWh/kg means nothing in this case, because it is one thing what capacity is stored, another thing - how much energy will be used to charge battery and what cost will be? It seems to me, that in this case is similar or even worse than hydrogen fuel cell. It is not accumulator or electricity storage unit. It is realy "battery".

Conserving storage of gasoline and battery power storage:

The exiting fact is that current electric vehicles consume 12,5 kWh/100 km.
At the same time gasoline most efficient car consumes 7 l of gasoline.

Then it means that you need only 2,5 kg battery per 100 km and 5,25 kg of gasoline per 100 km.

Remember the lithium-air couple has a theoretical energy density of 11,600 Wh/kg (vs 200 Wh/kg for lithium-ion).

That's enough for viable aircraft, and Polyplus are working on the technology now.

Guys,
I don't believe in any of these battery fairy tales. By simple chemistry rules none of the metals can have substantially larger oxidation energies than hydrocarbons. They might be a little higher, but not as much as to warrant the special preparation of the fuel elements.

Compare this to nuclear energy. There they take the ore, reduce it or whatever, make the fuel elements etc, recycle if possible. That's a pain, but they do it because one such fuel element yields a huge lot of energy. Now why would one make VB2 rod if they know that that they will get out of it only a little more energy than from a similar amount in kilos of gasoline???

Having to handle on-board wet salts of alkali with V2O5 and B2O3 means the relevant volume will be that of those salts, not the VB2 electrode. Compact though that electrode must be in terms of L/kWh, its volume, as a part of the total necessary ash storage volume, is lost in the noise.

If the electrode could be crunched into pellets and burned to drive a heat engine, the voluminous wet alkaline ash would be avoided in favour of a more compact dry powder.

I expect this is a tremendous invention. i really like vanadium stocks like LGO and APA as a way to capitalize on this new market. please do your own research on these.

Would someone care to make a comparison with a Vanadium flow-cell battery? From what I've been able to find so far, this tech seems to overcome many of the real-life deployment issues of most other approaches.

The source does not mention power density. What is the power density (or projected power density) of the system?