What should be clear here is that the production of the EEStor nano capacitors represents a remarkable technical achievement and the test results published show they are standing up. I can see from the cloud of commentary that a lot of impatience is been expressed that is seriously misplaced. They have the brick. Building from that brick is challenging but I certainly do not see it as a deal breaker.
What you cannot buy is time. Everything takes time to get right. The brick of the computer was the first miserable transistor. Yet that allowed us to immediately imagine today’s technology. The only catch was that our imaginations needed thousands of man years of time investment.
These guys appeared to have produced a very specific device which can enable the ultra capacitor. I hope that they can deliver something in the next year and do that continuously. I just think it is a tough goal post and would not be disappointed if the ball were dropped.
This transcript is rough but a lot of specific information flows out that I certainly find convincing. It is worth working through since much will not be in news releases.
Kindest and warmest regards to wasmaba, for his financial support!
First / raw / initial draft. Certain to be some errors, mistakes, ommissions, typos and various other flaws. Last edited Thu, 23 Jul 2009, 5:31pm There may be some minor update(s), in the future. (Most likely spell, word order swap, ... )
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/5577862/14646725 Audio .mp3 provided courtesy of smackYYZ and "Audacity" software.
W: is Dick Weir I: is Interviewer, unknown, at time of transcribing
W: Well, ahh, the basic building block that we use here and that both Carl and I have extensive knowledge of is Composition Modified Barium Titanate powder.
0:10
Well known the best powders of the highest permittivity of any materials in the world. Although they have some very significant problems. And people tried for about 30 35 40 years to solve those problems by variety of techniques process and that stuff. Ahhh, but classically they never really took the full approach that we did to attack those problems on an individual basis as we go through a production process. We saw in the past what they did the ... take these constituients Barium, Titanium, Calcium, Neodymium, Manganese, Yittrium, Lanthium, Zinc and .. and put those into a ball milling system and ball mill these powders down so they get it into a reasonable size. And they would then take and calcine those and they would grow together, Very high temperatures and then they'd calcine them again ... but ... they'd ball mill them again. 1:15 They kept that process up until they got something that was half way decent. But still a looong long way from optimum. Ummm, in looking at that process if you make capacitors out of those materials, and this is were the guys in the industry they said well the voltage is such a deep problem. Well, it was for them. For after all they did not take the time to solve the technical problems properly. And therefore you apply a voltage to those type of powders and they lose permittivity over time. And also if you are very high voltage, you get what's called domain wall slippage and you lose all the permittivity.
So those are some nasty problems that had to be overcome, if one is going to work with Barium Titanate Composition Modified Barium Titanate powders. Well, the first thing we concluded that {there} was just no way to ever make this work using ball milling. So we said we would use our experience in chemistry and make this a full aqueous process. And the reason you can do that is that you can get these materials all in a nitrate form. And nitrates are water soluable. But you can't blend them together.
If you did that a lot of them would just plain fall out and you couldn't get a good blend. So we had to invent some chemistry so we could pull off the aqueous process. That took us about a year of work there, of really going through and getting the chemistry optimized so we could blend this stuff together and get the proper constituients that we're looking for. 2:47 Well, we're happy to say that that suceeded.
We've done a great job because a lot of this stuff has been out here over 3 years, 3 1/2 years, and no degredation whatsoever. I mean zero. De nada. So we're very happy that we really have superior chemistry here and from the aqueous process. Then we went into a great detail purification process. The 2 ions that are very detrimental to getting to high voltage is sodium and potassium. Like if you put salt inside of water ... the resistance of the water goes down because you've got free ions in there.
We went ... worked hard to invent processes where we could purify all of our activating chemistry and also the coating process we put on these powders. And the reason we coated the powders, to just back up a little bit, with aluminum oxide, which is the highest resistivity material in the world, and the best seal in the world, because when you add voltage to these materials you lose oxygen.
If you coat the particle, and it states so in our patent, so this is all public information. You kill the loss of oxygen which totally shuts down the problem of putting voltage onto these products and losing permittivity {over time / aging}. So, that was a big breakdown. And Carl and I used aluminum oxide before for... in secur? world for the same reason. So, we have a lot of experience in that. A coater? powders took a patent process which we have working out here so we coat the powders very accurately
And so we know how to put those powders on particle on each particle and keep it down to 100 Angstroms plus or minus very few Angstroms. We know how to put it on very accurately. Again, one of our patented processes. 4:38 So we got going on the purification, got that going and that took us about 6 to 8 months so that was into the second year.
And then we certified that when we were done with SouthWest Research downer?. Any thing we do ... any news releases we always get it certified. No hype. Southwest Research is one of the most sophisticated chemical analysis companies in the world. And we sent it to them and they analyzed it and our particles purity was in the range of a parts per million. And then to a little bit of work on aluminum? nitrate and a few other things and we got it down to parts per billion. Now, if you take and purify our stuff down to that level and we uhhh ... a certification on that we mentioned in one of our news releases. If you certify ... Let's take one, let's take the aluminum oxide. You certify it down to that level. The voltage breakdown on the aluminum oxide, certified mind you, in our news release, is 1100 Volts per micron. Now we're at 350 Volts per micron on our working Voltage. And you see we're more than 3 times away from our working voltage.
Which is more than enough for safety of that type of activity, for voltage breakdown versus the working voltage. Usually 1.5 is more than enough. Were we see we're actually a little better than 3. 5:57 So, no real heartburn there of getting our voltage. Now another thing on voltage and I did put that in another news release is that we work deep into the paraelectric phase. In the paraelectric phase we have very sophisticated test data certifying that in the paraelectric phase there are no domains.
And this is where the people out there ... the bloggers out there ... well, my God, you know, you're going lose your permittivity. Well you would if we were in the paraelectric phase. 6:24 I'm sorry. In the ferroelectric phase. Barium Titanate, Composition Barium Titanate is a 2 phase material ... is Barium ... it has a paraelectric phase and a ferroelectric phase. Now, all the colleges and universities and all those PhD guys out there are very familiar with the ferroelectric phase. If you apply a voltage to it you get to the voltage and have domain wall slippage and you lose your permittivity.
It's not true if you're in the paraelectric phase and I pointed it out very clearly in one of our news releases. If you're in the paraelectric phase, it is very difficult to get polarization saturation cause your dipoles shift ... they are now electron clouds and you can expand them. 7:03 And on top of not only that, we have a patent process, a patent pending process, where we can polarize our dipoles so they *all* shift through 45°. That means our polarization saturation has been improved by at least a factor of 4. Well, you see, that's not taken out ... a non-problem, now.
So not only got the voltage breakdown under control, I got polarization under control, we've got the purification behind us, the chemical saturation ... er the chemical stability is more than proven for a 3 year period and all those chemicals last minutes at the factory even ? the pour goes that quick. And we got it lasting 3 years. 7:45
