Interesting stuff. But it's false advertising to say the car runs on sea water. It doesn't.
I hadn't heard of the technology involved, so I spent an hour or so researching, including reading the press kit from the manufacturer. It's something called a flow cell battery. It's real. It works. But it won't truly work in this application.
I'll try to translate for the lay person.
We're all pretty familiar with the lead-acid battery in our cars, right? It uses an electrolyte in a chemical reaction with the electrodes. As the power is drained from the battery, the electrolyte is depleted. The battery is drained. But, it's rechargeable. By recharging the electrolyte, the chemical reaction is reversed and energy it put back into the battery. Pretty simple stuff, and it happens every time you run your car.
A flow cell works a little differently, in that there are two electrolyte solutions separated by a membrane. This membrane allows the electrochemical reaction to take place without the two liquids mixing. In this sense the flow cell works like a regular fuel cell battery, such as a hydrogen fuel cell. However, in the flow cell, the electrolyte doesn't have to be stored in the battery. You can keep it in a big tank outside of the battery and pump it in as needed. A "gas tank" so-to-speak. In this case, two separate tanks for each electrolyte.
But let's go back to the lead-acid battery for a moment. Remember how the battery is drained of power once the electrolyte is discharged? Well, you can actually re-energize the battery in two ways. The normal way is it pump electricity back into it. This is what happens in your car's battery. However, you could just drain out the used electrolyte and put fresh stuff in. Voila! Instantly recharged battery.
And that's the idea with this car. As the electrolyte is used up, recharging the car is simply a matter of replacing the electrolyte. Pump out the old, pump in the new. But there in lies the catch. To make this a viable technology for cars, you would still have to "gas up" when the electrolyte is used up. So you go to an electrolyte station. But not only do you refill the electrolyte tank, you have to drain the used stuff, so that's an added complication.
But wait!!! There aren't any electrolyte stations!!! That whole entire infrastructure would have to be built. And then there's the issue of recycling all the old electrolyte. Can you imagine if we didn't have any gasoline or oil infrastructure at all, and suddenly you needed it? It would take trillions of dollars and decades to build.
That used electrolyte is a problem as well. It takes energy to recharge the electrolyte. There's no free lunch. Sure, maybe it can be done somewhat efficiently in mass production, but it will always cost more energy than what you get out of it. Simple physics.
Addressing the "sea water" description. Well, the electrolyte in a flow cell can be a metal salt. And sodium chloride (table salt) is a metal salt. But no, you can't just pump sea water into a flow cell. There's too many other chemicals that would muck things up. And the reality is, table salt "salt" isn't what's used in flow cells. It's some other metal salt, which brings up potential toxicity and safety issues, but that may not be any worse than dealing with gasoline.
But of course, no one is saying just what the electrolytes used actually are. Only that it is non toxic and provides 5 times the energy density as lithium ion.
And that is another issue. By their own admission, the flow cell technology they claim to have made is still 20 times less energy dense as liquid hydrocarbons. IE gasoline still has 20 times as much energy per unit volume as their flow cell.
All they are doing is replacing the gas tank with two less energy efficient electrolyte tanks. An advantage is that the electrolyte can be recycled and reused, where gasoline is a one way use, and it can't be manufactured. A major disadvantage is the required replacement of the oil/gasoline manufacturing/distribution infrastructure with one based on the electrolytes.
Brian
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