An Interesting Interview With Dick Weir Of EEStor

GreenLiving has Yahoo video (not video, but all audio) of an interview with Dick Weir of EEStor, in what has to be the longest interview I've ever seen him do. Weir is claiming production in 2010 now; he's missed important deadlines before, so let your skepticism be your guide there. He also addresses (or claims to) a long-form post at TheEEStory.com outlining why the paramagnetic phase of the proposed barium titanate dielectric cannot do what he says.

EEStor's New Patent

There's so much noise — Slashdot, at The EEStory, gm-volt.com, and EEStor Ultracapacitors — that it's hard to understand the major issues being bruited in the new U.S. Patent (7466536B1) filed recently by EEStor. Perhaps the most interesting part of this comes in this The EEStory discussion thread about the patent. This post in particular interests me (all lower-case typing is a direct quote):

i found it interesting that the patent describes taking the alumina and PET materials down to -150 degrees C! i'm no expert, but i doubt seriously that's a common practice. that's very cold.

maybe that's the magic fairy dust everyone has missed -- the use of extremely cold temperatures to modify the property of the materials in order to make this seeming violation of physics work.

i've been following eestor for years now and i don't think they've done it, but i do find the mention of ultra cold temperatures used in manufacturing very, very, very interesting. is the low temperature something that would have been done in weir's previous career in hard drives?

as others have said, r. weir is either one of the boldest liars out there or he's an extremely shrewd inventor.

We still, of course, don't even have a demonstration unit released, and there's plenty of good reason to be skeptical. But if they're liars, they're certainly keeping their mouths awfully closed, an awfully long time. It's entirely possible that there were design problems they assumed they could skate past that have proven more problematic than they first thought. It may not ever work, but that is not the same thing as a scam.

Lockheed Mumbles Something About EEStor

Lockheed Martin supposedly has signed an agreement with EEStor to deliver products, though the former company won't admit to having seen even so much as a prototype. Delivery is supposed to be at the end of the year. More: the article says that the ZENN car company is expecting production modules by mid-year. We'll see.

BASF Patent For Barium Titanate Ultracapacitor

I wish I could recall where I saw this, but it sure is interesting. In addition to EEStor, BASF has filed for a patent on a barium titanate ultracapacitor design, number 7,023,687 filed on April 4, 2006. It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these competing designs ever make it to market. The more I read of EEStor (or, perhaps more accurately, the less I read, for they're notoriously quiet and quietly slipping behind schedule), the less inclined I am to believe they'll ever deliver a working product.

Update 12/17: A lot of interesting and heated discussion at Clean Break about this, including an anonymous commenter who claims that energy stored is proportional to ½cV for non-linear dielectrics (which barium titanate supposedly is) rather than ½cV² for linear dielectrics. One sign — and I agree — we should look for is an actual lab measurement of the properties they believe they can meet. Supposedly this is done in WIPO patent WO/2006/026136. Judging by the tone and arguments raised, it appears the same Anonymous (who may have been a former Maxwell Corp. employee) has been busy recently on Boing Boing as well.

EEStor's Ultracapacitor That Isn't (Just Yet?)

I'll start with this January, 2007 piece at MIT's Technology Review that breathlessly announced EEStor's ultracapacitor; there was recently an AP piece about U.S. Patent 7,033,406, which claimed to cover the thing. The big advance claimed is a huge increase in permittivity even in cold weather and at high voltages, something others in the field say has not been done with years of research invested. Now it looks like they're delaying product shipment until 2008. Hm...