The Ultimate Prius Battery Mod for 44% better Mileage

Prius has 28 modules. I don't know any hybrid battery pack with only 10 modules.​

 

I won't say this is total BS, but there are a lot of reasons to be highly skeptical.

1) Very poor quality presentation/website. Not what one would expect from a professional scientist.

2) Very high buzzword to actual data ratio. Many of these seem to be used completely out of context.

3) Several patents, no peer reviewed papers I can find (at least on these topics).

4) Whole family seems to be on the bankroll.
New World Batteries CONTACT Innovative Battery Technology Improvement

5) There are certainly electro-chemical improvements that can be made to existing battery technologies. The recent offering by Firefly comes to mind:
Home - fireflyenergy.com
However, these improvements have to be made in exceedingly complex tradeoff space of size, weight, cost, cycle life, power delivery and capacity. This work seems to address only one of these aspects, without comment on how the others are affected.

6) 44% increase in Prius efficiency does not really seem plausible, even if battery is improved by the described procedures.

Prius does not judge SOC based on voltage as some have speculated. SOC is determined based on "coulomb counting". The controller measures/integrates how much energy goes out, and puts that much back in. This is due to the poor correlation of voltage to SOC in nimh batteries. This makes the Prius unable to make use of additional battery capacity w/o reprogramming or replacing the battery controller. The cal-cars phev conversion gets around this by pulling the voltage high enough (~242V) to trigger a recalibration routine in the controller (it assumes if the voltage is that high its miscounted and accidentally overcharged the battery. This trick is refered to as "SOC drift". Under any normal circumstances the battery (even with reduced resistance) will never venture into this voltage range. Even if it does once, this will not reset the capacity. In the cal-cars conversion, the voltage is pulled this high more or less every time you step on the gas pedal, until the secondary battery is depleted.

Decreasing resistance of the pack will help reduce voltage sag under heavy load, which will help keep the charge and discharge current limits from being dropped, allowing a little more battery use at lower SOC. This could potentially result in marginally better pickup, particularly at lower SOC.

One of the first experiments that was done on the path to PHEV conversion was to simply make the batteries bigger. This didn't work, because the computer would not use the extra capacity. The next thing was to try adding a whole second prius battery. This was complicated because both controllers have to be online. When they got this working, the benefits (double capacity, half the resistance with only ~3% weight increase) resulted in minimal (~5% I think) improvement in mileage, because ultimately all the power is coming from the gas engine. It was only when people started adding a second pack (or completely replacing the primary pack) with one that could be recharged externally that any significant improvements in mileage were observed. This is not primarily due to improved efficiency, just a partial change of fuel sources from gas to electric. In the cal-cars conversions, once the secondary battery is run down, its kept in parallel with the main pack. It no longer has the power to pull the voltage up to trigger SOC drift, but it does still make the battery effectively much larger in capacity and much lower in resistance. This has the effect to more or less cancel out the effect of carrying around 250 lbs of lead batteries, maybe 1-2 mpg.

I will freely admit that I am not an expert in battery chemistry, just a lowly electrical engineer. So its certainly possible that this is all just over my head. That said what I think this is really all about is making a pretty simple idea sound really complicated in order to try and attract investors. That doesn't necessarily mean its out of good or bad intent, in fact its a pretty common practice in tech. What I think they are trying to say is, in most batteries it seems plausible that you get an increase in resistance as the electrolyte near the terminals becomes saturated while the rest of the electrolyte really is under utilized. You could improve this by mechanically stirring the electrolyte around, but this is complicated, expensive, and prone to failures. By introducing a magnetic field in the battery, you can get the charged ions in the electrolyte to move around creating a similar stirring effect. By "homogenizing" the electrolyte you can effectively lower the resistance of the battery because you always have fresher electolyte at the electrodes. That may really improve battery efficiency somewhat, but claims of 5-10X more capacity and 44% better Prius mileage are a little harder to believe.

Just my 2c,
Rob

 

I think the clue is in the user name of the messenger.
Where I come from if someone tells a fib they are telling a little lie.

Reduction of losses in the battery would improve power recovery from the battery but as nowhere near 44% of all the energy to the wheels comes through the electric motors from the battery I can't for the life of me see how this could lead to an improvement of even 4%.

If the OP is seeking investment there may be a better chance at the pickup truck forums.

 

Nice comments MISCRMS.

I too was surprised at the low quality of the presentation. I always tend to check the math of articles. (since there are frequently mistakes, and it is just fun). There were severe math errors in the presentation. In the section about improvement in the batteries, they claimed 26.3% arithmetical improvement, but a "likely" 32% improvement. What does that mean?!?! Anyway, it turns out that the average improvement was only 21.3%. How could there be such a simple mistake in a presentation like that?

 

And then you have to question the science when even the basic facts aren't correct.

​

​

​

Units of resistivity/conductivity are ohm/length (or ohm*length, depending on what you are discussing). Not ohm/volume or ohm/area (KOH). This is a very basic step, as resistance depends on the distance between electrodes. I can buy absent-minded scientist puts together boring presentation with lousy graphics and even questionable math. But when they don't even use the proper units for their core data???​

 

I'm always the skeptic.

 

your mistake was emphasizing this step... so do tell, how would magnetizing a battery help when in actuality, permanent polarity if it were possible, would impede electron flow on either the charge or discharge cycle? effectively removing its ability to be reused.

 

The important thing to remember here Mr Fibb is although this forum has it's share of uneducated fools like me there is more than a smattering of people on this forum who's knowledge would run rings around yours, mine and maybe a couple other dudes combined. A couple of days ago I read about the workings of the MRI machine from someone who seemed to be extremely knowledgeable about electric stuff. I would be very careful who it is you claim knows less than this doctor friend of yours has forgotten about electricity and its behaviour in a magnetic field.

You do realise this isn't a truck or SUV forum don't you?
Have you been to those forums?
Trust me, unlike those on truck forums the people here are very polite, too polite I think and aren't going to make a big fuss when a fool comes by, so if you see any fools don't make a big fuss. Hey they let me hang around.

Oh and I just googled Ohms/cm2 and here is what I got;
Results 1 - 10 of about 2,110 for Ohms/cm2. (0.12 seconds)
I don't know what that proves just thought I would post it.

 

The SI physical units for resistivity are ohm-meters. This is the resistance measured across opposite faces of a 1-meter cube of the material. Any reasonably-qualified physicist or engineer knows this. Resistivity is sometimes (but incorrectly) referred to as ohms per cubic meter, or ohms per cubic centimeter.

Wrongly-quoted units and typos always raise my eyebrows.

More importantly, where are the data? Where are the peer-reviewed publications? I don't see any.

Claims of a 44% increase in fuel efficiency are obviously bogus, any losses inherent in the battery won't make this much difference, as others have stated. I could believe 4.4%.

Simple changes to electrolyte chemistry are things that many folks will have tried over the years - I find it hard to believe this has been overlooked by battery researchers.

Many alternative energy/perpetual motion schemes feature magnetism, which is a bit mysterious to many folks. Magnetically-driven convection currents? Again, where is the data?

My skepticism detector is showing off-scale on this one (it reminds me of the Utah cold fusion debacle).

I'd be delighted if you'd prove me wrong - but show me the data!

Mike

 

I Googled "ohm/cm" (conductivity) and got:

Results 1 - 10 of about 241,000 for ohm/cm.

or "ohm/m" (also conductivity):

Results 1 - 10 of about 73,500 for ohm/m.

or "ohm*m" (resistivity):

Results 1 - 10 of about 753,000 for ohm*m.

or "ohm*cm" (also resistivity):

Results 1 - 10 of about 569,000 for ohm*cm.

As opposed to "ohm/cm3":

Results 1 - 10 of about 397 for ohm/cm3

So, I'd guess that out of 241,000 entries on Google, 397 of them have typing errors. That could even be the case with the good Dr. O'Brien, but when you or he are trying to tout a miracle cure, you can't afford typing errors. All this proves it that I can use Google, it doesn't tell you anything about my qualifications to review a presentation on an electrical subject.

But think about this, Dr. O'Brien claims that 5M H2SO4 has a "resistance" of 1 ohm/cm3. That means that if you have 10 cm3 you have a resistance of 10 ohms. If you increase the amount of H2SO4 to 100 cm3, using his values, you would have a resistance of 100 ohms. Therefore, using the values given in the presentation document, increasing the amount of electrolyte will increase the total resistance in the battery. Yet, the core assertion is that increasing the amount of electrolyte decreases the total resistance. It doesn't hang together.

MHO, adding a little electrolyte (if there's room for it - and I would be concerned about thermal expansion) could result in slightly better performance at early stages because there is more mass to heat during charging and possibly slightly better battery plate contact during discharge. But, there is still only the same amount of external battery surface area for cooling (although possibly better heat transmission to that surface with more electrolyte in each cell), so longer term tests that reach steady state conditions with regard to battery temperature will probably show limited improvement.

The only hard data in the presentation details "improvements" in getting electricity out of the battery at higher rates during one minute tests. That in no way proves that the charge/discharge cycle is more efficient, only that you can put a greater load on the battery. And if I'm only going to be driving my Prius for one minute, I walk.

 

I think we are all agreed, if this turns out to be true it would be great. We all want to see battery technology continue to move forward.

My skepticism stems from the concern that wild promises of amazing range improvements that later don't pan out can be very damaging to public acceptance of electric vehicles. Particularly when this is done with other peoples investment dollars. The nay sayers are very quick to point to this sort of thing as evidence that battery technology just isn't ready for EVs. We know this is a load of bull, as evidenced by the 10yr old RAV4 EVs still driving around on their original NimH batteries.

Ultimately this is how science works. People are skeptical. The person with the new idea has to prove his idea to the skeptics. The skeptics study the evidence and try to reproduce the results. Based on the information provided so far, this is not yet a very convincing case. Thats not to say it may not be a good idea, there is just a lot more work to be done to prove it to everyone. I think part of the problem here, is we have a chemist/materials guy trying to talk electrical engineering speak. When you say "magnetically induced convection currents" to an EE, you immediately sound like Nicoli Tesla. In reality I think all he is saying is you can stir up the electrolyte by adding magnetic fields. That sounds a lot more feasible.

This brings us to another problem, in that the Prius is not an appropriate test platform for a battery technology. There are far to many variables that can not be controlled to ever be able to directly compare one against another. A true BEV would be much more reasonable, and even that is challenging to make truly reproducible. Whatever data is collected on the Prius is going to be almost impossible to draw any conclusions from.

Rob

 

With the claimed 5-10 times more energy, you can go 11 to 22 miles in pure EV mode. Just inject some solution into the current NiMH HV pack and magnatize it! Poof and you have more energy than Li-ion. You don't need Li-ion PHEV battery anymore. That is one extraordinary claim and it requires an extraordinary proof.