1500 mile SUPER-battery: BUSTED!

so far the Tavistock based company has gone under the radar as they've designed a battery that could power an electric car for 1500 miles one man in Tavistock now says that he's made the breakthrough to make these places a thing of the past and Dane my Twitter feed explodes apparently a new battery has been invented no not by one of those narrow-minded battery manufacturers you know those who work billions into battery research every year this one was invented by a single father of eight and a Royal Navy officer this is going to be awesome now a real game-changer let's read the first line of the article shall we imagine the satisfaction of driving your environmentally-friendly electric car for one and a half thousand miles without having to stop to recharge the battery a distance more than four times as far as the best and most expensive model currently on the road or how that's awesome without having this stopper to recharge you know something that would happen if you say for instance couldn't recharge the battery but I'm Way too cynical I mean look it's right there in the title of the article that it can go 1,000 miles without needing to charge so if they're talking about charging it in the title it's got to be a rechargeable battery right under the bonnet is a revolutionary new type of battery which unlike though is used in conventional electric cars can power buses huge lorries and even aircraft actually you can't power all of those things with battery it's just not a very smart way of doing it what's more it's far simpler and cheaper to make these batteries than the battery is currently in use in millions of electric vehicles around the world and I don't like those it can be easily recycled yeah but can it actually be recharged it might sound like science fiction but it's not last Friday the batteries inventor British engineer and Royal Navy officer Trevor Jackson signed a multi-million pound deal to start manufacturing the devices on a large scale in the UK oh that's awesome I had no idea they were gonna start manufacturing them and he's actually holding one of them which kind of suggests that it exists and that's actually one of the batteries that's gonna power something for one and a half thousand miles and what they're gonna get the money for the mass manufacture Austin electric an engineering firm based in Essex which now owns the rights to use the the old Austin motors company logo will be putting thousands of them into electric vehicles next year according to her austin's chief executive Danny call Koren the new technology is a game-changer great I'm sure if I look them up they're gonna be a massive multi-million dollar mega corporation with factories and suppliers and tons of expertise and thousands of employees you know to put thousands of them on the road next year yep there it is Austin electric limited Essex director mr. Stubbs I'm sure he's gonna be a big shot currently the director of five yes five whole companies what do we got black are limited where he's both the ER engineer and director ha I guess he uses a lot time he's not directing least multi-million dollar deals to be an engineer but whatever he's got about two hundred thousand in assets and about two hundred thousand in the liabilities making the company worth about a hundred pounds what's next Austin Motor Company place both the director and company director asset 2000 liabilities twelve thousand net assets - ten thousand now I know it might be a little behind of times here just a little bit more than two thousand pounds to run a real motor company but whatever a holdings limited total asset or one hundred pounds I'm beginning to think this director might struggle to give up multi-million dollar deals and finally Austin Electric a company that doesn't even have a total website seriously you look up Austin Electric you'll find loads of electric companies for places like Austin Texas it was founded about a month before this article came out with new details really available what did the article 2nd Austin Electric an engineering firm based in Essex which now owns the right to use the old Austin Motor Company logo will begin putting thousands of them into electric vehicles next year yeah I'm gonna push X to doubt on that one actually I did almost scratching around and I found this the filing for Austin electric currency great britain pounds total number of Shaye's allocated to seriously two shares was an aggregated nominal value of two pounds you could buy two of these companies for what you would pay from meal of McDonald's and still have changed but what did the male highlight oh it's an engineering firm that earns the right to they Austin motors company logo well the company's worth less than the money that's falling down the back of a couch and in any event what the hell is the old Austin motors logo got to do with anything am i smelling Aston Martin or something turns out it's an old British car manufacturer defunct now for almost a hundred years which according to wiki the rights are now owned by some Chinese firm two years ago Jackson claims motor manufacturers lobbied the ax foreign office to buy him from prestigious conferences for a European business and government at a British Embassy in Paris which we're supposed to agree a blueprint for ensuring all new electric cars by 2040 the bid to exclude him failed now with their signing of the new austin deal it seems he is finally on the road to success awesome he's finally the road to success well sure the motor lobby wanted to keep this prestigious guy with his friends in Austin electric in a via tube hound company no they don't no no really they felt really threatened by him don't you just know the conspiracy nuts will be all over this just like they were with the water powered car a local inventor has discovered a way here this to use water to run your car it's a major breakthrough that will no doubt make motorists happy and his Ralph Robinson explains the Pentagon is also showing lots of interest in this project runs for hundreds of miles on a few drops of water I started working on this project for years ago he's not a scientist he isn't even a chemist in these garage creep the formula for this mad inventor and Vincent newsela revolutionized wolf hasn't changed for decades in fact he never graduated from college Mars was determined says to design something to protect this country from oil embargo and last week to look at Mars invention there's talk of possibly using it in the Star Wars defense program and to run our meetings and how big oil would try to suppress his idea you know this big oil he's always threatened play always perpetual motion machines all that these two years before the fuel system goes into mass production the data happens will be one that fuel industry hate put a smile on the face of those who've had to say at one time or another full or one man in Tavistock now says that he's made the breakthrough to make these places a thing of the past and if you ever want to lose faith in mankind just read the comments on Stan Meyers water car he was a threat to oil companies rest in peace Stan he was taken out ask yourself why all forms of technology have gotten way better and amazing over the last 100 years well yeah we are still using the same gasoline engines for the last 100 years no advancement at all well firstly that's not quite true and secondly the reason we're still using gasoline he's because there really isn't anything better well that is nothing better that we can safely use it's basically top of banana in energy density indeed is essentially what was used in the first stage of the Saturn 5 in the late 1980s Stanley Meyer invented a car that could go from coast to coast in the United States on 21 gallons of water spoiler alert he couldn't that's not actually an energy source he was offered one billion dollars from the automobile industry for his invention but turned it down because he wanted this idea to go to that people shortly afterwards he was poisoned to death and his invention has been hidden from us ever since yet our children are not learning about inventors suppliers in the school nor they are they being encouraged to develop alternative fuel sources you see what I mean about kind of losing faith in mankind I'm willing to bet that the government had this man killed and took all of his research that is what happens watch me get an IRS audit for posting this comment stanley ramaya refused billions for his patents in 1997 he was poisoned to death the next year back when the news covered real stories government killed him plain and simple and iPad runs on far more technology advanced than a car that runs on water how are you gonna call this fake oh my god these people had depressingly stupid anyway let's get back to the aluminium battery he also secured a hundred eight thousand pound grant Wow you can buy a lot of often electric companies for that for future research from the advanced propulsion Center a partner of the Department of Business Innovation and Skills cool a hundred eight thousand pounds to do research until you have an idea of how much research actually costs you see a significant slice of what money in research goes into is paying salaries so a hundred eight thousand pounds would pay for a single researcher for a couple of years with maybe some modest amount for consumables and not gonna do a lot of research with a hundred eight thousand pounds that's just the way it goes in 2001 he began to investigate the potential of a technology first developed in the 1960s scientists had discovered that by dipping aluminium into a chemical solution known as an electrolyte they could trigger a reaction between the metal and air to produce electricity at the time the method was useless for commercial batteries because the electrolyte was extremely poisonous and caustic no but he continues after years of experimentation that age workshop in a Cornish village in Killington Jackson's Eureka moment king when he developed a new formula for a electrolyte that was neither poisonous nor caustic like drunk it when demonstrating it to investors so I can attest to the fact that it's harmless Jackson says this is exceptionally depressingly stupid reporting I mean does the journalist here really think that the end ability of the electrolyte the drinkability of the electrolyte has ever been something that inhibited the use of a battery doesn't this person realize that basically every single internal combustion engine car in the world has a battery to start its motor wheat has as its electrolyte concentrated sulfuric acid and really he thinks that the drinkability of the electrolyte is what's been holding back the development of the aluminium battery I drunk it when demonstrating it to investors so I can attest to the fact that it's harmless Jackson says ah Hugh who wanted to drink the electrolytes in your battery really this kind of reminds me of the weed killer incident do not believe that glyphosate seit in Argentina is causing increases in cancer you can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you yep this is climate change denier Patrick Moore famously claiming that a Monsanto weed killer was safe to drink he's not a small-time climate change denier either he actually got retweeted by President Donald Trump Patrick Moore co-founder of Greenpeace the whole climate crisis is not only fake news it's fake science there is no climate crisis there's weather and climate all around the world in fact carbon dioxide is the maintenance and Friends Wow are we where to start first of all no carbon dioxide is not the main building block of all life unless you want to cast your net so widely that you could say no agents aren't toxic because phosphates are some of the principal building blocks of life and in any event whether it's a principal building block of life or not doesn't actually matter climate change only depends on the amount of energy the earth receives from the Sun versus the amount of energy it radiates out into space and currently the former is larger than the latter so in evitable the system must heat up yes oh you want to drink some we have some here I'd be happy to actually until this moment happened which is pure gold yeah not not really but not really I know it wouldn't hurt me I'm not stupid okay so you you know but I know this dangerous really there are precious few liquids that you can drink that will make you very sick Oh kill you tell the truth it's not dangerous to humans no no not so are you ready to drink one glass of no I'm not an idiot interview me about Golden Rice that's what I'm talking about that's a serious blow now the water there either going from no it's perfectly safe to drink till he realizes that they actually have some there for him to drink okay then except then the interview is finished let's say that's a good way to soul things yeah here at complete jerk let me just remind you most car batteries run on lead plates and sulfuric acid and it's amazing how few people have ended up harming themselves by drinking the sulfuric acid Jackson gave me a demonstration he cut the top off a can of coke drained it filled it with the electrolyte and clipped the electrodes to it powering a small propeller the energy in this will keep that propeller spinning for a month he said you can see what this technology could do in a vehicle if you scale it up oh sweet lord tell me he had more than this well what what he's demonstrated the electrolytic cell you know the battery so that's gonna release the charge from it will and there we are there's a propeller running something that you can do with the potato and you we're impressed by this so how is it meant to have total EU battery well you're gonna need some aluminium another metal which is in a different potential so I'm going to just take copper because I have it and you need to make two electrodes oh they're sort of things piece of copper he's all into another electrode hey so how close so I'll be heat to electricity at this point we're going to need a voltmeter Jessica Thomas how many volts we generate in between these two contacts so I myself actually generate some voltage kill and if I connect one electrode to the aluminium and the other to the copper of course I get nothing between them I get nothing between them if I talk to a what if I just put some regular tap water in there and stick both electrodes in boom all the sudden almost 1 volt and that's how difficult it was to generate the potential now if you want to conduct a car if you want to get power out of this thing you've got to move the electrons lots of electrons from one to the other the potential here is essentially the neighbors technology asking if you use it's like two Lakes one lake up one lake down this tells you the difference between the two legs if you want to get power out of it you've got to move electrons from one electrode to the other so that usually means you won the electrodes as close as possible and you want there to be at least resistance between the two from the electrolyte as possible and once in aluminium air fuel cell is spent it can be recycled very cheaply I'm gonna have to push X to doubt on that one again but we'll come to that one in a second accordingly the Jackson it's going to be super cheap no to cut a long story short he's invented a square wheel and it made such awesome clickbait that the Daily Mail ran with it with a gazillion of other buzz feed like vultures following afterwards in reality it's an aluminium oxygen battery a concept that's been around since the dawn of electrochemistry something like a hundred or more years and let's make one thing abundantly clear this is law a rechargeable battery it's a one-off you use it and it's dead then you need a new battery I mean like or loathe Tesla the one thing that you can say about them is if you want to recharge the battery you just plug it into the mains you don't have to take the entire battery out and put in a new one which really does just point to the dishonesty in the title of this article you know one half thousand miles without needing to charge well you can't charge the battery at all easy if you just look at the thermodynamics aluminium is not a stupid way of storing energy cool eh hey you say so if the idea is so old older than playing flight why don't we have aluminum batteries powering everything well actually that's quite an interesting question you see the way it works going a long way back aluminium metal was one of the rarest of metals because it was so hard to manufacture indeed there are even stories of a Russian Tsar giving his son an aluminium rattle which at the time cost more than its weight in gold the reason for this is because it's at gargantuan pain in the ass to make aluminium maybe one of the most abundant elements on earth but not much of it is actually available in a my noble form you know it all which you can simply get the metal out of you know it's just like there's loads of gold in the oceans it's just you can't get it out very easily like that you need something like a a gold mine so once you've got the or it comes out in a form that's approximately alumina aluminium oxide or aluminium oxide with a little bit of water on it bauxite is the mineralogists call it and it's one of the hardest compounds out there indeed if you had a nice crystal of aluminium oxide mmm guess what it's called the Sapphire and it's also got an insanely high melting point for reference gold melts at about a thousand degrees which is actually a pretty hard to mature get to without modern equipment [Music] Platinum is even crazier that melts at about 1700 degrees [Music] [Music] an Illumina doesn't melt told just over 2,000 degrees Celsius I've got bad news if you want to get the aluminium Owl to that you get after melted at some point and what the hell are you gonna melt it it even a platinum crucible would be a puddle of metal by the time your alumina melts well you've got to find a way of lowering its melting point as many of you know I've done something similar on this channel you would sodium-potassium alloy which is a beautiful and deadly metal at room temperature but how can that be I hear you ask sodium is a nice solid at room temperature and potassium is a nice solid at room temperature and some sodium they've both got about the same density and so the ratio of the volume is basically gives me the ratio and which I'm mixing them in which is approximately four parts potassium to one part sodium oh yeah a liquid you push two solids together you get liquid liquid metal no less so wife you mix the two together do you get a liquid well the detailed description is is kind of complicated involves terms like entropy unless oh it's like but the basic concept is trivial atoms are basically balls that stick together like these magnets so if I say for instance have large balls who say for instance potassium they stack together nicely and make a big grid like this and if I have small balls say for instance sodium they're also gonna stack together nicely but if I mix these two together especially in an awkward ratio they're gonna stack together poorly in a disordered way which an atomic-level kind of means like a liquid so you can do this by adding something to the alumina and reduce its melting point from about 2,000 degrees oh she's insanely high to 1,000 which is still insanely high and difficult to achieve but much more possible okay great you've now got your molten alumina now you've got to electrolyze it which is basically putting electricity through it and boom yeah aluminium at one electrode and oxygen at the other part this process gobbles up the electricity takes about five percent of the electricity in the United States just make those soda cans that can be discarded without a second thought now in principle there's a lot of energy in aluminium or aluminum depending indeed thermodynamically it's exactly the same both ways so just as you have to put an insane amount of electricity in just to get your aluminium you can also get an insane amount of electricity out by reversing this now obviously I can't do this of a thousand degrees you have to do it in an aqueous solution of some sort so what this in practice means is aluminium is actually a very good potential energy source and this is one of the reasons why aluminium is such a pain in the ass is-isn't look like it but it actually got oxide layer on there which in if it's the electrons coming off it also inhibited oxidizing the way which is fantastic one of the reasons al iminium is a stunningly reactive mantle then the only reason it doesn't catch fire really in air it's because of this oxide layer that prevents it so you really want to get rid of that oxide layer if you want to use this ass in a battery so you could dissolve that off somehow now on the easiest way to do that is use use sodium hydroxide which is basically drain cleaner let's make a nice concentrated solution so we might drop site is just something that how I I'll show you here later this okay incinerating me hot by the way very exothermic reaction something to make my peroxide and water and of course it is al drain cleaner which means ya stick your fingers in it anyway if I now do exactly the same thing right so with water it gives us about a vault in sodium hydroxide well and that's mostly because we're solving off the oxide layer so if I now immediately come back to water you see it maintains the satan voltage because the aluminum surface is now clean however there is a problem we've doing it this way and i'll show you what that is okay I think that's good enough so you got the thermal camera yeah that's what you're seeing on the thermal camera it's not quite in focus I shouldn't a sort that out beautiful and as you can see this thing is a lot more than 20 degrees I'll tell you that so that's all the heat that's been generated and for comparison is the regular tap water by the dissolution of the sodium hydroxide that's toasty that's warm to the touch 60 degrees I'm gonna call it quits at about 30 degrees now at this point you gotta realize why you get that nice clean metal surface whilst it's true the sodium hydroxide is very good at cleaning off the surface of aluminium and expressing a nice clean metal surface it also has some other somewhat less desirable properties so if I just drop that in there so in many ways this is more the true reactivity of an iminium with water and it gets really really quite excited and that's actually hydrogen gas being given off there which is really explosive in its own right and you'll notice that there's also some bleed precipitate now in the solution somebody so it's about thirty degrees in there at the moment until I Chuck my nice little piece of aluminium in there and it first of all that happens and what happens a little bit of fishing a little bit of fishing and this is basically releasing all of that energy and I'm sure there's a huge amount of energy in aluminium oh hell that's it what are we up to here 50 60 more than 60 all right and this is just a little a little bit about aluminum foil 70 and that's incredible that you're generating that much heat was just stuck in a glass of 40 degrees 80 it's hot enough to burn you 90 that's boiling the water at this point that's actually that the point where it's just boiling the water let's take a look what it looks like on the camera and that's hydrogen being given off there so if you're like oh so that is why a Lavinia is a pain in the ass to use as a energy source and you see the solution is now gone all cloudy and that's just after a few little pieces of aluminium have been dissolved in it Trevor Jackson has developed a way to release energy from everyday aluminium scientists can already do it with totally pure aluminium but using the metal in a drinks can is new sorry what was that was that miss BBC excellent science reporter being able to do it where the drinks can is completely new well let's see how completely new it actually is so I've got my cutoff beer can and bizarrely enough there is there is no voltage but let's just put in some water shall we and Alakazam boom we have some potential and let's clear off a little bit that hydroxide sorry that that surface layer by adding just a little bit about concentrated hydroxide boom and look at the voltage go up no one's ever done this before Wow look a nice clean metal surface and I'm generating a potential from a beacon no one's ever done this before and look if I shorted out on the bottom is not cleaning the surface of enough oh yeah i shorted out euros to zero but yeah if I don't one point four balls he keeps on going up yeah yeah he made me miss science reporter at the BBC I have got a bloody textbook so this is your basic problem with the aluminium batteries you need a material to clean off the oxide layer and this instance I used concentrated sodium hydroxide which is actually quite extreme in its reaction with the aluminium however even if I'd have just cleaned off the oxide layer the water will quite happily react with the aluminium which in practice means that an aluminium air battery will lose some 80 percent of its charge over the period of about a month whereas with the regular lithium ion battery it would lose about five percent for the once the aluminium has reacted with the water it gives aluminium hydroxide which further remove its the efficiency of the battery because you've now got white sludge between your electrodes the electrolyte breaks the metal down releasing energy what's in the fluid is top secret intellectual property known only by Trevor and his lawyers who's open the chemistry textbook or understands basic chemistry it's aluminium hydroxide then of course you've got the volume change problem with most batteries it's sort of understood that the volume of the battery doesn't change between the charged and the discharged state not really so with aluminium oxygen batteries you know the basic reaction is you start with aluminium and some water and you convert it with some oxygen into aluminium hydroxide and they a few back-of-the-envelope calculations show that this will about double the volume of the battery in easy-to-understand Bolton's you start off with the aluminium whose the small balls and then you're discharging it by adding oxygen to it say add those two together you get with a bigger volume battery at the end than you had at the beginning and then finally the recharging you take for instance a Tesla and I'm gonna love the people in the comments saying that I'm shilling for Tesla hey you parked your Tesla battery into the mains and it'll regenerate sorry recharge your battery it's fairly quick and fairly easy and it takes pretty much a minimal amount of extra energy with your aluminium battery you've got to take all our white sludge from your discharged battery theme aluminium hydroxide then you've got to dry it into aluminium oxide then you've got to melt it and a thousand degrees then you're gonna put all of the electricity into it you know to make the aluminium that's effectively charging the battery that's gonna take at least a bare minimum of the same amount of electricity that you had to put in to your Tesla battery then you've got to take your aluminium out and then somehow shape it into your new batteries and voila very simple a recharged aluminium battery and using recycled aluminium doesn't help you at all here because fundamentally if you want to recharge the battery you've got to put that bare amount of electricity into the battery so that's a quick summary of these amazing liver thought of before aluminium batteries and maybe just maybe Austin to pound illiterate really does have some proprietary top-secret formula that somehow fundamentally changes the properties of aluminium and maybe just maybe Stanley Maya really did have a car that needed nothing more than water to run on yeah complete maybe just maybe if you plug a power cord into itself yeah we'll get unlimited power but I doubt it so if you enjoyed this video make sure to hit the notification bell to make sure you don't miss out on new uploads and as ever you can support this channel either by visiting my Amazon store or you'll find loads of poor some science goodies like multimeters that certain cute cubic lattice arrays of magnets and such like or you can support this channel directly through patreon and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 472,987

Rating: 4.8280191 out of 5

Keywords: 1500, mile, range, battery, busted, thunderf00t, electric, vehicle, tesla, elon, musk, gold, aluminium, batteries, platinium, butane, fuel, recharge, volt, chemistry, physics, science

Id: OmHnKKuBdco

Length: 37min 39sec (2259 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ice__nine]

There are still a lot of people who blindly believe in this.

[u/shiskibob]

TL; DW??