I know this subject has come up on the forum on several occasions, but I never paid much attention to it, nor do I recall how the subject conversation was titled. …the idea that we could have battery powered model trains, free from track power.
I was reading my mail today, and this item caught my attention,
https://newatlas.com/energy/nano-diamond-self-charging-batteries-ndb/
The quest for deadrail continues.
From the man with the permanent left index finger and pinkie hovered over Ctrl+V…I guess I’ll warm up the dead horse for the eventual beating…
If the nano diamond technology is actually realized, model railroading will be a minor issue.
This technology, if realized, would change the world’s energy system. Just imagine batteries that recharge themselves, with no external energy source. Batteries that recharge hundreds of thousands of times with no energy drop-off.
Sounds like pie-in-the-sky, but at one time, so did almost everything we use today.
California company NDB says its nano-diamond batteries will absolutely upend the energy equation, acting like tiny nuclear generators.
The heart of each cell is a small piece of recycled nuclear waste.
That whole article smacks of a scam. Surprised they don’t mention Tesla (as in Nikola, not the car company) since that seems to be an absolkute requirement for dodge energy technology. We WANT to believe this is real, but I have serious doubts about their claims.
Heck, if the wireless energy people are real - we wouldn’t need batteries in the loco, just a controller. Direct radio control that also provides the power. Dead rail AND no batteries that need to be recharged. Just a pipe dream though.
–Randy
Wireless charging is commonplace technology and suitable for dead rail. Converting tiny amounts of nuclear radiation directly into electricity is a whole nother ballgame. Reference to an iPhone suggests very low power rates are contemplated.
All battery powered devices are limited by the current pretty hard limits on energy density for current battery chemistry.
Service life for a Li ion battery suitable for dead rail locomotives is not a serious limitation. It is exceptionally unlikely any one model locomotive would be recharged so many times the battery became useless. If the dead rail locomotive is designed properly the shell would be easily removable and the battery just plug in plug out. No technical reason battery replacement or recharging would hinder dead rail.
Space inside the shell for a suitably sized battery is one problem as is the lack of enough space to fit adequate weight in as well. Batteries are light compared to metal weighting. Internal charging capability is of little relevance to either of these limitations. Heck, resurrecting my soldering skills for model railroading facilitated replacing the tiny battery in my electric toothbrush…that lasted a decade and still held 80% of its original charge capacity. Induction charging also. One new battery every decade is no serious limitation to this technology.
I’m no scientist but my basic conceptual understanding of batteries is that they are mearely a device for STORING energy. You have to generate the energy somewhere then put it into the battery to then use the energy at some other time or location.
A battery that charges itself sounds more like a power source than a storage device. I’m skeptical.
Batteries that can be recharged many times or hold their charge for longer periods without fractional dimunition of energy from the amount of energy put into it seems more doable.
While I am always skeptical of miracle inventions, it makes for interesting reading. The articles claim it passed its first tests at Lawrence Livermore and Cambridge University.
And yes, it is a power source, along with capacitors to store the charges. I think they are using the term ‘battery’ because bunches of these small power sources can be linked into a battery.
Here is another article that explains a little more.
Don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger:
Based on
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_battery
A single cell would only generate 0.000007 amps. However, it would last 7000 years. You could use a separate battery/capacitor to store power butfor itlarger surges, but it would take a very long time to fill up enough.
This kind of technology is fairly common in spacecraft, but it is usually very small amounts of actual energy. Also you end up with a fairly radioactive battery. I’m not sure I want that in my train room.
The Quest for cold fusion has been going on for decades. Free power forever is a dream, that will not occur in my lifetime.
So, if I decide to nuke my layout, can I do it with a Nuclear Diamond Battery? [swg]
Rich
Not free power.
It uses radioactive waste as the power source to charge capacitors.
The man-made diamond is the radioactive shield.
The amounts of electricity are tiny. However, this company claims they can put these together in amounts large enough to make batteries, much smaller and at lower cost than lithium batteries.
Again, notice I used the word ‘claims’.
I guess we’ll know in five or ten years if this is legit.
I’m real sure I don’t want that in my train room. Can’t imagine it being generally popular with consumers, presuming they are able to overcome the regulatory issues. And cost will be a barrier for those willing to go there.
It’s not that I don’t respect them for trying, but my research tells me that the good things about nuclear energy are often way too optimistically portrayed and the bad things shoved under the table, err, layout.
I do like to have fun with these things, though, otherwise life is just too grim to contemplate sometimes. I have most of the nuclear fuel cycle represented on the layout, including the local nuke plant seen here while hosting some peculiar visitors…
A ‘battery’ by definition is a power source composed of a number of cells (by analogy with a battery of guns, itself so named essentially because it can ‘batter’ objectives more effectively). It does not matter if the “cells” are electrochemical, or reversible storage batteries, or other technologies like TACs or older nuclear-electric batteries.
As noted, one well-understood trade off is speed of ‘charge provision’ (at given EMF or range thereof) vs. various kinds of associated non-electric emission (notably gamma EM, charged particles or neutron emission of various kinds, undesired heat or mechanical energy, or noxious chemicals as in the originally-promising Daniels or Page batteries to be used in railway traction. High specific power is going to result in higher such emissions, in the past usually to a point that managing them is less cost-effective than the power or power-density increase. One characteristic example was the plutonium-electric construction of the 1960s, which would happily scale to ‘contemporary’ locomotive packaging… but in an imperfect world, why would you want to?
Here you have ‘game-changing’ nuclear and electron-transfer physics that are much more ideal for nanoamp low-power electronics, but likely no more cost-effective or useful than TACs for use at 1:1 locomotive scale. Even for model deadrail the rate of recharge might be slow; as noted, use as primary power might begin to involve ‘interesting’ amounts of the radionuclides involved.
(I suspect the ‘waste’ refers to the anticipated cost of the nuclear material, not a judgment of its quality or potential unrefined danger. But I have been surprised by would-be ‘nuclear engineers’, particularly in the general realm of thorium-cycle scams, no few times…
Nuclear powered train. Where have I heard that. Oh yeah. The 1950,s. Can’t say it is not prototypical then.
for some reason most forget the power requirements of a train. Train weight, length, grades speed, sound or not. All factor to how long that small battery will last on a charge. It works in large scale cause the battery size and and the bank that can be built in a trailing car To supply the locomotives. Plus space. The numbers don’t work the same in small scales due to the batteries themselves.
it I have said before. It could work on a switching layout. Removing the headache of electrical isolation and shorts. Slow speed and light loads. With a few designated charging rails. It will work nicely and reduce head aches
Dead rail isn’t very useful in any larger small scale application
Shane
Ed, you probably have a copy of the paper on the plutonium-battery-electric locomotive, really the only “practical” '50s design (although the molten-salt design spun off from aircraft research and I think ‘in play’ for the Alco A-100 was certainly intriguing as long as you had Navy-disciplined engineers to watch the plant like a hawk…)[(-D]
Well, as a startup, this sounds alot like Theranos. The tecnoligy works but not ready for prime time. Theranos was able to do some of what they said, but not all and not in the timeline that was said. They already have batterys that last 10 times Lithium. They could do a real working deadrail tomarrow but not without spending alot of money. We need a billionare to get into model railroading.
Nuts! Guess I shouldn’t have bought that last Accurail kit. Now I’m a little short. [:(]
