Energy Invention Suppression Cases
Remy Chevalier (Reporter): NiMH Batteries; Solid-State Lithium-Ion Batteries
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- Paul M. Lewis: Airmobile
Remy Chevalier (Reporter): NiMH Batteries; Solid-State Lithium-Ion BatteriesThe best Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries are no longer on the market. Why? Because either Cobasys has no intention of ever mass producing powerful NiMH automotive packs, or they just don’t know how, even though they own the patent. The cells they displayed at the last EDTA conference were bulky at best, and certainly a million years away from the level of engineering exactitude Japanese automakers expect from their suppliers. Essentially Matsusita took some of the information from their original, but mediocre patents and developed a functional NiMH battery that gave a range of 160 miles to the General Motors EV-1 and 110 miles to the Toyota RAV4 EV. This Panasonic M95 was also getting 1-2000 deep cycles and 100,000-150,000 miles on a battery pack. Something the oil companies and Detroit automakers don’t want on the market, despite the Fortune 500’s good mood for natural capitalism. So now that the best NiMH battery technology for EV’s has been removed from commercial circulation, Toyota, Honda and Ford are stuck using inferior NiMH battery technology in their hybrids. Toyota has indicated it will take up to 4 years for the next generation lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery chemistry to be as reliable and affordable. Till then, it’s touch and go as Toyota can’t crank out enough hybrids off the assembly line to meet demand, especially in deliveries to corporate fleets, taxicabs and limousine services. State-of-the art lithium-ion chemistry is in limbo at some California-based company who has managed to secure the exclusive production rights to the only Li-ion technology that really counts, roll-to-roll solid-state battery production. That’s right; no more liquid chemistry… no leakage, no over heating, no explosion, extreme light weight, easy mass production! Just like printing mylar off a printing press! Just like laminating plastic photovoltaic sheets! Instead more conventional liquid Li-ion chemistry is being pushed feverishly. Toyota is buying out major Li-ion startups in Asia. Other Li-ion battery companies like Valence, Electrovaya, Kokam, LG Chem have attractive polymer Li-ion batteries, but they are still all based on the older liquid chemistry model, and therefore more expensive and more complicated to produce. The chemical genius who came up with the Li-ion solid-state polymer roll-to-roll protocol is a professor at MIT who does not own his own technology. MIT owns the technology, and it is the MIT licensing office which gets to decide what companies do or do not get awarded these licensing rights. This revolutionary technology has been in limbo since 1995! Is it because MIT is cashing checks from the Rockefeller Bros. and the Ford Foundation? Is it pure incompetence? Is it a repeat of the cold fusion debacle Gene Mallove wrote about in his book “Fire from Ice”? It’s hard to tell as everyone involved is terrified to talk about it openly, which is why I am not mentioning any names. Frequent visitors to the Electrifying Times website know exactly who I am talking about! My suspicion is that certain forces within the military, and now Homeland Security, do not want solid-state roll-to-roll Li-ion batteries from entering the civilian marketplace, the same way you can’t buy Green, a special duct tape developed for Groton Electric Boat workers to strap metal parts, so strong it instantly bonds to the skin, requiring surgery if accidentally touched. What a poor boy to do who wants to save the planet if the powers-that-be won’t give him the affordable batteries he needs to make a 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds EV with a 200-mile range on a single charge? That‘s the question we should all be asking ourselves instead of lamenting about who killed the electric car! The batteries are there, being manufactured for military applications all over Connecticut! If you want plug-in hybrids and 100% pure EVs so you don’t ever use a drop of gasoline again, with equal to if not better performance than any liquid fuel engines, then ask yourself why MIT, since 1994, has done very little to get their solid-state Li-ion roll-to-roll battery patents into production. Don’t follow the money; follow the trail of misappropriated and shelved patents. Congress needs to put back into question the entire review process of patent law, and its consequences on environmental health, by imposing strict fines to whoever is caught buying patents for the sole purpose of keeping its protocol out of commercial circulation. (Excerpted from “Who Killed Better Batteries?” by Remy Chevalier, Electrifying Times, spring-summer 2006, Vol. 10, No. 1, www.electrifyingtimes.com.) (Erik Masen adds more details in his “Suppression of Quantum Leap Inventors” Electrifying Times, 2007, Vol. 10, No. 2) Chevron-Texaco bought into a Detroit company, Stanford Ovshinsky’s Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), and changed their name to Cobasys. ECD held the original patents on nickel metal hydride battery technology, but never successfully marketed a turnkey NiMH battery for major markets. They did sell a considerable amount of NiMH batteries to GM for the EV1. Panasonic came along and refined this NiMH battery technology into an indestructible battery of higher energy density and longer life. That enabled the Toyota RAV4 EV (electric vehicle) to get 80-120 miles out of a battery cycle, and get over 100,000 miles of battery life out of this improved NiMH battery. ECD-Cobasys filed a lawsuit of patent infringement against Panasonic and won. This action essentially shutdown the import and use of the Panasonic M95 NiMH battery that was so successful in making EV’s practical for the GM EV1, Ford Ranger Electric PU, and the Toyota RAV4 EV. As a result the proven very popular M95 90-ampere-hour NiMH is not for sale in the United States. ECD-Cobasys also put heavy licensing fees and restrictions on the NiMH battery used in the Toyota’s present hybrid fleet. Paul M. Lewis: AirmobileIn 1936, Paul M. Lewis designed a three-wheeled car that looked a lot like the present Volkswagen bug. He called it the "Airmobile", and his original model is still on display at Harrah's auto Museum in Reno, NV. Though Lewis had not known what Dr. Ferdinand Porsche was doing in Germany, the Lewis Airmobile was amazingly similar to the popular VW beetle. Both vehicles were low cost, simplistic in design, used horizontal opposed four-cylinder air-cooled engines, transaxles, independent suspension systems and unitized body construction. When World War II came along, it sent VW soaring in Germany, but killed the Airmobile. Porsche fit into the German establishment, but Lewis was a "crackpot" inventor and a pain in the neck to the economic status quo. The VW beetle's popularity proves that Lewis' original idea was valid and worthy, despite the laughter from Detroit. The Airmobile was driven out of business in the late 1930s by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Postal Department, who have been called bureaucratic flunkies for the oil-auto monopoly. "I was harassed for two years, and they refused to let me sell stock in my company on the pretense they were investigating possible wrongdoing." Lewis said. "After I was beaten down, they sent representatives to tell me they found nothing wrong, and I could sell stock. A man can't make a dead horse walk." After losing the Airmobile, despite driving it through 26 states for more than 45,000 miles without a repair, Lewis went from Denver to Los Angeles, where he continued inventing. Joel McClain and Norman Wooten: Magnetic Resonance Amplifier On December 12, 1994, Joel McClain and Norman Wooten, two Dallas inventors, discovered that a magnetic resonance amplifier could be capable of over-unity gain energy conversion. The electrical output of their prototype was five times the electrical input. They made a point of publicizing their invention as widely as possible via the Internet right away so as to forestall possible suppression. Since then, they have authored articles on the magnetic resonance amplifier in Electrifying Times, Extraordinary Science, and New Energy News. A personal friend of Newt Gingrich became very interested and arranged for the Physics Department at Georgia Institute of Technology to experiment with it. They were able to increase the gain so that the output is 18 times the input. Since they could not explain this according to conventional physics, they refused to publish their results for fear of losing the respect and esteem of their peers. Gingrich had been following the MRA with keen interest so when his friend told him of the problem with Georgia Tech, Gingrich arranged for the federal funding of Georgia Tech programs to be cut off. The President of Georgia Tech who had been in the dark on all this began getting phone calls from enraged Georgia Tech professors. Then the Physics Department published their findings. At the International Tesla Society Symposium in Colorado Springs (July 20-23), McClain and Wootan gave a lecture on their magnetic resonance amplifier. The oscilloscope waveforms of output vs. input they showed were very odd. They sort of loop around themselves. A few days after the conference, Wootan’s two-year-old boy had been abducted, Wootan was running for his life in Canada, and McClain was in hiding. The magnetic resonance amplifier’s claimed over-unity power conversion efficiency was later shown to be a measurement error. However, a past issue of Electrifying Times claims that Scott McKie has invented a solid-state over-unity electrical energy converter with an input of 15 volts, .438 amperes (7.25 watts) and an output of 34 volts, 127 amperes (4318 watts). McKie’s converter apparently is a more advanced version of the magnetic resonance amplifier. Download 0.7 Mb. Share with your friends:
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