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Plastic Batteries Coming Soon?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Engineers at Brown University have built a prototype of a hybrid plastic battery that uses a conductive polymer. The system, which marries the power of a capacitor with the storage capacity of a battery, can store and deliver power efficiently. For example, during performance testing, 'it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery.' Still, it's unlikely that such a device can appear on the market before several years."
Why is it that we keep hearing about this kind of advancement "to be available in five to ten years", and yet the storage capacity of batteries has been stagnated for at least that long?
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I can understand your skepticism, but this breakthrough--along with MIT's research into using carbon nanotubes to build superior supercapacitor storage devices--could drastically change the world as we know it for two reasons:
1. It opens the door for a truly practical electric car, one that uses a far smaller battery pack (which means more passenger/cargo space and less battery "dead weight" to lug around) with very long range and recharge times about the same as one refilling the fuel tank in a passenger car.
2. It makes it possible for large-scale storage of electric power, meaning power generated by wind turbines and/or solar cell farms can be stored for future use when the wind speed is low and during the night.
...for most of the things I care about. And this device only had double thecapacity of an an alkaline battery. Capacity is mAh. Power is watts.
An alkaline battery might have a capacity of (say) 2000 mAh, meaning that it could power a three-watt bulb for about an hour. This device, if it lives up to the claims, could do so for about two hours.
An alkaline battery couldn't power a 100-watt bulb at all, because it can't deliver more than a few amps. This device apparently _could_ power a 100-watt bulb... but only for about four minutes.
The ability to deliver power, that is to deliver energy in a short, intense burst, might be very useful for some applications. But it wouldn't let you recharge your laptop once a week or anything like that.
(There's another question I have. A battery hold an almost steady voltage for a long time, then declines fairly rapidly. Almost a square wave. This is one reason why it's hard to measure discharge state. Presumably these ultracapacitors have a smooth, exponential voltage decline, like radioactive decay. That probably means that you need tricky circuitry to exploit them... and there is probably always a significant amount of power in the device that you can't use, because the voltage has dropped too low).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Gas tanks don't explode in the real world like they do on movies & tv. Gasoline needs to be in a fine mist to become explosive--a puddle of gasoline will only burn as quickly as it can breathe in oxygen. A capacitor on the other hand can release all of its stored energy instantly. A big enough cap to power a car would go off like a bomb.
Obviously they'll have safety circuitry to prevent that from happening in the event of a short . . . but I still haven't heard how they intend to make them safe in a car crash, when the capacitor itself might get ruptured or crushed.