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Improved High-Performance Energy Storage
Physicists at the University of North Carolina have developed new improvements for high-energy-density capacitors that can store up to seven times as much energy per unity volume as common capacitors. "The amount of energy that a capacitor can store depends on the insulating material in between the metal surfaces, called a dielectric. A polymer called PVDF has interested physicists as a possible high-performance dielectric. It exists in two forms, polarized or unpolarized. In either case, its structure is mostly frozen-in and changes only slightly when a capacitor is charged up. Mixing a second polymer called CTFE with PVDF results in a material with regions that can change their structure, enabling it to store and release unprecedented amounts of energy."
I was wandering about this for some time, you look at any electronics board, the biggest things on them are chips, which are actually many many small components, and capacitors, which are disproportionately big in comparison to everything else which has been turned into miniscule gizmos integrated into everything else.
but what's the internal impedance of these things? What's the maximum charge/discharge rate? And no I didn't RTFA.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is another example of a super-material that is great at just one thing. How does it stand up to heat (or cold for that matter). Is it to brittle to put in a portable device? Is it able to be produced efficiently (read: cost effectively)? Unless some of these other questions are answered this is just another material to be used as some kind of benchmark in a laboratory.