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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."
From TFA, it is North Carolina State University. You are about to be set upon by wolves!
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.
CTFE Chlorotrifluoroethylene PVDF Polyvinylidene fluoride http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinylidene_fluori de
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Key phrase from TFA:
"Their predictions of higher energy density capacitors are encouraging, but have yet to be experimentally tested."
Call me when they're being produced in something resembling quantity. Yeesh.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
The editors are asleep again. The summary says the discovery was made at University of North Carolina, which really surprised me because all of the good engineering is happening at North Carolina State University.
It might seem like a trivial slip but to those around here there is a pretty huge difference.
Oh yeah, and DUKE SUCKS.
Is this really newsworthy?
http://www.google.com/search?q=ultracapacitors
No sig today...
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.
Combine this with plates coated in carbon nanotubes and the storage would go way up. Hopefully the Sony versions won't explode though.
Well, guess all those AIs in the matrix won't need us any longer. Goodbye, reality!
It was bad enough to just get your shiny new needlenose pliers welded together. =/
From the sounds of TFA, these things will be able to power my Flying Car(tm).
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Don't get too excited. They're still about an order of magnitude away from lithium ion batteries. The power power density and durability are much better, but that doesn't mean much when it has to be 10 times as big.
In his novel Friday Robert Heinlein described a fictional device called a "Shipstone". This was an ultra-super electricity storage device.
Supposedly, the shipstone had a dramatic positive effect on the world. It was no longer a problem to get electricity from where it's made to where you need it. Big solar power systems were put in areas that get lots of sun, for example. Cars would run on Shipstones, and instead of gas stations, they had stations where you could swap the discharged Shipstone from your car for a fresh, fully-charged one.
I have been wondering if these new ultracapacitors might someday become practical "Shipstones". How close are ultracapacitors to, say, powering a car?
Can you drain the power slowly from an ultracapactor, to run a car for a few hours, or do you have to drain it quickly? Does charge leak out slowly over time from an ultracapacitor, or can you make it fairly inert?
It's great that they have "seven times the energy per unity [sic] volume", but what is the energy density improvment per unit mass??? Seems like that would be a lot more important for mobile applications.
That's right. As an incurable optimist, I'm still holding onto faint hope that EEStor will prove me wrong and not actually be a total scam. Slashdot previously covered EEStor.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Call me when they're competing with MIT's carbon nanotube based ultracapacitors. Conventional ultracapacitors can achieve an energy density of 6Wh/kg, but the CNT ultracapacitors being researched and developed by MIT are claimed to achieve an energy density of 60Wh/kg (or, let's say, ten times more than this "new" capacitory developed by North Carolina State University).
p _project.html li.pdf
Overview: http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/projects/cnt_ultraca
More-detailed Poster (PDF): http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/posters/RU13_signore
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Break out the railguns, baby, it's time for some head shots!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The real issue will rest in whether they can release all of that energy slowly, in a controlled way. Otherwise they will have limited uses. A high energy capacitor dumping all its energy instantly can be a real thrill.
I'm not interested until it can store as much energy as my common alkaline battery does now -- or at least a NiMH rechargable. Seems someone else awhile ago felt they could build a capacitor with nanotubes that might approach this value, while still having the advantages of speeed and near limitless charge/discharge cycles. THAT's what interests me at the moment.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
But are they 10X as heavy, to provide the same power? Weight is more of an issue than size in a car.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Capacitors are rarely meant to be a battery replacement. They are meant to be used for fast storage and release of energy on the order of milli- or microseconds. The chemical reaction that occurs in batteries is far too slow to produce a resonating RLC circuit, or even power a bright camera flash where a capacitor is used in parallel with the battery. Likewise, the Capacitor has a much smaller operating output than a battery in general and they tend to leak thus requiring a load just to keep them at full charge.
The excitement isn't in the fact that they may be a battery replacement, it's that they can store a ton of energy for many other electrical uses.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
While I do agree that this research is still preliminary, the technology has the huge potential to finally overcome two major hassles in terms of electric power storage, namely charge times (after all, capacitors charge way quicker than any NiMH or Li-On battery pack) and density of storage.
:-)
This could open the way for two things:
1) A decent means to storage power generated by solar panels and wind turbines so it can be used when the Sun is not up and wind velocity is low. That could make it possible for true distributed power generation, where every home generates its own electricity and shares the excess with other people in the neighborhood.
2) A true, practical electric car. With supercapacitor batteries, we could dramatically increase the range of the electric car, reduce the size of the battery pack so it rarely inteferes with interior space, and charge the battery pack in about the same time you fill up a 20-gallon fuel tank!
That's why I think people are still underestimating MIT's announcement of nanotube-based supercapacitor development. It could potentially make the whole idea of fuel cell power superfluous.
As an EE student in Virginia, I'm very interested in the subject of this article: unfortunately, it doesn't really say much more than the post above....
www.purevolume.com/martyd
They aren't planning on just throwing a wrench across it's terminals to drain the power.
Energy and power density are usually given by mass (Joules/kg or Watts/kg).
Where are the cheap, highly efficient photonic crystals for storing optical energy without transduction to electrons or chemical potential?
--
make install -not war
But that's the FUN way to do it!!! ;)
Personally, I think that the supercaps would be better suited for hybrids - Generally speaking they don't need much in the way of battery power, a lot of effort has gone into increasing their current capacity - both for charge and discharge.
Fast charge would be a bonus - you want to be able to store as much braking power as possible, and discharge for the accelleration afterwards.
Generally speaking, the wait time from starting the car to getting it in gear would be enough to slap at least a fair amount of charge into the caps for the first accelleration of the day.
I don't read AC A human right
The one major thing to worry about though is that an item that can charge up incredibly fast, contain a lot of electricity, and store it efficiently, can also discharge rapidly and violently...
Neither group has a working prototype, so there's plenty of reason for both approaches to be investigated. Honestly, are you some sort of MIT-fanboy that you have to put down another university's research?
Can this store 1.21 Gigawatts?
Almost in the sci-fi realm at this point, but what will the ultimate cap be? I'm thinking a superconducting film over a superinsulating film. I once asked a physicist (specialty was quantum physics) if a super insulating substance could be devised, much the same as are some with super conducting qualities. He scratched for a while then suggested that they just may.
Seems we're slowly heading in that direction. A small device holding as much energy as this imagined device could hold is scary to think about if it fails while fully charged though.
Once the capacity gets brought up close to a battery, then the average battery will disappear. The reality is that batteries have a relatively short life cycle, cost an arm and a leg, and have a LONG recycle time. Capacitors will superceed batteries in terms of energy storage in the course of the next decade (probably within 5). Of course, W. has focused as much research on hydrogen/ethanol as possible, but within another 5 years, the main focus on energy storage will be electrical, most likely in the form of capacitors. It is just too efficient.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So can gas. In fact, until cars were designed to be safe, a common way to die in them (in the 50's and 60's) was via blowing up. Now, it is extremely rare.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Surely you mean "unit volume"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
No, the fun way to discharge a capacitor is to toss it to your buddy. Good times in the Electrical circuits classes...
Also, you learn how to diagnose a circuit quite quickly when it's liable to be faulted every time you step out of the room.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
i would assume as an implementation of these possible new capicitors where performance gains may be possible
Fundamentally, capacitors store electricity (electrical charge), batteries do not - they convert electrical energy into chemical energy in a reversible manner. The charge/discharge curves are very different, most batteries will provide a pretty steady voltage until the chemical energy is almost depleted - capacitors will exhibit a smooth drop in voltage as the electrical energy is removed. Batteries won't work in normal resonating circuits because they don't have exponential charge/discharge curves like capacitors. This is also the main reason that capacitors won't replace batteries for simple circuits - a battery can be equipped with a simple buck regulator and provide very acceptable service. Because of the exponential discharge curve of a capacitor, making effective use of its stored energy requires a much more complex (and costly) regulator.
While one can encounter "leaky" capacitors, that is not a necessary characteristic, and some commonly available ones do very, very well
Capacitors are not exclusively used for their ability to release energy quickly - high capacity ("gold" or "supercaps") ones are often used as backup power sources for low current applications (such as real time clock keepalive), due to the fact that they can be expected to have longer lifetimes than batteries.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I was in EE a few years ago, and I was a terrible student. We still wired ICUs together on breadboards and I have personally electrocuted myself on all kinds of components. Capacitors hurt the worst.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
As far as I know, the voltages required for a railgun would make it very difficult to fit it in a portable size. If you make it too small, the cap will discharge through an arch. Could be painful if you were wearing it in a holster...
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.
True, but if you think in of terms of the potential of such an 'ultrauber' cap, the gas tank analog has faults. I think that the first problem would be in making it safe in a contained environment. A short in such a fully charged cap could result in as much energy released in a brief duration as to be equivalent to a nuclear bomb. There'd have to be a modest limit on how much energy such a cap could be allowed to hold, for civilian use anyway. Given that, the gas tank parallel is fine.
One thing for something in my pocket that might light up my way at night, and another for a military satellite that might want to cease to exist, plus everything in between. Seems though, that truly superconducting paired with superinsulating, could make for a very small device capable of unlimited energy storage.
Ultracapacitors are really impressive. They exceed the limits of what was considered physically possible twenty years ago. The newer ones can be charged fast and discharged fast; it's not like the older ones that could only deliver tiny currents. People have used ultracapacitors to start auto engines.
The problem, though, is that all the energy can come out at once if they're shorted or damaged. Lithium-ion battery thermal runaway is a problem, and laptop fires have resulted. Ultracapacitor failures will be worse. You don't really want to have a fuel tank's worth of energy stored in a capacitor. But saving the energy from braking a car is probably OK.
The one major thing to worry about though is that an item that can charge up incredibly fast, contain a lot of electricity, and store it efficiently, can also discharge rapidly and violently...
Hmm, very interesting. Perhaps it could be used as a power source for a HANDHELD DEATH RAY!!!!
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=railgu n&search=
Youtube has quite a few videos of real test railgun weapons. They're all huge at the moment though.
Advances in capacitors??? How shocking!
The nuclear bomb thing is nonsense. The only thing that would release as much energy as a nuclear bomb would be an actual nuclear bomb.
Batteries and capacitors don't even approach the amount of energy in a gasoline tank at the time (a nuclear bomb has a really enormously larger amount of it than that), and how fast energy is released doesn't really matter for the comparison.
To sum your post up:
You're advocating a tiered energy storage system to maximize advantages and minimize disadvantages (including costs) of different mediums.
We've been using a system like this for years in our computers and it looks promising to get this on cars.
Fast capacitors, slower capacitors, NiMH/Li battery (most hybrids use NiMH), gasoline/diesel/ethanol/natural gas/whatever tank. Sounds nice and plausible and I remember hearing that at least BMW is planning on incorporating capacitors in their hybrid model of the X5. They may not do that for efficiency reasons but for faster sprints, but it's going to be interesting, though.
Wake me when they invent energon cubes.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
And as a bonus, I read somewhere that NanoTubes are being used to increase the SA
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
The thing is that current hybrid batteries are as large as they are more for current capacity than energy storage. But then, as all their power comes from the ICE, they don't need any more capacity than what's needed for 'acceptible' starts and storage of stopping energy.
When you go to pluggable hybrids or outright electrics, your battery bank becomes defined by energy needs - not current capacity. A battery pack with enough energy to get you even 50 miles is going to have plenty of current capacity for the current requirements for charge/discharge for your stopping/starting. If you start looking at a LiIon based storage system for a 300mile range car, you're talking about even a screeching stop not being able to strain the charging capacity of the batteries.
At which point you wouldn't want the capaciters anyways, as their energy storage ability is poor in comparison to batteries by weight and volume. You might have some as part of a power regulation system, of course, but they wouldn't be considered part of a vehicle's 'fuel tank'.
I don't read AC A human right