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Advance In Super/Ultra Capacitor Tech: High Voltage and High Capacity
fyngyrz writes: Ultracaps offer significantly faster charge and discharge rates as well as considerably longer life than batteries. Where they have uniformly fallen short is in the amount of energy they can store as compared to a battery, and also the engineering backflips required to get higher voltages (which is the key to higher energy storage because the energy stored in a cap scales with the square of the cap's voltage, whereas doubling the cap's actual capacitance only doubles the energy, or in other words, the energy increase is linear.) This new development addresses these shortcomings all at once: considerably higher voltage, smaller size, higher capacitance, and to top it off, utilizes less corrosive internals. The best news of all: This new technology looks to be easy, even trivial, to manufacture, and uses inexpensive materials — and that is something neither batteries or previous types of ultracaps have been able to claim. After the debacle of EEStor's claims and failure to meet them for so long, and the somewhat related very slow advance of other ultracap technology, it's difficult not to be cynical. But if you read TFA (yes, I know, but perhaps you'll do it anyway) you may decide some optimism might actually be called for.
We're getting to a point where the issue isn't just how much energy we can store in how little space, and how readily we can use it, but also how stable that medium is and how gracefully it fails when mishandled. Cellphone batteries are already pretty scary when punctured, imagine something holding several times as much energy.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Capacitors. [...] If they finally obeyed Moore’s Law by squeezing themselves down to the microscale
They never disobeyed Moore's law since Moore's law is about transistor density..
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Cellphone batteries are already pretty scary when punctured, imagine something holding several times as much energy.
You ARE something that holds several times as much energy. The energy density of animal fat is roughly the same as that of gasoline and both are FAR higher than the energy density of a lithium-ion battery. Whether something is scary has very little to do with the amount of energy it holds. It is the rate and circumstances in which it can be released that matters.
That said, if something hits me hard enough to puncture my cell phone battery while I'm carrying my phone, the battery combustion is probably the least of my concerns. I'm likely much more concerned with whatever just speared or shot me.