Scientists Create Battery That Charges In Seconds and Lasts For Days (telegraph.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: A new type of battery that lasts for days with only a few seconds' charge has been created by researchers at the University of Central Florida. The high-powered battery is packed with supercapacitors that can store a large amount of energy. It looks like a thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones, electric vehicles and wearables, according to the researchers. As well as storing a lot of energy rapidly, the small battery can be recharged more than 30,000 times. Normal lithium-ion batteries begin to tire within a few hundred charges. They typically last between 300 to 500 full charge and drain cycles before dropping to 70 per cent of their original capacity. To date supercapacitors weren't used to make batteries as they'd have to be much larger than those currently available. But the Florida researchers have overcome this hurdle by making their supercapacitors with tiny wires that are a nanometer thick. Coated with a high energy shell, the core of the wires is highly conductive to allow for super fast charging. The battery isn't yet ready to be used in consumer devices, the researchers said, but it shows a significant step forward in a tired technology.

Comments

I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

This technology will be in shops within the year.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

It will be bought up and hidden away in less

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[ArchieBunker]

Those predictions are always so dumb. Buy it and license out the patent to everyone else. But then again this will be another one of those dead end claims like 3d holographic storage and cold fusion.

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Yer dreamin'...

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Because combining the word "big" and the name of any industry automatically means EVIL.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought an electric screwdriver about 6 months ago thst uses a super capacitor. It charges completely in about 60 seconds and is good for driving 3 or 4 two inch screws before recharging. Not the most wonderful tool for heavy work but a lot more convenient around the house than my older rechargeable battery version which was always dead when I needed to use it and took at least a couple of hours to charge. A quick charging phone would be great.

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

My prediction is that this is a fluff piece and the "breakthrough" is complete bullshit. I've been hearing about batteries that supposedly can charge in a few seconds and store massive amounts of power for years now and there is still nothing to show for all of the bluster. This line says it all:

The battery isn't yet ready to be used in consumer devices

Know why it's not ready? Because it doesn't exist. This is just as bad as Andrea Rossi's "E-Cat" scam.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a Kobalt Double-Drive screwdriver that requires no power and works just as quickly as any powered screwdriver.

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Supercaps have been on the market for years and are already used in many industrial products with the price dropping and density slowly increasing. This is nothing like a free energy scam, but just an over hyped, incremental improvement to a very really product.

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were true, it would already be in consumer electronics. There is no reason that these corporations would turn down money except that the technology is bullshit.

Show me a high drain consumer device that uses a fingernail sized battery that charges in seconds and can last for a minimum of one week. You can't.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read the summary? The reason they're not used in this fashion right now is the energy density, the battery would be too large. They've just found a viable solution. Getting a product from the research lab to consumers hands takes longer than announcing the discovery.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read the "story"? The author is clearly lying through her teeth when she says:

A new type of battery that lasts for days with only a few seconds' charge has been created by researchers at the University of Central Florida.

The high-powered battery is packed with supercapacitors that can store a large amount of energy. It looks like a thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones, electric vehicles and wearables, according to the researchers.

As well as storing a lot of energy rapidly, the small battery can be recharged more than 30,000 times.

So how is a "thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail" too large? What is the problem other than it's bullshit?

They've been beating this dead horse for YEARS. Where is the end product? Why isn't it available?

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[alexgieg]

Where is the end product? Why isn't it available?

Because it costs several billion dollars to create the whole infrastructure needed to make any of these things at an industrial scale, while the infrastructure for Li-Ion one is already in place and can be cheaply adapted to new improvements on the already proven technology. Besides, Li-Ion has the "advantage" of forced obsolescence, requiring user to purchase new ones for their devices every few years.

Down the line it might be worth it to invest in these new technologies, particularly if some new technology appears that requires such massive power densities and speeds and there's huge demand for it, as was the case with electric cars and the new battery tech they require. Right now however the economics of scale, coupled with the potential lower long term profits, don't favor investing in it.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah super capacitors are already good for a whole bunch of things... electric tooth brushes, shavers, wireless mouse (you could just tap it on your computer when it runs out for a second).

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[newcastlejon]

My prediction is that this is a fluff piece and the "breakthrough" is complete bullshit.

Of course, it's being reported in the Telegraph.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on how secretive the inventors are and how revolutionary the invention is. If an invention is published or some prototypes distributed and it is revolutionary enough It doesn't matter who buys up the patents most countries would develop/manufacture them anyway. If the inventor is secretive they might be able to suppress it, but generally revolutionary inventions (and today even pretty mundane ones) get quite a bit of press coverage.

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll never happen. Capitalistic greed will ensure of that.

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me a high drain consumer device that uses a fingernail sized battery that charges in seconds and can last for a minimum of one week. You can't.

As I posted in the previous comment, these have been on the market for years. Go on Mouser or digikey and look for kilofarad capacitors. Hell, they even have replacement ones for things like memory backup supercaps for rather old electronics now. There are even posters further down saying they are now used in some powered screwdrivers. The idea of having practical farad or larger caps that can fit on a desktop is only a couple decades old, as I still have textbooks from ~25 years ago that said a 1 Farad cap would be the size of a room.

Also, moving goal posts now? I didn't say they were in use in phones or whatever other random new goal you've got mind now. Supercaps have been slowly getting better for decades, but that doesn't mean they can replace all batteries in every use case. Do you also think solid state hard drives are snake oil because magnetic drives haven't been completely displaced? Does your conspiracy include Wikipedia having a whole article including discussion of research vs. commercial unit performances?

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

So how is a "thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail" too large? What is the problem other than it's bullshit?

Do you (and not so bright mods...) realize that batteries scale in size? Or do you think that the D, C, AA, and AAA batteries are different technology and needed to be separately researched and developed?

The problem is not that the finger nail size is too large. The important thing is what is the density, because you can build much larger batteries easy. Pretty much every consumer electronic device you use with rechargeable battery has multiple cells in them, and use widely different cell sizes. The size of the prototype is just a piece of trivia that the newspaper brings up, and has nothing to do with the size if used in actual products.

Again, the density is what matters, and while supercaps have many current commercial uses, their density is worse than of batteries. Small, portable devices that need to run as long as possible and be as small as possible are going to use batteries. Supercaps current get used in Devices that need only moderate amounts of energy storage, not constrained as much by size, and need high reliability with frequent charge-discharge cycles: memory backups on non-portable electronics, momentary UPSes for systems that cycle power sources a lot, etc.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been beating this dead horse for YEARS. Where is the end product? Why isn't it available?

Have you even tried looking? It sounds like you spent those years complaining on the internet instead of actually learning about the topic or progress.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[ChoGGi]

I've got a Yankee screwdriver, works a treat for and nothing to charge.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should take a look at the stuff you link before you link it and save yourself the embarrassment of looking like an utter moron. Your idiotic little search result shows capacitors that have none of the properties of the one described in the story.

You still haven't shown me a single devices like a phone that uses one of these magical, thumbnail-sized batteries that power the device for a week off of a few seconds worth of charge and can be recharged 30,000 times. Until there is an actual, real-life product that features such a thing you, the sensationalist authors of these tabloid articles and the "scientists" who "invent" such things need to shut the fuck up and stop wasting everyone's time.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice attempt to steer the conversation away, but that isn't what the story (which you obviously haven't read) states. They state that they HAVE a thumbnail-sized battery that can be charged in seconds that will power devices like phones for a week and can be charged 30,000 times RIGHT NOW. I don't give a shit about your apologist excuses because that doesn't change what these "scientists" and the article author are claiming exist RIGHT NOW.

Re:I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice strawman but nothing you refer to is thumbnail sized, can be charged in seconds 30,000 times and can power a phone for a week like the one in the story supposedly can. In fact not one single product has ever been released that uses such a thing.

YOU are the one trying to move goalposts, you illiterate little shit. FTFA:

The high-powered battery is packed with supercapacitors that can store a large amount of energy. It looks like a thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones

Perhaps you should have stayed in school long enough to learn how to read.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't say only a single one will be used in a phone. Your lack of reading comprehension has amounted to a whole threat of posts asking for people to show you something that only exists in your mind.

And when some one says this is incremental improvement on existing tech, you asked for examples of existing tech and got that. No shit the commercial examples are not quite as good as what is on a researcher's bench, but that was exactly what was already said.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like a thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones

They don't say that a phone would use a single one. I have a package of AA batteries that says it is great for use in cameras and high drain devices, that doesn't those devices use only a single AA battery. And regardless of how shitty the wording of the article is, no where do the actual scientists claim the same sized supercap could provide the same energy storage of a phone battery. But the original paper does say the energy density is comparable and that it would hence could be scaled up with virtually no difficulty.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[eric_harris_76]

Not to worry. Practical fusion power -- cold or regular -- is just around the corner, about 20 to 25 years away. Still. Again. Always.

Re: I'm going to make a prediction

[originalmouse]

"Big Porno"

Finally.....

[vatin]

No more worries about non replaceable batteries!!!

So, how often does it explode?

[bistromath007]

I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that whenever energy is both very dense and very accessible, you've made an explosive. Existing battery technology is already going that direction. At what point will I need to register my phone as a destructive device under the NFA?

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[SumDog]

https://xkcd.com/651/

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Black Parrot]

At what point will I need to register my phone as a destructive device under the NFA?

Samsung will register it for you before they ship it.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Best.XKCD.Ever

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[CaptainDork]

Electronics guy here, and I was thinking along the same lines.

Capacitors are two plates, very close together, separated by an insulator.

We attach power up to the two plates and a static charge occurs between the two.

After we remove the power source the capacitor retains the static charge and would do so forever if it weren't for decay due to leakage across the insulator.

The "capacity" of a capacitor is directly proportional to the surface area of the two plates.

The voltage it can hold is defined by the arc-through point of the insulator quality and distance between the plates.

Sounds like they have all that figured out.

--

The advance in battery consumption has bottomed not been on the battery and breakthroughs on the efficiency of the device(s) that needs the battery power have pretty much topped out, as well.

This method could be a game-changer, but I wonder about factors that would degrade the integrity of the system, especially the distance between the two plates (punctures, blunt force, flexibility) and the shelf life of the insulators.

Those factors have always been a concern with capacitors.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[ArylAkamov]

This method could be a game-changer, but I wonder about factors that would degrade the integrity of the system, especially the distance between the two plates (punctures, blunt force, flexibility) and the shelf life of the insulators.

Hobbyist reporting in, and this is exactly what I was curious about. That better be a damn good insulator, otherwise we are in for a whole new ballgame of Note 7s.

I very much want better battery technology, but that also invites some very destructive failure modes.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[evilviper]

I'm pretty sure that whenever energy is both very dense and very accessible, you've made an explosive. Existing battery technology is already going that direction.

That's nonsense.

NiMH and LiFePo batteries are at least 2/3rds as power-dense as Li-Ion by volume, but are EXTREMELY stable and safe... Moreso than lower density Alkaline batteries.

Meanwhile, the least-dense battery technology being used is lead-acid, as found in your card battery, and they have a bad habit of exploding, too. Probably much more than Li-Ion batteries.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

With tech that can charge in seconds, id probably guess it results in changes to device expectations. Something like cell phones that hold less total power, but can be charged wirelessly in a few seconds every 4 hours or something. Basically more frequent yet quicker charges.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, so what if we raped you? You were asking for it, what with that butt all exposed. I just had to anal rape you, I just had to!

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

The advance in battery consumption has bottomed not been on the battery and breakthroughs on the efficiency of the device(s) that needs the battery power have pretty much topped out, as well.

Lieutenant Colonel Korn, take that sentence out and shoot it.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[thinkwaitfast]

First year physics... q = Integral[current, t]

F = 1/(4piepsilon0) q^2/r^2

IIRC from a homework problem 20 years ago, if you had 2 pennies with a 1% charge differential between them, there would be enough force to life the WTC. (I said it was a long time ago).

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[ShooterNeo]

Couldn't you wire it with a current limiting diode so a short won't lead to an explosion?

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

The GP missed the other part, that capacitance is inversely proportional to separation of the two plates, and a lot of the advances in higher density capacitors has come from making the plates separated by smaller and smaller distances. You don't have some large voltage between the plates, with a lot of the higher capacity ones being quite low voltage of a couple volts max without putting multiples plates in series (the electric field across the small insulator still ends up being large...). But the neat thing with really thin insulators that are often the result of chemical reactions, is they can sometimes self repair faults. Electrolytics have done this for some time, and they often have much higher voltages across the insulator that could quickly drive a lot of current even with not that low of a resistance fault (it is a bit disconcerting to sit next to a fridge size rack of caps that sound like the tinging of a cooling engine block as minor faults self repair the first time you charge them up or condition them after some odd situation).

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those exist; internal shorts are the greater concern.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

My concern is the voltage discharge curve. A lipo battery holds a close enough to constant voltage until it is nearly flat, then rapidly drops. A capacitors voltage is directly related to the amount of charge remaining. A device would need voltage regulation for the large voltage range, and won't be able to use a large chunk of the charge.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Belay that order ..... death's too good for it... Cardinal, get the comfy chair!!

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Explosive? Not necessarily. It is a capacitor, not a battery. So no energy-rich chemicals. Short a capacitor, and it may deliver enough energy to melt whatever you short it with. Or melt the wiring. No need for the cap itself to explode though.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[PingPongBoy]

This method could be a game-changer, but I wonder about factors that would degrade the integrity of the system, especially the distance between the two plates (punctures, blunt force, flexibility) and the shelf life of the insulators.

Hobbyist reporting in, and this is exactly what I was curious about. That better be a damn good insulator, otherwise we are in for a whole new ballgame of Note 7s.

I very much want better battery technology, but that also invites some very destructive failure modes.

In the light that capacitors are being used, the way to alleviate the battery's distress is to build a sensor that detects the battery wants to dump core, and also build a device that responds, when the detector goes into the red, by shooting two prongs ... no, just a minute, that's how to make a taser.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

At what point will I need to register my phone as a destructive device under the NFA?

It depends. Is it a Samsung?

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

This method could be a game-changer, but I wonder about factors that would degrade the integrity of the system, especially the distance between the two plates (punctures, blunt force, flexibility) and the shelf life of the insulators.

You can probably encase it in a sturdy metal casing that acts as armour to make that far less likely, and would act as a heatsink as a bonus. Plus an array of small cells would mean any bending would happen between the cells not in the cells, protecting the insulators.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[AmiMoJo]

Actually batteries are already about as good as we can reasonably charge them in most instances.

In electric vehicles we are already getting close to the limits. Tesla charges at 120kW, but actually they pair up bays so it's 120kW shared between two. If one car is already pulling 110kW, the other only gets 10kW. Going higher is difficult because you need an even bigger connection to the electricity grid, and a charger capable of handling more heat.

Maybe you have a 3kW electric heater in your home. If the Tesla charger is 97% efficient it has to dissipate 3kW of heat. The car also has to dissipate considerable heat as the batteries warm up, which is mostly due to the chemical reaction so does represent an area where improvements can be made.

Even for your phone, based on the form factor, the thickness of the USB cable wiring, the need for a buck converter... If you had a capacitor that could charge in a minute the USB cable would melt and the buck converter would melt the phone. You would need to dump 650W into it, so even at 99% efficiency (impossible) you would need to dissipate 65W. Maybe you have seen what a 65W CPU cooler looks like, a large metal heatsink with a fan attached to it.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[AmiMoJo]

It's not really accurate to compare a battery to a hand grenade though, even if they contain similar amounts of energy. The grenade can release it all in a fraction of a second, while the battery, even if shorted, will take several orders of magnitude longer. Could start a nasty fire but you certainly couldn't throw one and expect it to detonate.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[AmiMoJo]

*90%. My bad, 99% would only be 6.5W, still problematic in such a small space.

90% is a very high target for a charging circuit... Typical buck regulators that operate in the required range with small inductors (to keep the phone thin) will manage around 80% with careful design.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[tomxor]

Electronics noob here :P The failure modes of normal super-capacitors appears to be quite different to the smouldering ceramic or exploding electrolytic based capacitors. From wikipedia on normal super-caps:

...theoretically supercapacitors have no true polarity and catastrophic failure does not normally occur. However reverse-charging a supercapacitor lowers its capacity...

So assuming nothing vaporises when multiple tiny shorts occur from blunt force, puncture or over voltage etc... then i guess the question is what else happens after all those shorts? would it heat up a lot to the point of melting or causing an external fire? would it try to discharge suddenly and cause electrocution?

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[CCarrot]

Explosive? Not necessarily. It is a capacitor, not a battery. So no energy-rich chemicals. Short a capacitor, and it may deliver enough energy to melt whatever you short it with. Or melt the wiring. No need for the cap itself to explode though.

Really? That was one of the primary amusements in our freshman labs, listening for the first 'pop' of a capacitor wired backwards, and they certainly weren't packed with C4...

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[silentcoder]

Depends what you throw it at. A jar of nitroglycerine maybe ?

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[silentcoder]

Actually, this would likely be a LOT safer than the exploding batteries, exactly because a capacitor is a much simpler device. Critically - it needs no chemically volatile liquids. Batteries are filled with highly reactive chemicals - they have to be to store energy in the form of lose ions. Lose ions only exist if the chemical is highly reactive.
Highly reactive == potentially explosive.

But a capacity is made of solid, non-moving parts - I actually can't see a scenario where it could explode. A huge charge with a short could possibly cause a great deal of heat, and some major sparks which could set OTHER things on fire, but I can't see a scenario where a capacitor would burn . There's no reason to put any flammable material whatsoever in one.

Maybe somebody with more knowledge than me can show that these types contain some highly reactive/flammable materials and that this is important to their operation but I wouldn't bet on.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not a chemical problem. One difference between a super capacitor and a chemical battery is that a supercapacitor has essentially no internal resistance. Therefore it can discharge much more rapidly, which makes it dangerous if there is physical damage that somehow shorts the plates. Any such event would produce a very intense energy release. We have enough problems with Li-ion batteries even though they release energy much more slowly when damaged.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[CaptainDork]

YouTube has many examples of exploding super capacitors, but the devices in this article are too new for us to know how they react to abuse.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the thermal perspective do capacitors suffer from the same charging issues that batteries do? My quick research suggests that capacitors have very low internal resistance which should make them far less prone to charge/discharge heating. As far as power you are absolutely right, most house circuits are about maxed out. Luckily most homes have a much higher power source within a few hundred feet of them, the power lines. If the mother of all EV batteries was invented (stores 70kwh plus, charges in a couple minutes, cost effective, etc) I imagine most charging would move to charging stations located near large power lines (akin to modern gas stations), homeowners could have charging stations connected directly to the power lines, or for areas that couldn't support such draw they would probably have a bank of the same batteries that were in their EV that would "trickle" charge until full, then a car could be connected to this bank and filled as if it was connected to a large power source. The biggest issue I can see with an EV society would be the draw on the grid, some kind of system would have to be set up to smooth the power usage to prevent brown outs. Even that shouldn't be a major issue though as we do similar things already (cheaper off peak electrical metering, better rates by letting electric companies switch on/off high draw appliances, etc)

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really accurate to compare a battery to a hand grenade though, even if they contain similar amounts of energy. The grenade can release it all in a fraction of a second, while the battery, even if shorted, will take several orders of magnitude longer. Could start a nasty fire but you certainly couldn't throw one and expect it to detonate.

A capacitor is not a battery, it has no internal resistance so when there is a short it will discharge much faster than a battery if you give it a path.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, the least-dense battery technology being used is lead-acid, as found in your card battery, and they have a bad habit of exploding, too. Probably much more than Li-Ion batteries.

What basis do you have for saying this? There are tons of lead acid batteries out there, have been for many many years, and the only time they explode is when a charger is connected in reverse. They are in car wrecks all the time and there pretty much never is a problem. No, they don't have a bad habit of exploding, not even remotely. Li-ion battery 'explosiveness' is a much much bigger problem and challenge, and engineering to eliminate that issue has been one of the main reasons that higher density Li-ion batteries are harder to manufacture

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[wagnerrp]

Arc flash is a serious thing, especially when the device is in your pocket.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[wagnerrp]

A capacitor's voltage is directly related to the square root of charge remaining. Start out at 12V, and by the time your voltage dropped to the 3.7V of a standard LiPo battery, you're down below 10% charge remaining.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[silentcoder]

Sure, but it's not an explosion.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were electrolytic capacitors. (The giveaway is that they have polarity; most other types, including supercapacitors, do not.) Such capacitors contain chemicals that go poof when you hook them up wrong.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Capacitors have internal resistance, and different kinds of caps can have wildly different internal resistance values. Electrolytics can discharge a lot faster than a battery, but still have a sizable internal resistance and can actually overheat if you put too much ripple current through one. Supercaps tend to have higher resistance than electrolytics because they use such small conductors to pack in as much as possible into a small unit. Plus some supercaps use a hybrid chemistry + capacitance storage method that results in something much closer to a battery in terms of internal resistance.

If you actually wanted to discharge a cap as fast as possible, you have to buy rather expensive caps that have low resistance and low inductance, and they have rather crappy energy density compared to most other capacitors.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were plugging them in backwards, you weren't making them pop due to stored energy, but instead were dumping a much large amount of energy from the outside circuit into the cap. Resistors will pop quite violently if you exceed their power rating by enough, effectively acting like a fuse (... fuses pop too when they break, with cheaper or older ones shattering the glass vial). I have a small scar from when a sizable transistor failed in a power circuit and the pieces of the casing shot out in the process of letting out the magic smoke.

If you provide enough external energy to any electrical component, it will pop. If anything, the electrolytic caps are less violent because they are just a thin metal can around some liquid or gel that gets turned into steam (including score marks so the pressure can't get too high), instead of other parts that are built pretty solid and build up a lot more pressure.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends a lot on the materials used, in different capacitors different materials respond to over voltage in different ways, they can burn or they can vaporise (which obviously causes an explosion or a big stinky venting event depending on the design). Not enough is known about the materials or structure used to do much speculation with this one.

At the minimum you can consider arc flash or a fast discharge onto a person to be pretty deadly considering the capacity and charge/discharge rate capability of a super capacitor, in one respect the disadvantage of slow charge chemical batteries is a safety advantage in terms of the rate of any failure mode which tends to be bound by the same physical limitations of the chemistry used, lipos can burn sure, but I bet it's less intense and over a longer period of time than a super cap failure (i'm disregarding how easy it is to cause lipo failure).

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

The dielectric constant of the insulator also plays a large part in the equation. But when the dielectric constant is large, it has a tendency to vary rapidly with temperature and also to have more leakage.
For capacitors for electronic circuits, there are 3 classes of dielectric: class I is temperature stable but low capacitance, class II is a good compromise for something which does not need a precise value, class III is junk, and I refuse to use it, even for things as mundane as power supply decoupling.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[wagnerrp]

It's not?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

this isn't one giant capacitor, it's millions of tiny ones...

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[undefinedreference]

This has been my experience with both lithium batteries and supercaps. In fact, supercaps are worse as they can discharge more quickly and don't need to wait on slow chemical reactions.

Supercap explosions are very frightening and could be very dangerous.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[silentcoder]

An explosion is defined as a rapid energetic gaseous expansion. Usually due to a high energy chemical reaction but disturbing a superheated liquid would count too. Arc flash is... not that. Well maybe if its energetic enough to plasmafy the air but I doubt there is any reason to put that much energy in your pocket.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[CanadianMacFan]

Just the once.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, and explosion is not limited to only gaseous expansion. It is certainly a high energy release that qualifies as explosive in nature. If you want to get petty about terminology fine, but the crux of the matter is that it can be a very dangerous energy release in a very short period that is more excessive that typical batteries.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have had my car battery explode. Extended cranking on a very cold day, generating hydrogen gas. Leaky exhaust manifold emits still-burning gasoline, hydrogen catches on fire. Fire burns back to the battery, and the gas still within the battery explodes. Battery case cracks and splits, acid splashes everywhere in engine compartment.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

A significant fraction off an arc's energy goes into heating off the air, which expands rapidly creating a nasty shockwave, which meets your definition of explosion. An internal fault is worse, because almost all of the energy goes into heat, vaporizing material that gets suddenly released at high pressure if the packaging fails to contain it.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

A giant cap and a bunch in series and/or parallel combination have the same discharge curve, going with square root of remaining energy.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

those are electrolytic, there is none in a super capacitor, not that it wouldn't do anything - just not explode like an electrolytic cap.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[aXis100]

Super/Ultra capacitors are not so simple, and share things in common with batteries.

Their total capacitance comes though a combination of
1) Double layer Capacitance - separation of charge in a Helmholtz double layer between the plate surface and the liquid electrolyte, and
2) Pseudocapacitance - electrochemical storage by redox reactions at the electrode surface. This is very battery like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[wagnerrp]

From the video...

It creates a pressure wave, called an arc blast, that can reach thousands of pounds per square inch. Enough to knock someone off a ladder, rupture an ear drum, or collapse a lung.

That sure sounds like an explosion to me, far more violent than rather slow conflagration you see from the runaway chemical reaction in a li-ion cell. You did see it blow the head off that mannequin, didn't you?

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[CaptainDork]

Capacitors are not like batteries.

They are batteries.

They are rechargeable batteries.

The math and physics for capacitors and batteries, from outside the devices, are the same.

Capacitors, however, typically have charge/discharge rates measured in fractions of seconds.

Often, it's in microseconds.

Batteries have been, until now, much, much slower at both.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

The math and physics for capacitors and batteries, from outside the devices, are the same.

Not really. Non-electrochemical capacitors and batteries have rather different voltage charge curves. Such vanilla capacitors can be charged to whatever voltage their dielectric can handle, batteries top out. On discharge, the voltage of batteries changes very little for most of the time, while capacitors will follow a square root of stored energy discharge. Batteries have all sorts of hysteresis, can much more complicated charge cycles to use effectively, and can take time for the voltage to settle after a given charge or discharge. Caps have just a tiny bit of rebound after discharge. The heating characteristics and failure modes are rather different too.

That hybrid devices exist, which behave mostly like capacitors but using electrochemical reactions and incorporating some aspects of batteries, doesn't change that batteries and caps act rather differently.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

The failure rate is pretty low, but if you run banks of batteries you see them pop every so often. Not like some grenade going off, but boiling acid can froth and splash near by as steam shoots out. Two common causes seem to be either overheating or when you get two or more shorted cells and charge the battery. That doesn't happen too much for most people with cars, because if it doesn't start the car, most people just replace it instead of charging it, or know enough to get rid of it if the voltage drops enough due to two shorted cells. And they can produce hydrogen gas, which is why jump starting instructions often make a big deal of connecting the ground last in a location away from the battery so any sparks are not near the battery, but that is less common of a problem than it used to be.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most kinds of supercaps have electrolytes too. And solid state caps pop just as much if you cause an internal fault, sometimes even easier since electrolytics will self-heal minor faults.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most supercaps are polarized too, because except for some less common polymer types, they also use electrolytes and can have asymmetric electrodes that fail if charged the wrong way.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[silentcoder]

The word 'explosion' literally implies something that grows bigger - the common phrase 'blow up' is actually pretty key to what is, or is not, an explosion. Your definition would mean implosions are also explosions !

And yes, I am being pedantic about terminology since my entire point is that the risk of explosions is far more limited. I never said there can't be other risks or they couldn't be even worse, I am open to that suggestion - but that's another problem and requires different solutions to address.
Explosions create unique and specific issues that make them dangerous. Very few people have ever been killed by an explosion per se. It takes a MASSIVE explosion for the shockware to actually injure people. The shockwave from a hand-grenade is practically harmless even if you're on top of it. May break a few ribs. But that rapid-expansion bit means explosions have shrapnel, and that is the much bigger risk. Most people who die in explosions are killed by shrapnel. An arc-flash doesn't have shrapnel.
Sure it could burn you - but it isn't going to sever your arteries.

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[wagnerrp]

The word 'explosion' literally implies something that grows bigger

The electric arc heats the air around it into a plasma. That plasma expands rapidly, resulting in an explosion.

It takes a MASSIVE explosion for the shockware to actually injure people.

Injuries like ruptured eardrums and collapsed lungs...

But that rapid-expansion bit means explosions have shrapnel, and that is the much bigger risk. Most people who die in explosions are killed by shrapnel. An arc-flash doesn't have shrapnel.

Well the explosion tends to blow apart whatever equipment just failed, producing shrapnel. Seriously, did you even watch the video?

Re: So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

The word 'explosion' literally implies something that grows bigger

Capacitor faults involve the change of state of electrolyte or solid material into gas in a fraction of a second, which means a massive increase in volume... in bigger cases for room sized banks it easily rips a parts bolts, 1" square bus bars, and can fling shrapnel through normal walls, so instead places I've worked before will install blast proofing design to stop shrapnel.

Smaller setups still require eye and hearing protection (rule of thumb at many labs is any cap over 10 J stored energy, which is equivalent to 0.5 mAh at 5 V) because the noise is literally deafening, and because ejected parts of the caps or other electronics can easily get to the point of breaking the skin on even small setups. Larger setups involve arc flash gear, because the emitted UV and ejected metal vapors will cause flammable things to combust, and at higher yet levels, the arc flash gear looks almost the same as a bomb suit (but quite rare, as at that point usually remote operation is preferred).

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[evilviper]

the only time they explode is when a charger is connected in reverse.

That's completely baseless. A lead-acid battery, operating normally, can explode at any time. Just ask NASA:

On May 17th, 2010 at approximately 10:00 am, the start-up battery on Generator #1 (not due to start-up) exploded for no apparent reason. [...] when one or more cells have a high concentration of hydrogen gas because the vent cap was plugged or defective and did not release the gas effectively an unsafe condition is created. In addition, when electrolyte levels fall below the top of the plates, a low resistive bridge can form at the top of the plates and when current starts to flow, it can cause an arc or spark in one of the cells to intensify that condition. This combination of events ignites the gas, blows the battery case cover off and spatters electrolyte with potentially injuring unaware personnel and to further damage associated equipment.
http://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/28...

There's untold tomes of more info on the problem, if you'll set aside your ignorance and do some actual research for yourself.

Re:So, how often does it explode?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello all,

A company down in Austin has been working on a capacitor technology that will replace batteries of all types. Their work has dragged on for years and years with few results. However, it does continue to work towards a product of some sort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor

GKJ

Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Often, batteries able to be charged in seconds can also discharge in seconds...

Coming in your next Samsung Note !

Re:Seconds

[meerling]

For a couple of decades now (more or less), I've seen discussions of using supercapacitors as batteries, but it always fails to happen because of the same major flaw, leakage. Supercapacitors lose their power rather rapidly, so you can't just recharge them and come back later and expect them to still be charged.
That seconds to charge, and last for days isn't how long it'll run a device, it's how long it'll still be charged without even being used.
There are a lot of really good researchers trying to make a supercapacitor that doesn't have that huge level of leakage, but the last improvement I saw on the science sites was several years ago, and it still wasn't enough to bring them anywhere close to being able to replace batteries are real power storage.

Re:Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Commercial supercaps have had self discharge times of weeks for quite a long time now (even electrolytic caps, which have much higher leakage, can last days). Hybrid supercaps, which are also the ones with the highest density commercially available, have an order magnitude less leakage too, lasting even longer. They've already replaced batteries in various power backup situations, although in a more niche roles because they still lag quite a ways behind advancing battery performance in enough ways.

Re: Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

Second showstopper is that their high internal resistance negates fast (dis)charge. For a given volume current LiX betteries have a much higher power density than any supercap on the market that has a useable energy density.

The remaining advantage is the lifetime in number of cycles, but keep in mind that for a given volume the energy exchanged in a cycle is much less for capacitors than for batteries.

Re: Seconds

[Anonymous Coward]

You've found the Brand Name!

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you .........The "Bettery"!

Elon Needs a Less...

[Captain Ramage]

Elon needs a less splodey battery.

Two issues that need to be addressed

[mykepredko]

One: What is the capacity per unit volume? This isn't mentioned in TFAs. I would think that creating batteries with an order of magnitude (or three) more capacity should be higher priority. Why should we have cell phones that work for days when they should work for months on a charge or cars that only go a couple of hundred miles when they should be able to go thousands of miles on a single charge?

Two: If it can be charged very quickly, it can be discharged very quickly. People were up in arms when three Teslas caught and Samsung phones caught fire. What will be the reaction when devices have batteries that can give up all their charge basically instantly which means literally thousands of Amperes of current.

I suspect that there are applications in which these batteries will be perfectly suited for - but the typicaly ones like phones, cars, etc. will not be in that list.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Harlequin80]

Electric powered toys will be a huge winner if you can have half decent capacity and a high discharge. Common racing style quad copters will happily draw 130amp and could easily draw more. The limiting factor is definitely the batteries. You draw 100amp from a 1300mah battery and the batteries don't last long.....

Current battery tech for quadcopters gives you batteries that are large and heavy for any given capacity. That is the only way to be able to draw the current.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[mark-t]

Two: If it can be charged very quickly, it can be discharged very quickly.

Sort of... but you can mitigate this to limit it to cases where you connect a third party device that is explicitly designed to extract the stored power from it at said rate. Such devices would be not any more difficult to detect than electronic explosives already are currently. The device itself containing the fast-charging battery could easily contain mechanisms that does not allow the battery to discharge faster than a certain speed for the electronics within, and if this mechanism is hard-wired as circuitry instead of using software or firmware to control it, then there is no way that an end user could making modifications to the device or its firmware that would cause it to exceed that rate.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[mark-t]

Actually, now that I think about it, you could even prevent it from being extracted by a third party device at a high rate by just adding a single diode to the charging circuit. The diode doesn't limit the rate, but it does restrict the direction that charge can flow. If the other side of the storage is hooked up to discharge circuitry that expressly limits the rate at which charge can be tapped from the storage system, then there is no possible way that you could get it to discharge any faster than the hardware was explicitly designed to do.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong try a hammer, that will get around your circuitry real fast.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Razed By TV]

Increased capacity makes battery explosions even more of an issue than increased discharge rate. A battery that lasts 100 times as long will release 100 times as much energy during a catastrophic failure.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[mark-t]

if it were integrated into the battery, all that would reasonably do is break the entire circuit so it doesn't discharge at all

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Art Challenor]

Ultracapacitors are the holy grail of electrical storage. Cheap materials, many cycles, very rapid charging, etc. etc. The energy density, last time I checked a couple of years ago was on a par with Lead Acid - so fairly heavy and large to get the energy you need. I assume that has, and will continue to improve. If they've reached the density of Lithium-Ion then that's some significant progress. It's a technology to watch, it already has application - typically regen braking in an electric or electric assist vehicle, you can dump a LOT of energy into the ultracaps very quickly and so recapture more of the braking energy, but it's not going to be in your phone any time soon.

Re: Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't hit the circuit, hit the capacitor. Now all your plates are in contact and the charge will equalize very rapidly.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[thinkwaitfast]

Nowhere close to lead acid. Energy densities is an order of magnitude lower. Numbers haven't changed in a hundred years

Ultracapacitor: 5-8 Wh/kg and 7 to 10Wh/liter

Lead Acid Battery: 33–42 Wh/kg 60–110 Wh/L

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Two issues that need to be addressed

[mark-t]

Sure, but then since two conductive plates are touching there is not enough resistance to the current flow to produce any heat. The charge on the capacitor would be neutralized almost instantly.

Re: Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

That energy gets turned into heat one way or another very quickly. There is a certain amount of energy stored in a charged cap, and it doesn't just disappear if you can short the cap with small enough resistance.

(Energy dissipated in resistance will be proportional V^2/R*t, but discharge time goes like RC, so your energy dissipation is proportional to V^2*C... just like the energy in the cap, and energy is conserved yet again)

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Your info seems out of date by a couple years, considering at my work place we use ~10-11 Wh/dm3 supercaps that are more on the economy side of things and not special order, higher performance options. Research units can range anywhere from 10-100 Wh/kg, and it comes down to finding new manufacturing processes to make those kinds of designs economical, not any fundamental limit.

Numbers haven't changed in a hundred years

Hybrid capacitors didn't exist until the late 60s, and weren't commercialized until later... so the numbers have changed a lot, from zero to current values. They've also been changing over the last 5-10 years, and a lot of it now comes down to pricing and mass production of newer designs.

Re: Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

But current batteries don't explode due to V^2*C, they explode due to overheting leading to gas formation, and spontaneously flammable chemicals being released. The lithium-cobalt battery is not the most flammable because it has the most energy, but because that particular chemistry is more flammable. A good ol' lead-acid can also be quite explody, but that's from hydrogen+oxygen gas.
The supercap isn't necessarily so.

Re: Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but then since two conductive plates are touching there is not enough resistance to the current flow to produce any heat.

A wrench doesn't have a lot of resistance either, but place it across the terminals of a fully charged lead-acid battery and you'll see very quickly that there's still a lot of heat generated.

Re: Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true. I've met 4x4 drivers who have welded drive trains back together in the bush with nothing but 2 car batteries, some jumper cables and an old wrench (for raw material).

Re: Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont worry about Tesla batteries. Sure, energy enough for a sizeable fire. But a gasoline fire/explosion is much worse, and it happens regularly too. A Tesla fire is scary only because it is a new kind of accident. But a "toy accident" compared to a ruptured gas tank.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[CCarrot]

Electric powered toys will be a huge winner if you can have half decent capacity and a high discharge. Common racing style quad copters will happily draw 130amp and could easily draw more. The limiting factor is definitely the batteries. You draw 100amp from a 1300mah battery and the batteries don't last long.....

Current battery tech for quadcopters gives you batteries that are large and heavy for any given capacity. That is the only way to be able to draw the current.

Yep. Approximately 47 seconds, to be precise. 36 seconds at 130A.

That can't be the steady-state draw, or those quadcoptors would barely be able to take off...and what the heck gauge wiring are these things using, if they're seeing that even as a peak? I sure hope it's #2 or better, or battery capacity could be the least of your worries...

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[silentcoder]

This actually sounds perfect for powering vapes.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[MooseTick]

"Why should we have cell phones that work for days when they should work for months on a charge or cars that only go a couple of hundred miles when they should be able to go thousands of miles on a single charge?"

You are confusing "should" with "I'd like to have". If we're going that route, then cell phones should have a charge the life of the phone. Cars should have a charge that will go 200k or the life of the car.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[DarkVader]

We can do that. The nuclear battery is a thing, they used to be used in pacemakers. For a car, a small reactor could conceivably power the car for its entire lifespan.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't the steady state draw, but each of the engines in a mid-tier drone have a 30A ESC on them. (so thats 120 Amps)

The drones being used by professional racers will have higher amperage rated ESCs.

The batteries for a mid-tier are typically 3 cell or 4 cell batteries, in professional races they use 5 or 6 cell battery packs to accomodate the higher current ESCs.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Harlequin80]

No that is max throttle draw. My freestyle quad will burst pull 100 amp at full throttle, 4 x emax 2205 2300kv motors. They will generate a combined thrust of about 4.8kg on a quad that weighs in at about 520g including battery.

On a 1300mah battery I get about 2.5 to 3 minutes before the battery is empty.

My racing quad though will pull 120 amp+ at full throttle (I don't know exactly as that is the peak of the current sensor I use). I get under 2 minutes on a 1300mah battery in a race. It produces just under 6kg of thrust at full throttle and weighs in at 440g inc battery.

Re:Two issues that need to be addressed

[Harlequin80]

Oh and I use 12awg from the batteries and 16 from the PDB to the ESCs and 18 for the ESC to the motors. Average wire length though is very very short with the longest being the main battery lead at about 40mm.

I also run 4 cell batteries giving me 16.8v on a fully charged battery. You do see 5 & 6 cell batteries but rarely at racing comps, more at drone top speed comps.

More like vibrator

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to trigger post-traumatic prostate orgasm, one must have INTENSE vibration which generally require approximate 220 Volts, AC and 10 to 20 Amperes between!

Now we need wait no longer to make a portable unit. Man could theoretically have orgasm in middle of restaurant or grocery store with rectum vibrator and such energy-storage technologies.

Re:More like vibrator

[UltraZelda64]

All I can think of when reading this thread is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: More like vibrator

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking this...

The IT Bike

yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick search tells me a phone battery typically has a capacity of something like 1500 mAh, so "charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week" sounds like something on the order of adding 5000 mAh in 30 seconds.

That would mean a current of 600 amps, assuming 100% efficiency. For reference, USB 3.0 has a max of 0.9 amps, Lightning is a little over 2, a refrigerator draws 6 amps, and your household circuit breaker will trip at 15 amps.

Re:yay math

[ClickOnThis]

This. Mod parent up. I was going to post something similar.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that your "household circuit breaker" in the United States is 115V? Comparing that to a 5V source (i.e., 59 times the voltage) when talking about amps without noting the voltage difference is kind of senseless. P=EI and all that...

Re:yay math

[Waffle Iron]

Without giving the voltage, those numbers are pretty meaningless. Power = Volts * Amps

Lightning has a huge power at 2A because it's millions of volts.

A high-end microprocessor can draw about 100A, but only at a little over 1 volt.

Your circuit breaker will trip at 15A, but at 120V. That's 1800W. If this capacitor is only charged to about 1.5 V like a typical battery, the 600A would only be 900W.

Thus, you could easily charge it from a standard outlet. It would require a beefy power supply similar to those in large servers, though. I think that most people would opt for a cheaper power supply that could still charge their phone in a minute or two.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Take my last mod point!

Re:yay math

[sl149q]

And think of the electrical service you would need to order to charge your EV in (to be similar to gas) say 2-3 minutes.

This says 4.5 megawatts to get down to 15 minutes and involves intermediate storage. Scary stuff!

http://www.computerworld.com/a...

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know that your "household circuit breaker" in the United States is 115V?

No, I know that your "household circuit breaker" in the United States is usually 15A. Assuming you have 115V available across that circuit breaker, you can draw up to, oh, 1725 watts (power, that EI thing).

Never tried it, but I suspect that if you hooked up that "household circuit breaker" in series with, say, a car battery at 12V, you could draw about 180 watts of power before it tripped. It's the current through the breaker that matters, not the voltage.

Re:yay math

[thinkwaitfast]

Me too...http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=5%2F.008333

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Never tried it, but I suspect that if you hooked up that "household circuit breaker" in series with, say, a car battery at 12V, you could draw about 180 watts of power before it tripped. It's the current through the breaker that matters, not the voltage.

If you used a switching power supply, or even an old fashioned transformer, you can put the full 1700 watts into a low voltage device with 90+% efficiency... or do you still think everything is linear power supplies and a 1A @ 5V charger just drops 110 V down to 5 V with resistance and wastes 105 W of power?

I have an induction crucible heater that outputs about kiloamp into a single turn load, yet runs off of a standard 15 A wall circuit, because with rather simple electronics, it is about the power you can pull, not the current limit at a given voltage.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the hell mods this up?

For reference, USB 3.0 has a max of 0.9 amps, Lightning is a little over 2, a refrigerator draws 6 amps, and your household circuit breaker will trip at 15 amps.

How about another reference: A 500 W psu that can output 20 A at 5 V or 40 A at 12 V. Or another: a 100 A MIG welder that runs off of a 15 amp house circuit. It is not magic, it is basic electronics, and you would expect anyone posting to Slashdot to have at least had to use a computer PSU before without thinking it is magic.

Re: yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Putting in a kA at a couple of volts, or several amperes at mains voltage, will still require radically different phone charging connectors than we're used to. I think that was the argument.

Silly: maybe in the future we'll have instantaneous wireless charging where we put the phone in a coin shrinker?

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

That would mean a current of 600 amps, assuming 100% efficiency.

As pointed out below, but without the math 15A @ 110V = 330A @ 5V = 1.65kW

So for 5Ah 5V battery, the minimum possible charge time is 55s

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, you realize that 5000 mAh in 30 seconds at 4V is only drawing 20A at 120V, right?

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you have 115V available across that circuit breaker, you can draw up to, oh, 1725 watts

The electrical service supplied to US households is 240V with a center-tapped neutral, which means you have two hot wires 180 out of phase so they have a 240V potential between them and 120V between themselves and neutral. So the typical voltage your standard 15A breaker is working with is 120V. At 120V, 15A is 1800W. That's enough power to get you 400A at the 4V required to charge a standard phone battery even after accounting for conversion loss. Supplying your phone's battery with 400A will only be pulling 15A at the breaker. The final current of a connected device is not the current seen by the breaker. You can supply 1.5 mega Amps at 1 mV through a standard 15A breaker without tripping it.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

A Chevy Bolt has a battery capacity of 60 kWh, and for longevity's sake usually only 70-80% of a car's battery capacity is used. So to go from empty to full on a Chevy Bolt requires about 48 kWh. If you wanted to be able to charge in 3 minutes, that would obviously require 16 kWh per minute. If we try to deliver that power at 120V, we're gonna need about 8000A. Of course, that's insanity. But at 10kV we only need 96A, which can be supplied through a 4 AWG cable. With the logic present in charging systems, it's possible to protect the end user from exposing themselves to those high voltages.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, I'm not an electrical engineer. Is it possible or not?

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

The new iPhone, now with copper sides machined from a single slab for faster charging

Re:yay math

[thegarbz]

For reference, USB 3.0 has a max of 0.9 amps, Lightning is a little over 2, a refrigerator draws 6 amps,

By the time this comes to the market we'll be at USB 7.4 anyway.

and your household circuit breaker will trip at 15 amps

WTF? Who wired up your house?

Anyway your assumption is stupid. You mention milliamps, hours, and no talk of voltage. So let's fix your math:

5000mAh in 30 seconds is 600A. Since you made assumptions about it being a mobile phone I will too, 5V. This is 3000W of power.

In a typical 230V house that is 13.04A. Easily delivered by the 18A outlets and the 35A circuit breakers typical for a house in Europe.
Things get a bit more interesting in the USA but really even you guys are capable of providing 3000W. And now that the physics are more realistic let's not forget storage. There's nothing here at all that assumes you will be pulling the charge continuously from the wall instead of say trickle charging an intermediate powersupply.

If you want to criticize this device don't look at the wall, but instead look into the device itself. It is relatively easy to provide a really large amount of power to the device, but I would be far more interested in how they can get this power over the circuit board traces and into the battery.

Re:yay math

[blindseer]

That's enough power to get you 400A at the 4V required to charge a standard phone battery even after accounting for conversion loss.

How large of a conductor would the wire have to be to safely carry 400 amps? According to the National Electrical Code it would be something like an inch in diameter.

There's some serious practical limits on the sizes of conductors for handheld devices. Something that can carry 400 amps of current, with feed and return lines, insulation, safety ground, etc. to make a cable would be the size of a fire hose. The connector would have to be even larger.

Even if we assume we are using this technology for something like electric cars, where such large connectors might be much more practical, there are limits to the voltage. The prongs on an electrical plug are insulated by air. To keep the prongs from arcing continuously from excessive voltage the breakdown voltage of air cannot be exceeded along with a considerable safety factor.

A battery that charges in seconds and last for days is simply impractical unless one is talking about very low voltages and power consumption.

Re: yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the unit you are looking for is Watts.

Re: yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

That is 600A at the 3.7 volt a phone uses. Home electricity is 110 or 220 volt though. 600*3.7/110=21A for a 110V system, or 10.5A for a 220V system. Or 5.5A for an industrial 400V setup.

So charging this phone is no worse than using an electric stove or a big table saw at full power. For a few seconds.

Now consider charging an EV in seconds. That is brutal.

Re:yay math

[blindseer]

That's an interesting claim, that we'd simply charge our cars with 10kV supplies. Protecting the end user is only one of the worries. At those voltages, especially with direct current, arcing is a real hazard. At 10kV the conductors in air would have to be at least 4 inches apart to keep from arcing, and that's with little to no extra safety factor. I simply cannot imagine a connector carrying that kind of voltage being something that any regulatory agency would allow to be handled like we handle gasoline pumps now. We're talking "wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole" kind of stuff here.

Even if we assume the connector to the car, with 10kV @ 100A, is something that could be considered practical there is still the matter of what happens inside the car. To maintain this size of conductor and still be made of cheap aluminum or copper the voltages would have to remain in the kV range inside the car, that's not going to happen. If stepped down to something in the hundreds of volts the conductors get very large or very hot. If some exotic material is used that has a lower resistance and/or can safely handle temperatures that would melt aluminum then the car gets real expensive.

So, take your pick. Is this car going to run at arc inducing voltages? Will it run at molten aluminum temperatures? Will it cost a fortune? I guess that there is another option, make it large enough to carry the weight of the conductors, to dissipate the heat safely, be made of cheap and common materials, and operate at reasonably safe voltages.

There is a reason electric drive trains are really popular for things like trains, forklifts, and such, heavy and slow is something of an advantage there. Not so great for passenger vehicles.

I'm afraid we will be stuck with electric cars that need many hours to charge.

Re:yay math

[blindseer]

Do you realize that a 330 amp cable would have to be larger than a garden hose? While you are out this Black Friday at Best Buy shopping for Christmas gifts go wander over to the kitchen appliance section of the store. Next to the ovens there should be a section where they sell the plugs for these ovens. Look at the size of the plug and the wire. These wires are made to handle only 50 or 60 amps. A 300 amp cable would have to be much larger, with a plug also big enough to handle that current and not melt down.

Now imagine having to carry this 300 amp charging cable with you so you can charge up your phone while traveling. That won't fit in your pocket any more.

Forget that even, just imagine having to plug your phone into a standard 120V 15A wall outlet. Those cables you use to plug your computer into the wall is now your cell phone charger cable. How big would your phone have to be to accommodate the connector that is so common on desktop computers?

I'm afraid we'll just have to put up with chargers operating in the 100 watt range, like USB-C with 20V @ 5A, and the charging times that gives us.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

That would mean a current of 600 amps, assuming 100% efficiency. For reference, USB 3.0 has a max of 0.9 amps, Lightning is a little over 2, a refrigerator draws 6 amps, and your household circuit breaker will trip at 15 amps.

In the UK plugs contain their own fuses with 13A being the highest you can put in an normal wall socket (cookers have their own higher rated outlets). Some ring mains will use 16A but most are probably 32A. Your entire consumer unit/house will be on a 100A fuse. Ignoring every other factor then 600A would be more than your entire mains supply would allow - to protect the meter tails which would melt or catch fire at 600A.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you *can* charge the plates in seconds doesn't mean you have to. You just design the phone charger with a smaller cable and limit its power to charge it in a few minutes instead. If it lasts days on that charge that's really not such an inconvenience. The nice thing is the underlying technology allows you to charge faster where it's useful and you can fit the bigger connections (cars). For discharge inside a phone a fuse (current limiting diode) can protect the connector so it's never going to supply it anything like 600A. You're then only left with the problem of internal shorts...

Re: yay math

[ledow]

To do that, it would have to do AC->DC conversion and push 600A-ish to the battery at something just over the battery voltage, though.

You're still talking about huge, dangerous current, it just wouldn't be exposed to the wall-circuit.

And, an everyday analog for that sort of current? You're looking at things like welding stations. Which can melt solid metal. Or car batteries, that can turn over an 1 tonne engine that you wouldn't be able to, faster than you can ever hope to move it by yourself.

It's still a concern.

Re:yay math

[AmiMoJo]

1500mAh = 1.5Ah

1.5Ah in 30 seconds = 1.5 * 120 = 180A at the battery voltage.

Battery voltage is 3.7V for LiPo, the type typically used in phones. So power = 180 * 3.7 = 666W.

In fact many phones have >3000mAh batteries. The OnePlus 3T is 3600mAh, which would be 1600W.

Okay, your outlet can provide 666W, but how are you going to get that to your phone and convert it to ~4V for charging the battery? Just take a look at what a typical industrial 3.3V 180A power supply looks like.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

People understand news reporting so badly, that even the science news reporters have a hard time grasping what they are writing. Basically they just make up exciting headlines that sound like something they (probably mis-)heard.

Re:yay math

[reboot246]

All of the breakers in my house are at least 20A, with larger ones for appliances that draw more power.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used welding cables smaller than a garden hose that can handle 300 A. Garden hose sized cables I've used up to 2500 A @ 600 V for a large electromagnet, which would be more comparable to the cables used to charge a car. The basic codes about cable thicknesses are pretty general, and you can get away with a lot more current if your cable length is shorter and not enclosed.

If you can safely guarantee that the current won't be used continuously, you can also get away with a lot less wire. Like a clamping spot welder that uses much smaller cables because it will only run high current for a short while. At around a couple hundred amps for a second or two, you will potentially be more limited by mechanical stress than heating of the wires, but could easily get something that would fit in your pocket.

But the argument seems pointless when you could just have a charging station that plugs directly into the phone and only short bus bars are needed for internal circuitry. If it only takes a few seconds, why would you need the ability to move it away from the charger during charging, and to have removable connections that can fit in your pocket?

Re:yay math

[swillden]

A quick search tells me a phone battery typically has a capacity of something like 1500 mAh, so "charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week" sounds like something on the order of adding 5000 mAh in 30 seconds.

That would mean a current of 600 amps, assuming 100% efficiency. For reference, USB 3.0 has a max of 0.9 amps, Lightning is a little over 2, a refrigerator draws 6 amps, and your household circuit breaker will trip at 15 amps.

All this means is that the battery pack won't be the bottleneck when charging. The bottleneck will be the thickness of the wires between the voltage step-down transformer and the battery pack. I imagine we'd want to make those wires as short as possible (they'd probably end up looking a lot more like "plates" than "wires"). We'd probably also want to consider higher battery voltages.

With Li-ion batteries we usually use 3.7V or 4.2V batteries, because that works well from a Lithium ion chemistry perspective. A 3.7V, 1500 mAh battery pack stores 5.55Wh. If you have a 12V supercapacitor pack of the same capacity, it has only 460 mAh. Assuming 100% efficiency, that's 55A at 12V for 30 seconds. That's high, but it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility. If it is, we could always reduce it a bit and take 60 seconds to charge, for example.

Regarding getting that power from your home wiring. 15A at 115V is 1725W, so your outlet can provide 5.55Wh in 11.6 seconds. But if we're charging over 30 seconds, we only need to draw 5.7A to do it.

Yay math, indeed!

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Just take a look at what a typical industrial 3.3V 180A power supply looks like.

Look at an industrial 12 V, 1 A power supply compared to a wall wart... industrial power supplies tend to be much heftier and better engineered compared to cheap, flimsy consumer devices will do.

A couple hundred amp low voltage power supply can be built cheaply and in a small enough space that the size isn't an issue (probably could be done marginally larger than laptop power bricks of yore). A much bigger challenge would be developing a reliable connector that clamps hard enough, doesn't wear out too quickly, and can mate with something that would fit in a phone.

Re:yay math

[swillden]

I'm afraid we will be stuck with electric cars that need many hours to charge.

Well, many minutes, anyway. Tesla's superchargers deliver up to 145kW. At that rate you could charge a Bolt from empty to full in 20 minutes (assuming no battery heating issues).

In reality home chargers don't need to be anywhere near that fast. As long as the car can recharge overnight so it's always full in the morning, that's good enough. Faster charging is really only needed on long road trips.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you charge a super capacitor at ~4v ... it's not a chemical battery, start with capacitors and understand how they work, a super capacitor is just a higher density capacitor with lower charge/discharge rate capability... but still a hell of a lot higher than a lipo.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

I would assume that you dont draw the power directly from the grid, but instead use an intermediate charge container.. like.. another capacitor.. that charges over a long time.. then through some low resistive connection displace the full charge into the mobile capacitor...

How hard can it be? :)

Re:yay math

[blindseer]

Just because you *can* charge the plates in seconds doesn't mean you have to.

That's true but since we already have batteries that can do that I fail to see any advantage to this technology. That's not saying there isn't a useful place for this technology, it's just not something that can allow anyone to charge their cell phone in seconds and run all week.

To keep the risks of arcing and electrocution low the voltages of a device would have to be in the tens of volts. I suspect that USB-C is limited to 20 volts for this reason. The same likely goes for the Firewire limit of 30 volts, automotive systems at a nominal 12 volts (which is more like 13.8 or 14.2 volts), most household thermostats at 30 volts, and so on.

When it comes to keeping the wires light, flexible, and cheap that means using copper or aluminum at small gauges. I keep some wire around for such things where it's about 16AWG on the big side, and something like 24 AWG on the small side. Those are good for max current in the range of 5 amps to 0.5 amps. Any bigger than than and they start to get heavy and stiff, even when using finely stranded wire.

So if practical considerations on conductors leaves one with the limits of 20 volts and 5 amps, like USB-C does, then going to a new technology for energy storage that can exceed this is unnecessary.

There are people in other posts that point out it is possible to use a cradle of some sort instead of a cable to allow for higher voltages and higher currents while keeping it safe. This then gets into regulatory territory where laws specify things like if a device uses voltages above a specified level then it must adhere to certain safety standards, such as double insulation, shielding, grounding, circuit breakers, arc fault detection, and perhaps more. There is also the problem that if a cradle is used then the size and shape of the phone is constrained by the cradle. I cannot imagine such a cradle being very successful even if it did in fact allow for charge times in seconds. Most people will sleep for several hours every day and simply plug in their phone to recharge every night, moving away from a perfectly suitable connector for this (like Lightning, USB-C or micro-B, or barrel connector) to a proprietary cradle adds no convenience and potentially considerable monetary cost.

The applications given for this technology, phones, electric vehicles, and wearable electronics, are actually poor uses for it. Or rather, existing technologies work just as well. I would expect this technology to be adopted only if it offers some sort of cost savings, but that was not one of the claims offered.

Re:yay math

[Anonymous Coward]

Lightning has a huge power at 2A because it's millions of volts.

Just a quick correction. He meant Lightning, the cable Apple uses. Actual natural lightnings have amperages in the order of ten to hundred *thousand* A.

Super cap or super crap?

[frovingslosh]

...about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones, electric vehicles ...

Wow. A battery the size of a finger nail that can power an electronic vehicle for days! I'm impressed. At least I'm impressed by the quantity of bullshit that the Slashdot editors will let be packed into a lame summary.

Re:Super cap or super crap?

[davidwr]

Wow. A battery the size of a finger nail that can power an electronic vehicle for days! I'm impressed. At least I'm impressed by the quantity of bullshit that the Slashdot editors will let be packed into a lame summary.

Or, that's one honkin'-big fingernail.

Re:Super cap or super crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

...about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones, electric vehicles ...

Wow. A battery the size of a finger nail that can power an electronic vehicle for days! I'm impressed. At least I'm impressed by the quantity of bullshit that the Slashdot editors will let be packed into a lame summary.

Oh come o-o-o-o-n! :D Read the last sentence. I would say that of all of the magical, fairy-dust battery stories I have read on /. over the years, this one is one of the least objectionable submissions! Have a great Thanksgiving! (if you celebrate)

Re:Super cap or super crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the size of the cell. Your phone might use half a dozen of them. Your car might use 10,000.

Re:Super cap or super crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

No no, it's totally legit, because 'Scientists' did it. We all know that science is always equal to truth.

Re:Super cap or super crap?

[Trogre]

I think it's safe to infer that the intention is to use more than one of these in a vehicle.

Re:Super cap or super crap?

[frovingslosh]

I think it is safe to say that a battery the size of a fingernail should and would never be used in a cell phone or a vehicle. It is pretty obvious that if it works at all, and I'm not buying that it does, it should be scaled up for phone or vehicle use. The claim that a device the size of a fingernail would be used in either of the listed devices is completely bogus, and once again an obvious failure of the Slashdot editors to edit.

There is one massive problem with this

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one massive problem with tech like this. Especially when talking supercapacitors and such. That is, they are fragile. Like really fragile. You know how lithium batteries burn and explode because they're fragile? Well this "nanometer" whatever supercapacitor shit is 10 times MORE fragile than that stuff.

It's not even about them being potentially dangerous. The problem is they simply break and stop working when subjected to shock like dropping it or vibration from being on a machine/car/whatever.

Re: There is one massive problem with this

[Anonymous Coward]

They burn or explode because we cheap out on containment to save weight in our phones, and because the chemicals inside are flammable and can evolve gas that breaks the containment. Most of the actual energy in the fire comes from the oxygen in our air.
Supercaps don't necessarily contain anything flammable.

Oh please, tell me more...

[Anonymous Coward]

About this mysterious battery tech that will never see the light of day outside of a lab.

Don't talk about it unless it's actually something that will hit the market damn it.

Re:Oh please, tell me more...

[Anonymous Coward]

But I thought this was "news for nerds" not "news for stupid consumers".

How many times...

[NormAtHome]

Over the years how many announcements / articles that promise some revolutionary technology have been talked about on here and yet years later they're still nowhere near being on the market. We're still waiting for those rollable / foldable displays that have been on the horizon for years, the closest that I've seen is a video of an LG prototype at this years CES show, you couldn't even hold it as they only had one and it was behind plastic; no shipping products use it yet.

There have been articles on here before about some university saying they have working nano-tube enhanced capacitors that will replace conventional batteries and promise unlimited and very quick recharges and yet still not on the market. When this gets on the market it'll be a revolution for mobile devices and probably electric cars too since they currently take 6 to 8 hours to charge, the Tesla high power wall charger promises to recharge in 3.5 hours but it's not like you can take that with you on the road.

Re:How many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is 42.

Re:How many times...

[NormAtHome]

Is that all? I could have sworn it was more ha ha

Re:How many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

The vast majority of research announcements don't go anywhere. But some fraction of them do cause things to move on, and that is the important result of the collective research as a whole.

Battery performance has improved. So has supercaps, to the point caps are replacing batteries in some uses. Not everything revolves solely around making your phone better, so you might not have noticed the large drop in supercap prices over the last ten years, or the slowly advancing performance that has lead to their replacing batteries in various power backup and isolation devices.

Re:How many times...

[thegarbz]

And yet on a daily basis we have a huge amount of technology trickling down to consumers. Try and run your phone on the battery technology of 15 years ago and see how it goes.

As for the foldable displays, that isn't a technology problem, it's a WTF do we need that for problem combined with a moving goalpost problem. We've had foldable displays in research labs for years, and just before they hit the market the market itself decides to go all touchscreen.

Re:How many times...

[Whibla]

Indeed OLED technology has gone nowhere since its inception around 10 years ago.

As for those foldable displays, yeah, they don't exist either... /s

OK, so not all research is immediately practical, not all technical hurdles are easily solved but at least try to remember the things that have made it to market (and are now so common place it seems like they never didn't exist or the technology was never new) as well as the things we're still waiting on...

Re:How many times...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I'm sure I read a Popular Science article on supercapacitors way back in the 1980's. They were exciting! Powerful! Charge them in seconds! Batteries are obsolete, make way for the supercapacitors!!!

Same goes for fuel cells, flow batteries, Zinc Air batteries, ultra flywheels, and a hundred others I've forgotten.

Batteries suck. They are better than they were back when Ni-Cad batteries were the usual commercial offering, but they still suck. Their energy density is poor. They have weird optimal charge/discharge preferences. If you quick charge them (convenient for the user) you shorten their life (inconvenient for the user). They lose efficiency like crazy when subjected to the cold. They systematically lose capacity as they age. On and on the shortcomings go.

NOT A BATTERY

[amoeba1911]

A capacitor is not a battery! They can fulfill the same need sometimes, but it's entirely different principle of operation. Next, the article is all about how lithium batteries suck, but doesn't talk about how this new capacitor compares to other capacitors or batteries. Before you can tell if this is useful at all or just junk, you have to know at least these four key metrics:

energy density per mass
energy density volume
power density per mass
power density per volume

The article is useless, doesn't list anything relevant.

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[BenFranske]

Note that TFS states that "The high-powered battery is packed with supercapacitors..." see the definition for battery responsible for why we call groups of electrochemical cells batteries... "a set of units of equipment, typically when connected together" which is based on the traditional usage for artillery batteries. So if there are multiple supercapacitors working together it's absolutely correct to call it a battery (specifically a battery of supercapacitors, instead of a battery of electrochemical cells). Note that I doubt that the author was actually thinking along these lines when they wrote the piece, but I would argue it could still be correct.

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[thinkwaitfast]

The article is useless, doesn't list anything relevant

Much like some websites

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[Anonymous Coward]

A capacitor is not a battery!

No, but a bank of them is exactly called a "battery".

Benjamin Franklin coined the term, "battery": denoting the increasing of power with a row of similar units as in a battery of cannons.

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[Anonymous Coward]

A capacitor is not a battery!

And a electrochemical capacitor is a hybrid of both... so things like hybrid supercaps make the categories not very simple and divided.

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollucks. It is abundantly clear that the Article at the Telegraph is using the term battery because their audience typically does not have a clue what a capacitor is. For that kind of audience the headline actually makes kind of sense, how else are you going to reach non technical people that could be interested in the applications of this technology?

Slashdot is another matter though. The editor should have made a headline along the lines of "Breakthrough in supercapacitors, may now be viable battery alternative."

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[Anonymous Coward]

A capacitor is not a battery! They can fulfill the same need sometimes, but it's entirely different principle of operation.

For all intensive purposes, they're the same.

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[friesofdoom]

battery
badr/
noun
noun: battery; plural noun: batteries; noun: the battery
1. a container consisting of one or more cells, in which chemical energy is converted into electricity and used as a source of power. "battery power" synonyms: storage cell, cell "insert fresh batteries"
2. a fortified emplacement for heavy guns.

Capacitors do not store chemical energy.

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[BenFranske]

I beg to differ, chemical energy is not required. See the Oxford English Dictionary...

battery, n.
Pronunciation:/batri/
Etymology: French batterie (13th cent.) ‘beating, battering, a group of cannon’, etc. (= Provençal bataria , Spanish batería , Italian battería ), battre to beat: see -ery suffix.

1. The action of beating or battering. ...
3. The beating of drums; sometimes a particular kind of drum-beat, perhaps that giving the signal for an assault.
4. A number of pieces of artillery placed in juxtaposition for combined action; in Military use, the smallest division of artillery for tactical purposes ...
III. A combination of simple instruments, usually to produce a compound instrument of increased power; applied originally with a reference to the discharge of electricity from such a combination.
III. 9. Electr. An apparatus consisting of a number of Leyden jars so connected that they may be charged and discharged simultaneously.
III. 10. Galvanism. An apparatus consisting of a series of cells, each containing the essentials for producing voltaic electricity, connected together. Also used of any such apparatus for producing voltaic electricity, whether of one cell or more.
III. 11. Optics. A combined series of lenses or prisms.
III. 13. a. Used gen. for a collection of similar pieces of apparatus grouped together as a set

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[BenFranske]

Note, I completely agree about the first part of what you said. When describing any kind of portable energy storage to the general public it probably makes the most sense to refer to it as a battery. I disagree about the second part though, I would still argue that if there are multiple small capacitors it's correct to call it a "battery of capacitors" or perhaps a "capacitor based battery" in technical publications.

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[Anonymous Coward]

battery

badr/

noun

noun: battery; plural noun: batteries; noun: the battery

        1. a container consisting of one or more cells, in which chemical energy is converted into electricity and used as a source of power.
        "battery power"
        synonyms: storage cell, cell
        "insert fresh batteries"

        2. a fortified emplacement for heavy guns.

Capacitors do not store chemical energy.

It's a battery... shut the fuck up

Re:NOT A BATTERY

[Anonymous Coward]

Capacitors do not store chemical energy.

Some supercaps do. Before they were called supercapacitors, they were originally called electrochemical capacitors, and some specific kinds now go by the name hybrid capacitor because of the chemical component to energy storage.

Same questions as always....

[gestalt_n_pepper]

What's the volumetric energy density compared to lithium batteries or liquid hydrocarbons?
What's the storage price per unit of energy?
How easy is it to scale up production?
Is it dependent on rare or difficult to obtain materials?

These questions are the ones that *matter*. All else is detail.

Re:Same questions as always....

[burtosis]

What's the volumetric energy density compared to lithium batteries or liquid hydrocarbons? What's the storage price per unit of energy? How easy is it to scale up production? Is it dependent on rare or difficult to obtain materials?

These questions are the ones that *matter*. All else is detail.

The energy density is likely 40-70 times lower than lithium ion batteries in even the most optimistic sense. The power density may be ok to better than lithium ions for the few milliseconds it actually functions.

Re:Same questions as always....

[Anonymous Coward]

The energy density is likely 40-70 times lower than lithium ion batteries in even the most optimistic sense.

The ratio in energy density is now more like 10-40 depending on your use case, as while both have been improving in density, supercaps have been improving slightly faster. And if you wanted to be "most optimistic" you would look at research versions that disregard manufacturing costs, which push that ratio down much closer to 1.

The power density may be ok to better than lithium ions for the few milliseconds it actually functions.

So... your battery only lasts a couple hundred milliseconds given the ratio in power densities?

It's a bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a new battery at all, it isn't a new supercapacitor either, its a method of making nanowire supercapacitors by growing them from 2D substrates.

But how do you explain that to Telegraph newspaper readers? Those readers won't understand that supercapacitors is already a mass market product, or that replacing batteries with them is already a niche thing.

So the Telegraph writes it up as 'magic battery', and Slashdot submitter echoes that.

Re:It's a bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

But how do you explain that to Telegraph newspaper readers?

print it on a t-shirt and have a page three model wear it.

Re:It's a bad summary

[NotAPK]

print it on a t-shirt and have a page three model not wear it.

Re:It's a bad summary

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a new battery at all, it isn't a new supercapacitor either, its a method of making nanowire supercapacitors by growing them from 2D substrates.

One thing I wouldn't mind getting is a reliable UPS which used capacitors for storage of say 10 to 60 seconds of power. The main thing is not to have to continually replace batteries.

SUPER batteries - SUPER discharge capacities

[rickyslashdot]

I seem to remember a story about a Kzin (in one of Larry Niven's RINGWORLD novels) referring to shorting out a high capacity (Puppeteer) battery to make a high yield destructive IED. Looks like life is catching up to SciFi - - - again -grin-
Please note that the batteries were designed by a rigorously safety-paranoid species to NOT be capable of being used in this manner - but a war-faring and destruction-motivated species STILL managed to circumvent the safeties, and managed to make it go "KA-BOOM".

100% Unobtainium

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who watch Robert Murray Smith on YouTube, you'll be familiar with the fact that super capacitors leak charge and approach zero much faster than batteries. On a good day, they can store approx 1/100th the overall amount of energy a lithium ion battery can. Yes, they can charge and discharge very fast, but they don't store much overall energy compared to batteries. The size of a fingernail? So 1/100 the volume, and 100 times the usual energy capacity for a AA sized cell. Either Elon is out of business, or this thing is made of unobtainium.

Re: 100% Unobtainium

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality super/ultracaps with a reasonable specific energy density cannot even charge or discharge as fast as a same size battery because of their high internal resistance. Check it out in the datasheets.

If it is small it is a lie

[EmperorOfCanada]

Whenever I see a "battery" that is the size of a postage stamp, I scream BULLSHIT at the screen. Not once have I seen a postage stamp sized battery technology announcement turn into a real battery. I want a battery that does something "measurable". This is very very very easy to do an experiment that any observer can do some mental math and say, "whoa".

For instance. Heat 1 liter of water from room temperature to boiling. Then we can look at the battery in question and know pretty much its energy density. Then charge it in short order, and heat up another liter.

Short of out an out fraud there is no way to really mistake what energy it takes to raise one liter from 20 to say 99 degrees. Converting electricity into heat is quite efficient. Unless it is very very slow, heating up the water won't lose much of the energy along the way. Thus we can look at something and say, Ohhh it has over X Watt Hours of capacity. Cool. Then we can look at the volume and even approximate the energy density. So if it takes a battery the size of a coin cell to heat up 1 liter of water by 80 degrees then WOW. If it takes a battery the size of a car battery to do it, then not very good.

Re:If it is small it is a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess you haven't looked at any of the god damn button cell batteries in the last 30 years. A common size (CR2032) is not much larger then a standard U.S. Postal Stamp and I go through several of them each year for my Diabetes Sugar Test meter. Hell even a Duracel Hearing aid battery (Size 13) is smaller then a common U.S. Postal Stamp and they tend to last for a week or longer depending on how much amplification you need. Now tell me that a hearing aid running off a Zinc Air battery isn't doing something usefully measurable - mainly amplifying sounds or that the calculator I use (Ti99A) with a CR2032 isn't using that battery for something important? From what the manual states, it's used to retain settings and programs while changing the 4x 2AA Batteries it needs.

Re:If it is small it is a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a battery that does something "measurable"

What? Electrical power and energy is very straightforward to measure on scales way smaller than a postage stamp. And it is a hell of a lot more straightforward and usable to think of the number of joules or what hours of electrical energy you get than how much water it can boil.

Re:If it is small it is a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like you are used to hearing free-energy overunity claims. That's the first thing I could think of because you are insisting on using calorimeter experiments to prove how much energy this battery can hold.

There are far more convenient and more accurate ways of measuring how much energy can be stored in a battery or capacitor.

Re:If it is small it is a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you shouldn't have any problems showing us a CR2032 that will power a phone for a week and can be recharged in seconds.

Oh and a CR2032 is MUCH thicker than a postage stamp or a fingernail.

Re:If it is small it is a lie

[Anonymous Coward]

The prototype is the size of a postage stamp. That doesn't mean they won't scale up and stack more of them together to power a phone. Batteries and caps can scale really well in that size range.

"A significant step forward in a tired technology"

[laserhead]

Translate: it is useless for commercial product right now, and we have no fucking idea how to get there.

Go away greenwow

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot

Not all that much power

[davidwr]

600 amps at 5V would be about 3kW.

It would take one honking-big wire connecting the charger to the "battery" and the charger would pull at least 25 amps from the wall at 120V or 12.5 amps at 240V. Realisticly, it would probably pull a lot more. Still, it's nothing a typical clothes-dryer 240V circuit couldn't handle, so don't worry about burning down the house.

So, to market this to the average joe consumer, you just make the charging take minutes instead of seconds and make sure the charger doesn't pull more than 15 amps (1800 watts) at any given time.

If I can get my phone fully charged for a week in the time it takes me to shower and get dressed in the morning, that may be worth paying a little extra for.

When pressed for a name, they called it...

[RubberDogBone]

a TODDLER!

3..2...1

[Anonymous Coward]

assassinated

Real uses

[CyberSnyder]

It could be used in phones, cars and wearables, but the first uses will be backpack power source for a friggin laser beam weapon. A flamethrower that can reach out to 1000 meters.

It isn't a battery

[jandjmh]

It is a capacitor. That means the voltage is directly proportional to the charge. That doesn't make it useless, but to extract most of the stored energy you need a load that can work over a 5:1 or more voltage range. (at 20% of peak voltage you have extracted 96% of the energy because the store power is proportional to the square of the voltage.) A Tesla battery pack can supply more than 1500 amps at 300 or more volts even when it is at 100% charge, and almost just as much current, at almost the same voltage, when it is at 10% or less of full charge. A giant supercapacitor that was designed as a replacement, might, just for example, have a full charge voltage of 600 volts, and be designed to work down to 120 volts, and would have to supply, in this scenario, 750 amps at 600 volts, increasing to 3,750 amps at 60 volts to deliver constant power. A challenge to the power control circuits indeed.

Re:It isn't a battery

[ledow]

Just about every device you have contains a Wheatstone bridge and a transformer or other power circuitry to come down to 3, 5, 9, 12v or whatever. The kinds of size that fit into a plug itself, most of the time.

110V or 240V. Large or small. Powerful or not. Pretty much everything has that kind of voltage conversion going on already.

Sure, you won't find one in your mobile phone just yet, but that's no different - batteries are often 3.7V and then pushed up to 5V for USB etc. and even laptops push their 19V higher for screen displays in even the cheapest of devices.

The question is not how do you convert the voltage, but how big is the battery already, how much power is in it, and what kind of current can it pump out. Past that, voltage is really at the bottom of the list of things to worry about.

Re:It isn't a battery

[friesofdoom]

"Wheatstone bridge" ?
A Wheatstone bridge is used to measure an unknown resistance. This feature is only required in a few rare circumstances, like inside a multi-meter.

Just about every device I have are not multi-meters and certainly do not contain Wheatstone bridges... You might be thinking of a diode bridge that could do with a transformer to convert AC to DC, but this only works to transform AC voltages and batteries to not supply AC. What you would need is something like a buck converter, which most digital electronics do already contain.

Scientists Create Battery That Charges In Seconds

[HeisenbergSaint]

I hope they do make this supercapacitor concept into reality, rather than just talk about it. For those of you who want to know what problems researchers of today are facing with producing these supercapacitors, then read this more indepth article here. http://saintlad.com/supercapac... Here are some recommended readings to further understand how these work and the current market situation for supercapacitors. Official Research Paper by University of Central Florida http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

Again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every month a new revolutionary battery comes to life in a lab ... and dies around the same place ... current battery technology has trouble powering our more and more power hungry devices. Could at least ONE of these new super awesome battery ACTUALLY hit the market or are we gonna milk lithium until the cow is totally dry ?

Re:Again...

[ledow]

Literally, until it's available in the shops, why would you care, bother or have any interest except if you were a chemist or similar.

So many battery advances have come and gone and either a) never been available or b) knocked out of the market so quickly by a superior competitor, that I gave up long ago.

Make one. Build it into a standard size / voltage cell. Sell it on Amazon or similar. Then you can worry about it. Until then, it's all pipe-dream stuff that I can neither purchase, use, or spent time worrying about.

Really?

[Maury Markowitz]

> t is uncommon for a lithium-ion battery to withstand more than 1,500 charges before it fails

Bologna. My iPhone 5S is over three years old and still has ~65% charge at the end of a day of use.

> can store a large amount of energy

The paper is behind a paywall, but thanks to Sci-Hub I could read it. It focuses entirely on power density, not energy density, but does have some comparative information in Chart F. According to that, the best-case scenario for this device is about 0.07 Wh/cm^3. A modern li-po is about 0.5, around ten times the energy capacity of this device. That is actually less than some other designs, which have approached li-po but only on microscopic scales.

So don't hold your breath, this is not a device that you will see any time soon.

Been there, done that...

[undefinedreference]

On a government project a number of years ago, we used a bank of supercapacitors to launch something very quickly off an average vehicle battery every minute or so.

It sounds great, but we also had the damned things explode quite spectacularly. And by that, I mean, if we didn't have it inside a very tough metal box, shrapnel might have killed the tech that was near it when it went.

Not that lithium batteries are much better; I've seen some really exciting fires when the LiPo batteries in R/C race cars fail... If you thought a phone battery bursting into flame was exciting, you have never seen one of these go up.

They're half right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Supercapacitor car batteries have been made, they just weren't a real replacement due to energy density. If this offers better than 10:1 improvement over existing supercapacitor technology, and can be produced economically in volume, then it wins for battery replacement. But cost benefit will only be proven in volume, not the lab. Gold and micro pore activated charcoal is an amazing, if expensive supercapacitor technology. But would be around $1000 for a car battery replacement that was roughly twice the size of lead based options. Lithium iron batteries are a better car battery than lead based as well, but cost much more currently. And may be more hazardous. It all boils down to money.

So

[gzuckier]

By battery we mean capacitor.

USC Irvine did this earlier this year?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds very similar.....nano-wires in gel.

http://www.popsci.com/researchers-accidentally-make-batteries-last-400-times-longer

I want this in my next electric car. The battery will last longer than the car!

Mice

[DrYak]

Actually, the technology HAS BEEN used in computer mice.
(which do not use that much power, and thus the lower energy density of older supercaps wasn't such a big deal).

of course, the supercap is small in order to fit into a computer mouse.
last I've heard about these (a couple of years ago), the mouse would charge literally in seconds, and could be used for a couple of hours in a go.

So if you leave the mouse on its charging craddle for a few seconds whenever you make yourself a coffe (or go to the toilett, or even just stretch your legs) you never have an empty mouse.
(as opposed to a mouse with a lithium battery, which won't be fully charged that fast enough)