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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.
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
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.
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.