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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.
This technology will be in shops within the year.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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...
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.