In the absence of any prior agreement, they probably have the right to take your work away from you - especially since grad students are university employees in a sense. If the movement to unionize grads gets moving, maybe you'd have a better bargaining stance to get a good contract which considers this issue.
Read the language of the press release - this is meant for load balancing the output of some power source that might have big surges and large fluctuations in power output. It is only a capacitor, which can hold a lot of energy but not necessarily keep it for a long time. Capacitors discharge on their own if they're left to their own devices - they discharge to air, even. If these things can deliver such a a huge current, I'm guessing they have a very short time constant. Translation: your notebook battery would be dead in an hour if it were one of these.
In the absence of any prior agreement, they probably have the right to take your work away from you - especially since grad students are university employees in a sense. If the movement to unionize grads gets moving, maybe you'd have a better bargaining stance to get a good contract which considers this issue.
Read the language of the press release - this is meant for load balancing the output of some power source that might have big surges and large fluctuations in power output. It is only a capacitor, which can hold a lot of energy but not necessarily keep it for a long time. Capacitors discharge on their own if they're left to their own devices - they discharge to air, even. If these things can deliver such a a huge current, I'm guessing they have a very short time constant. Translation: your notebook battery would be dead in an hour if it were one of these.