Improved High-Performance Energy Storage 129
Physicists at the University of North Carolina have developed new improvements for high-energy-density capacitors that can store up to seven times as much energy per unity volume as common capacitors. "The amount of energy that a capacitor can store depends on the insulating material in between the metal surfaces, called a dielectric. A polymer called PVDF has interested physicists as a possible high-performance dielectric. It exists in two forms, polarized or unpolarized. In either case, its structure is mostly frozen-in and changes only slightly when a capacitor is charged up. Mixing a second polymer called CTFE with PVDF results in a material with regions that can change their structure, enabling it to store and release unprecedented amounts of energy."
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So can gas. In fact, until cars were designed to be safe, a common way to die in them (in the 50's and 60's) was via blowing up. Now, it is extremely rare.
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Hmm, very interesting. Perhaps it could be used as a power source for a HANDHELD DEATH RAY!!!!
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But are they 10X as heavy, to provide the same power? Weight is more of an issue than size in a car.
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Energy and power density are usually given by mass (Joules/kg or Watts/kg).
Re:battery replacements? (Score:5, Interesting)
The excitement isn't in the fact that they may be a battery replacement, it's that they can store a ton of energy for many other electrical uses.
Only at this time. (Score:3)
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firstly, they don't actually store much power (normal capacitors are only 500mF or something like that) - that would only light a 12v bulb for a fraction of a second
Secondly, they leak a lot of power, as the article says
>The amount of energy that a capacitor can store depends on the insulating material in between the metal surfaces, called a dielectric
Whats actually happening is there are 2 metal plates, a positive and negative (well there are actually many sets
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Running 31F at 3500V in 336 pounds gives them 350Wh/kg. [peswiki.com]
And for LI-ION: High energy density that reaches 400 Wh/L (volumetric energy density) or 160Wh/Kg (mass energy density). [electronics-lab.com]
Of course, the source has to be considered, but if the peswiki article is true, the capacitors is 2x better.
As to the discharge, yeah, that is an issue. The better super capacitors are losing something like 1% / day. But with
You misstate the physics... (Score:3, Informative)
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Personally, I think that the supercaps would be better suited for hybrids - Generally speaking they don't need much in the way of battery power, a lot of effort has gone into increasing their current capacity - both for charge and discharge.
Fast charge would be a bonus - you want to be able to store as much braking power as possible, and discharge for the accelleration afterwards.
Generally speaking, the wait time from starting the car to getting it in gear would be enoug
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Also, you learn how to diagnose a circuit quite quickly when it's liable to be faulted every time you step out of the room.
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You're advocating a tiered energy storage system to maximize advantages and minimize disadvantages (including costs) of different mediums.
We've been using a system like this for years in our computers and it looks promising to get this on cars.
Fast capacitors, slower capacitors, NiMH/Li battery (most hybrids use NiMH), gasoline/diesel/ethanol/natural gas/whatever tank. Sounds nice and plausible and I remember hearing that at least BMW is planning on incorporating capacitors in their hybr
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When you go to pluggable hybrids or outright electrics, your battery bank becomes defined by energy needs - not current capacity. A battery pack with enough energy to get you even 50 miles is going to have plenty of current capacity for t
Wrong University (Score:5, Informative)
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Quite a Result (Score:3, Insightful)
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It could change the size of certain capacitors whose values and tolerances it matches. However, a more space-efficient capacitor would not necessarily lower the number of capacitors required u
polymers (Score:5, Informative)
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Hmm... I should write that down. Does anybody have an extremely loooong piece of paper?
Vaporware... (Score:5, Informative)
"Their predictions of higher energy density capacitors are encouraging, but have yet to be experimentally tested."
Call me when they're being produced in something resembling quantity. Yeesh.
major faux pas in /. description of article (Score:5, Informative)
It might seem like a trivial slip but to those around here there is a pretty huge difference.
Oh yeah, and DUKE SUCKS.
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We already have "ultracapacitors".... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/search?q=ultracapacitors [google.com]
What I want to know is ... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Let me know if you need information on other topics too, politics, sex, etc.
Re:What I want to know is ... (Score:4, Funny)
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2) Boyfriend? Viagra.
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Surface Area (Score:2)
Surface area (Score:1)
Coppertops? (Score:4, Funny)
Great... (Score:5, Funny)
It was bad enough to just get your shiny new needlenose pliers welded together. =/
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9 Volt battery, wired into a relay and a button. Connect the Battery to the coil, the coil return to the switch side of the relay, and the "normally true" side of the switch to the button, and the button back to the battery. Connect a couple of metal pins to either side of the coil. Press the button, and you have a complete ciruit. It charges the coil, and breaks the switch, breaking the circuit. The coil then discharges through whatever's touching the pins (the air if th
Bullshit (Score:2)
Sweeeet.... (Score:2)
From the sounds of TFA, these things will be able to power my Flying Car(tm).
Shipstones (Score:4, Interesting)
Supposedly, the shipstone had a dramatic positive effect on the world. It was no longer a problem to get electricity from where it's made to where you need it. Big solar power systems were put in areas that get lots of sun, for example. Cars would run on Shipstones, and instead of gas stations, they had stations where you could swap the discharged Shipstone from your car for a fresh, fully-charged one.
I have been wondering if these new ultracapacitors might someday become practical "Shipstones". How close are ultracapacitors to, say, powering a car?
Can you drain the power slowly from an ultracapactor, to run a car for a few hours, or do you have to drain it quickly? Does charge leak out slowly over time from an ultracapacitor, or can you make it fairly inert?
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Re:Shipstones (Score:4, Interesting)
I should start by saying that I'm not an EE, however I've done some reading on this topic.
Ultracaps are still far from being practical for powering a car. Right now the best Ultracaps store 5-10 Wh/kg, which means they could only store enough energy to power a car for a few miles. Furthermore, the price of the ultracaps is about 10x too expensive for the car to be within the price range of what most consumers expect.
HOWEVER, Ultracaps have seen dramatic and encouraging improvements during the past 10 years. Ultracaps have decreased in cost/kjoule by a factor of about 3 over the last 5 years, and have seen dramatic improvements in energy density. At the current rate of improvement, in about 10 more years Ultracaps will be usable for plug-in hybrids that cost about the same as conventional vehicles and can run for 10-20 miles on electricity alone. Unlike batteries, ultracaps can be recharged extremely quickly and will not require replacement after repeated recharging.
You can drain the ultracap slowly. However ultracaps can be more dangerous than batteries since they can discharge all their energy instantaneously.
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This may be an impediment if you're thinking about plug-ins, but if you're talking about hybrids the story changes. The major improvements from hybrid powerplants are load balancing by allowing the engine to run at the optimum operating point and by regenerative braking. Neither of these have large storage requirements: all you need to get the regenerative braking benefits is to
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Thanks for the catch.
-Rick
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Wrong measure (Score:1, Interesting)
*yawn* only seven times? (Score:5, Informative)
Overview: http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/projects/cnt_ultraca
More-detailed Poster (PDF): http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/posters/RU13_signore
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http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/02/mit_carbo
Now, if they can even get anywhere near their potential 60 kW/kg that's
damn good and comparable to NiMH with much better economics of use.
Re: *yawn* (Score:2)
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Call me when they're competing with MIT's carbon nanotube based ultracapacitors. Conventional ultracapacitors can achieve an energy density of 6Wh/kg, but the CNT ultracapacitors being researched and developed by MIT are claimed to achieve an energy density of 60Wh/kg (or, let's say, ten times more than this "new" capacitory developed by North Carolina State University). Overview: http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/projects/cnt_ultracap [mit.edu] _project.htm More-detailed Poster (PDF): http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/posters/RU13_signorel [mit.edu] li.pdf
It's also important to take into consideration how the capacitors behave in differing operating conditions. Assuming the capacitor will be used in a car, will it work at -20 degrees? What aobut 130 degrees? Can it handle road vibrations? Will it still work after 10 years of abuse?
Ultracapacitors? Finally, it's time for (Score:3, Funny)
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Youtube has quite a few videos of real test railgun weapons. They're all huge at the moment though.
why compare to "common capacitors"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm Not Interested Until... (Score:2)
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Seems we're slowly heading in that direction. A small device holding as much energy as this imagined device could hold is scary to think abou
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One thing for some
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Batteries and capacitors don't even approach the amount of energy in a gasoline tank at the time (a nuclear bomb has a really enormously larger amount of it than that), and how fast energy is released doesn't really matter for the comparison.
Finally solving battery problems? (Score:3, Interesting)
This could open the way for two things:
1) A decent means to storage power generated by solar panels and wind turbines so it can be used when the Sun is not up and wind velocity is low. That could make it possible for true distributed power generation, where every home generates its own electricity and shares the excess with other people in the neighborhood.
2) A true, practical electric car. With supercapacitor batteries, we could dramatically increase the range of the electric car, reduce the size of the battery pack so it rarely inteferes with interior space, and charge the battery pack in about the same time you fill up a 20-gallon fuel tank!
That's why I think people are still underestimating MIT's announcement of nanotube-based supercapacitor development. It could potentially make the whole idea of fuel cell power superfluous.
Intruiging (Score:1, Interesting)
Photonic Crystals (Score:2)
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About Vancouver, that is. The alien planets I've got covered. But their shipping rates are too high.
What I want to know... (Score:1, Funny)
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Unity volume? (Score:3, Informative)
Practicality? (Score:2, Insightful)
The trouble with ultracapacitors (Score:3, Interesting)
Ultracapacitors are really impressive. They exceed the limits of what was considered physically possible twenty years ago. The newer ones can be charged fast and discharged fast; it's not like the older ones that could only deliver tiny currents. People have used ultracapacitors to start auto engines.
The problem, though, is that all the energy can come out at once if they're shorted or damaged. Lithium-ion battery thermal runaway is a problem, and laptop fires have resulted. Ultracapacitor failures will be worse. You don't really want to have a fuel tank's worth of energy stored in a capacitor. But saving the energy from braking a car is probably OK.
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Advances in capacitors? (Score:2)
Energon Cubes (Score:1)