Scientists Create Battery That Charges In Seconds and Lasts For Days (telegraph.co.uk) 230
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.
I'm going to make a prediction (Score:4, Funny)
This technology will be in shops within the year.
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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.
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My prediction is that this is a fluff piece and the "breakthrough" is complete bullshit.
Of course, it's being reported in the Telegraph.
Mice (Score:2)
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, o
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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 technolog
Finally..... (Score:1)
So, how often does it explode? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So, how often does it explode? (Score:5, Funny)
https://xkcd.com/651/
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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.
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Depends what you throw it at. A jar of nitroglycerine maybe ?
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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? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: So, how often does it explode? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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
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Sure, but it's not an explosion.
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It's not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: So, how often does it explode? (Score:2)
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.
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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?
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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.
E
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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?
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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.
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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 Tes
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*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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 th
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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 addi
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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).
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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? (Score:2)
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.
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Just the once.
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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...
Two issues that need to be addressed (Score:3)
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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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.
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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...
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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 u
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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.
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This actually sounds perfect for powering vapes.
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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 sp
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It's a bad summary (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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print it on a t-shirt and have a page three model not wear it.
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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/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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"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.
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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.
yay math (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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This. Mod parent up. I was going to post something similar.
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Re:yay math (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
Not all that much power (Score:1)
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 m
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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... [computerworld.com]
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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 gasoli
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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.
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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 b
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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.
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 perspectiv
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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 someth
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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 volt
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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 me
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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 sti
Super cap or super crap? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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.
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I think it's safe to infer that the intention is to use more than one of these in a vehicle.
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How many times... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Indeed OLED technology has gone nowhere since its inception around 10 years ago.
As for those foldable displays [kickstarter.com], 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...
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Is that all? I could have sworn it was more ha ha
NOT A BATTERY (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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 artil
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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.
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The article is useless, doesn't list anything relevant
Much like some websites
Same questions as always.... (Score:5, Informative)
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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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.
SUPER batteries - SUPER discharge capacities (Score:2)
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".
If it is small it is a lie (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
"A significant step forward in a tired technology" (Score:1)
Real uses (Score:2)
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 (Score:3)
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: (Score:3)
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 1
Re: (Score:2)
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 d
Scientists Create Battery That Charges In Seconds (Score:2)
Really? (Score:2)
> 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-p
Been there, done that... (Score:3)
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.
So (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
All I can think of when reading this thread is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
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 s
Re: (Score:2)
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 w