Nanotechnology takes energy storage beyond batteries
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Nanotechnology takes energy storage beyond batteries
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Comments (5)
Interesting technology and article. Comments and questions:
1. Your engineering skills may be great, but I question your historical knowledge. "Capacitors have been around since 1745, beating batteries to the scene by half a century." Primitive but effective batteries (wet cells) are documented from the ancient Egyptians 3-5000 years ago and several other civilizations where they were used for metal plating and possibly other tasks.
2. What's effect does EMP have on your capacitor technology? How would you effectively shield your technology from EMP without reducing its efficiency?
Thanks. d
Posted by Durwood M. Dugger | November 5, 2007 5:21 PM
Posted on November 5, 2007 17:21
Concerning your article's title: Aarrggg!!
Seriously, interesting stuff.
Posted by bill clawson | November 13, 2007 12:09 AM
Posted on November 13, 2007 00:09
One fact that is only implicit mentioned but worth mentioning it explicitly is that the discharge curve of a Ultra-Capacitor is still a exponential and far from what a battery shows.
This limits the use of Ultra-Capacitors for applications where a fixed voltage is needed. Also the energy stored in the low voltage area is not accessible to such applications.
In a robot project we used five Ultra-Capacitors from Maxwell Technologies in series (about 13V peak) and a DC/DC converter to power the electronics (5V) of the robot. It worked fine, but as combined down/up converters are hard to find, the energy below 5.5V was not available. This limited the usable energy stored in the Ultra-Capacitor board to about the energy of a 9V battery. Lacking a power supply which could deliver more then 30 Amps the recharching only took about 30 seconds.
Quite buzzing to charge a small energy store with 30 Amps!
Posted by Mathias Faust | February 2, 2008 8:25 AM
Posted on February 2, 2008 08:25
Very interesting article about a very interesting subject.
But in my opinion it is a bit inappropriate to write "... all form of capacitors store energy only on the surface of the material.".
In my knowledge electric charge is stored on the surface, whilst energy is stored where there is electric field, i.e. in the space beween the plates, since the energy density is \frac{1}{2}\epsylon_0 E^2. Isn't it?
Posted by Domenico Galli | April 16, 2008 11:20 PM
Posted on April 16, 2008 23:20
I have often wondered if it might be possible to control the discharge of large capacitors. Because they can be charged very rapidly,they could then be used either as primary a supplier or as a means to recharge a battery pack over a longer period of time. This would make electric cars more attractive by lessing the time required to recharge the battery pack.
Posted by Harlan Dutton | April 26, 2008 8:55 PM
Posted on April 26, 2008 20:55