Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday, 6 October 2017

Let's make a battery of capacitors, just to annoy grammar Nazis

A new type of battery could let people charge gadgets, appliances and electric vehicles in seconds. British start-up Zap&Go has developed carbon-ion supercapacitors that allow rapid charging. The current version is not able to store much power, but the company hopes future generations will store much more.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-41419838/carbon-ion-battery-could-mean-rapid-charging

6 comments:

  1. (super)capacitors ≠ battery

    One stores energy chemically the other in an electric field

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bet you a beer they'll call it a battery when it goes commercial though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have it... they can make a charging unit which consists of many linked supercapcitors, thus making it a battery in the other sense of the word, e.g. a battery farm. Like xkcd's suggestion to name an exoplanet Pluto, this should annoy everyone.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Supercapacitor problem is not charge time, but energy density. Unless I missed something, this is not going to change anytime soon.
    Chemical batteries will continue to improve at a steady pace for the next years (there is still quite some room before hitting hard limits on chemical energy), but the next technological step there will probably be high-energy superconductors. Though it is trivial to turn a high-energy storage system as a bomb, so those may be regulated.

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  5. "The current version is not able to store much power…"

    ReplyDelete

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