Posted on 09/01/2010 1:34:35 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Before you get too excited, find out how many watt hours hours a unit can hold, then look at your electric bill, remember your use is measured in kilowatt hours. During the summer, I go through millions of watt hours running the air conditioner.
If you convert horsepower to kilowatts, your car engine output is probably over 100 kilowatts. It take about 25 kilowatts (25,000 watts!) to push your car at highway speeds.
If commercialized, the new super capacitor could be fully charged in a second and, coupled to a normal battery, provide enough energy to power a cell phone for weeks or a laptop battery for days.Probably take care of running a taser for a couple of hours.
Coulombs.
Redundant.
...and blacks out your whole neighborhood during that five minutes...
See # 46...
Good point, that is what a capacitor does when it fails, and then they explode or something weaker in the circuit will fail causing more and harder to troubleshoot problems.
Super caps as a battery replacement is not doable, never will be, rechargable batteries already fill that void and that's what they should be focused on.
I’m disappointed in FR that it took 20 posts and 40 minutes for somebody to post that. Yes, you win!
Remember the batacitor of Ringworld?
Ha ha
~~~~~~~~~~~
Supercaps are already being used on a small scale for battery replacement. There are several types of RC toys that use them (and are quickly recharged from dry cells). Also, I suspect that those "shake and use" LED flashlights employ supercaps.
There is no question that a large-capacity supercap (without internal limiting mechanisms) is a distinct safety hazard. But, the same thing applies to similar-sized batteries. (Remember the flaming laptops...?)
If I understand the article correctly, the plan is to pair supercaps with batteries. The supercap would accept the quick charge, and then would depete its charge by "trickle-recharging" the battery to spread the use out over a long time scale.
The problem of a high peak-current charging source for the supercap remains, however...
Probably a strategy like used in the toys would work: Supercap charging stations that are "trickle-charged" from the grid and that then can quickly dump part of that charge into the mobile power-supply supercap should be workable. That would reduce the peak load on the grid, while taking advantage of the fast-recharge properties of the mobile supercap/battery pack...
After a career in high tech, (semiconductors and micromechanics) I have learned that "...is not doable, never will be" is frequently a position that will come back and bite you in the rear... ( I remember something like that being said about superconductivity, for example...)
My wool rugs can charge me up to 50KV!
An analogy is the RC helicopters that are quick-charged by the battery packs in their RC hand control units.
Actually that might be a workable strategy for using the variable output of wind or solar generation (as in the "shaker" flashlights)...
(Of course, the things would have to be armored or otherwise shielded against terrorists with AP weapons...)
pang
Yeah, I know it is the same kilowatt hours, and yer gonna pay for them one way or another. I just find the idea of vast amounts of electricity delivered to your door in a state you can use and without wires to be intriguing.
Someone else mentioned that to me recently. I’m sorry to say I never read it.
Did read your comment on your FR homepage about the spread of islam, however... ‘twas a thing of beauty, thanks! Well done, sir.
You say that like it is a bad thing...
;)
1.21 Jigawatts?! Tom, what was I thinking?!
“For with a supercapacitor, the car can be ‘refueled’ in less time than it’d take to refill your gas tank.”
Let’s say your electric supercapacitor car takes 15,000 Watts to run at some nominal speed. Now run it for four hours, that’s 60 Kilowatt-Hours.
If you were to recharge that capacitor in one second, the power required would be 216 megaWatts.
If it’s a 12 Volt system, you’d need to run 18 million Amperes.
There are practical limits to how fast you can charge a capacitor.
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