Are carbon based super supercapacitors hype or truly something that could have an impact on EVs and all electronics? Fascinating video:
I don’t think that supercapacitors are the solution to everything however graphene really looks like it is going to have some pretty notable effects in the future with the myriad of uses that they’re working on using it for.
I wouldn’t worry about out-dating or anything like that, look back 8 years or so and you’ll see just how far lithium has moved in that time-frame. It’s remarkable how fast things are progressing now and I don’t feel that that is bad in many ways (Long as we don’t dump stuff, contain waste, etc).
This may be the birth of a wonder material, but we’ll have to see how it moves into other fields as the development continues. Right now there’s a bunch of speculation but a lack of real substantial understanding and usage; but hey it was only found a few years ago and we’re already are messing with it, that’s pretty good in my books ;).
So…someone decided to ‘charge’ a piece of this stuff. Where’s the + and where’s the - ? To run an LED off of it…same question…I thought you had to have a positive and negative anode (at least for direct current). It is fascinating to me, but I guess I don’t quite understand it. Can anyone that is electro-tech savvy ’splain this?
The prospects look pretty cool if this technology can be used. Imagine charging an EV in 30-60 seconds, or your flashlight (cell phone, gadgets etc.) is much less time than that!
there are actually flashlights that use super capacitors instead of batteries already. you may or may not already know that
http://www.511tactical.com/html511/static/LFLDemo.html
sorry for the slight off topic. but i think capacitors could be a good replacement for cells. ive been wanting to play with these for sometime now.
That is an incredible light you linked to there.
A supercapacitor’s energy density, even one with graphene electrodes, is still substantially less than modern battery. State of the art battery technology offers energy densities in the neighborhood of 400 Watt-hour/kg (see Envia Systems’ announcement last year) while graphene supercapacitor energy density falls into the 7-8 Watt-hour/kg range.
Where a supercapacitor outshines traditional batteries is power density. The best batteries currently have a power density of around 10 KW/kg while a graphene supercap offers upwards of 45-50 KW/kg. So comparing state-of-the-art graphene supercaps to state-of-the-art batteries, the supercaps can charge and discharge at much higher currents (great for a hybrid vehicle for starting/stopping) but have a capacity that’s almost two orders of magnitude lower than the best batteries (not so good for driving any significant distance). So for now, the best of both worlds is probably to include both batteries and supercaps in the design.
Graphene is pretty exciting stuff, though. IIRC, folks are still trying to figure out how to reliably manufacture, on commercial scales, graphene sheets that are only one or two atomic layers thick. Once that happens, who knows what new uses they’ll find for it.
I have to wonder, though…you see media refer to charging vehicles in mere seconds. Seems to me that’s going to require substantial improvements to our electrical grid. The Tesla Model S has an option for an 85 KWh battery. So assuming perfect efficiency, charging in one hour requires an 85KW charger (Tesla calls these “superchargers”). Now envision an “ubercharger” that can do it in 1 minute (assuming the batteries could handle it). The ubercharger would need to draw 5.1 megawatts per outlet. I can’t imagine that being feasible on any kind of scale in our lifetime…
I seriously doubt that graphene will ever see the light of day (or dark of night) in a real-world application. Things an atom or two thick are way to easy to break…