Big advance in Super Caps (12x)

[MileHigh]

Graphene nanoribbons made by unzipping carbon nanotubes.  It's amazing stuff.  It almost feels like we are in a renaissance of changing battery technology as we speak and five years from now it will really be the Jetsons!

I did my searching and indeed there are many promising new technology announcements for batteries and super capacitors that have taken place this year.  I am very optimistic about that and I am overall quite optimistic about our energy future.  You have better storage technologies converging with increasing energy from renewable sources.  Those are complimentary synergistic technologies.  If a solar panel could charge my cap bank during the day and a setup could power my living room LED lightning and TV/surround sound at night that would be awesome.  If the cap bank/inverter was the size of a PC box/subwoffer I could live with that.  Then the magic target is the price.  If you could do that for say $300 in 2018 I think that you would have a successful product.  Even if the return on investment would be quite long, that's only the cost of a cell phone.  It would be an empowering experience to do that and feel like you are "sticking it to the Man."

Then your home theater personal computer by that time will also be lower power so you could run that too.  An SSD/low power processor combination would do the trick.  For all we know full PCs will be transparently integrated right into TVs by 2018.  (No Windows 8 allowed.)  Hey, they could be Linux flat panels too, all 17,000 flavours.  I say that to be politically correct.  lol

The BattCap sounds like something I want for Christmas.  They don't say exactly what it is inside, but that model sounds like a hybrid battery-supercap.  No mention of electronic guts either.  I can feel my chest thumping just from looking at the picture of it.

[Floor]

I'm always most interested in the longevity aspect of a new battery or cap design. Specifically, how many charge/discharge cycles, before it's no bueno? Also how many years in storage, before some element of the device breaks down.

Energy density is important but, really becomes critical in mobile / automotive applications, and of course monetary cost / affordability has some kind of relationship to energy density.  But a great enough longevity,  ultimately trumps other considerations, in non mobile, and even in some mobile application.  This is why I personally hope for advances in caps, more so than in batteries. Planned incomes from the replacement of dead batteries, needs to become a thing of the past.  I didn't find any specs. on the projected longevity of either of the two battery / cap devices.  Has anyone else?

[profitis]

we need a cellular phone battery that is entirely divorced from the house plug.divorced from the grid.i think supercaps will go well with hand-shaking dynamo recharge systems,being able to swallow a massive amount of energy in one go as opposed to the trickle-charging li-ions.this is one reason to actually delay or supress supercaps from a giant buisnes perspective.li-ion market will take a hit-n-a-half,overnight.

[powercat]

Who remembers EEStor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor

[MileHigh]

Powercat:

I read the full Wiki article on EEstor and of course everybody around here is familiar with their story.  It gives some balance to the discussion and reminds us of the need for real production units.  I will take a guess that one in a 100 of these breakthrough information releases comes to fruition.

Whenever I follow a link and I see the weaknesses in the information presented I get very conservative and won't believe it until I see it.  For example, Magluvin linked to super capacitor/batteries that are used by car audio enthusiasts.  Those will work fine to prevent voltage brownouts for the occasional big bass thump or any very loud audio transient in car audio.  That requires a manageable amount of energy that a super capacitor can provide.  However, the Uttracapacitor (the one that I panned)  is supposed to do that for a car propulsion system for acceleration or regenerative braking and perhaps to start the car.  The problem is those things require a lot more energy than a fat pluck of an electric bass string.  There were no numbers for anything (a warning) but my instincts are telling me there is a mismatch between the car drive train energy requirements and any super cap you could add to the battery considering the battery has a fixed volume.  That's honestly just a guess.

What's interesting is that in 2013, the same group seems to have moved on to lead-carbon battery technology:

http://www.hybridcars.com/48v-lc-super-hybrid-to-showcase-lead-carbon-battery-technology/

Interesting paragraphs:

Based on identical basic specification 1.4 liter VW Passat family sized saloons, the production-ready LC Super Hybrid technology at 12 volts has already been widely demonstrated to carmakers in Europe and the US following its debut at the 2012 Geneva Motor Show.  It offers the potential of a mass market, gasoline-powered, large family car with superb drivability, impressive performance and excellent fuel economy of 50 miles per imperial gallon (42mpg US or 5.6l/100km) and 130g/km on the NEDC New European Drive Cycle.

The more powerful 48 volt demonstrator is said to offer significant additional functionality including torque assist to the petrol engine for launch and low speed transient acceleration, optimized highway cruise conditions with electric assist 'load point moving' and a leaner fuel calibration, in-gear coast-down and the ability to harvest significantly more kinetic energy from regenerative braking.  It combines cost effective, advanced lead-carbon batteries with CPT's production ready, versatile SpeedStart motor-generator system, which has been recently validated for 1.2 million stop-starts compared with 150,000 to 300,000 for first generation micro-hybrids.

So they are really talking about a gas motor assist from an electric motor powered by their batteries.  It's kind of cool when you think about it, you hit the accelerator pedal and an electric motor kicks in seamlessly in the background to give you more torque.  It's clear that it's still a gasoline powered vehicle, but with a very respectable 42 mpg.

Perhaps Mark's link will be the one that percolates to the top.  Perhaps the next-generation LI batteries with the graphene nanoribbons will be the one that makes it.  Nonetheless, I am cautiously optimistic that within five years laptops, tablets, cell phones, and perhaps even electric cars will be running with new and better battery or super capacitor technologies.

It makes you wonder if you had some kind of photovoltaic technology incorporated into the skin of the car and advanced capacitor technologies under the hood, that cars sitting outside in the sunshine might be able to provide for a significant portion of their energy needs from solar power such that you had to "fill up" less often.  On the other hand, it might be technically possible but still too expensive.

MileHigh