an easier analogy: 100-stories building that stays on 1 cm^2 area has a total surface of 100 cm^2. Now, make the height of this building 1 cm, and you have 100 cm^2 surface in 1 cm^3 volume.
Make it 1M floors, and you are talking about 1M cm^2 = 100 m^2
Imagine a sheet of paper the size of a football field but infinitesimally thin. Now, fold it in half. Fold it in half again. Continue folding it in half until it's the size of a postage stamp. You now have something with the surface area of a football field that you can easily fit in your wallet.
It doesn't have to be a high-amp power supply- you could use a low-amp supply to charge up another supercapacitor, then use that capacitor to charge your laptop's supercapacitor.
the best thing about supercapacitors is that they don't have a liquid inside. It means that (at least theoretically) they can be of any form and thickness. So, (again, speculatively speaking) they can be a part of laptop frame.
My fault. I thought they use the approach described in [1], where the prototype used LightScribe DVD optical drive to make a pattern on a disk with graphite oxide film. That prototype didn't require any liquid.
I don't see how this video shows anything which supports your .. fears? Obviously, you shouldn't short-circuit capacitors. You shouldn't short-circuit any power source.
I think the first usage would be to recover energy from the brakes, energy that you can use almost immediately afterwords. You would still use another battery as the main storage.
Note to reader: the supercaps in the article aren't being used for long-term energy storage.
When a car brakes using magnets, a huge quantity of power is generated by the magnets. In a typical setup, this power value is much higher than the maximum rate at which the lithium batteries can absorb charge.
From what I gather, what this article actually means is that these supercaps will be used as energy couplers between the regenerative brakes and the lithium batteries. They aren't actually replacing the lithium battery.
Presumably it'd work the other way, too? Supercaps that let you recover more of the energy produced by regenerative braking should also give you short bursts of acceleration, no? I imagine a system similar to the KERS system used in F1:
So is the idea here that you would use these supercapacitors as the primary energy store? Or is the case that you would use them to quickly capture the energy from regenerative breaking and then use it to slowly charge traditional batteries over time?
I think the idea is that you capture the energy from regenerative braking in the super capacitors and then drain them almost immediately when acceleration is called for (which means the batteries need to be used a lot less and thus last a lot longer).
I don't know much of the science, but I think if it can charge that quickly, it can probably discharge pretty quickly as well. I imagine I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that, so maybe there are drawbacks to putting it into a device you hold in your hands?
The lenovo x1 carbon (and probably others) charge from 0% to 80% of battery in about 30 minutes -- which is really helpful and does a lot to compensate an otherwise lackluster battery life.
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[ 11.8 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] thread[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activated_carbon
Make it 1M floors, and you are talking about 1M cm^2 = 100 m^2
[1] www.itrs.net/Links/2007ITRS/2007_Chapters/2007_Interconnect.pdf
http://books.google.com/books?id=pAuiWvNHwZcC&pg=PA120&lpg=P...
Activated carbon filters are another material with a phenomenal surface area.
They do:
"...electrolyte (an ionic liquid called EBIMF 1 M)..."
[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6074/1326
When a car brakes using magnets, a huge quantity of power is generated by the magnets. In a typical setup, this power value is much higher than the maximum rate at which the lithium batteries can absorb charge.
From what I gather, what this article actually means is that these supercaps will be used as energy couplers between the regenerative brakes and the lithium batteries. They aren't actually replacing the lithium battery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_recovery_system
Also super-capacitors aren't that bad for medium term storage - they lose 10% of the charge per day which is not much.
Personally, I'm all for supercaps for regenerative braking right now and will love to see a day when we can fully charge an EV in 30 seconds.