8) - Batteries V Capacitors? Which will win?

Community Bar Sport
1

With this new fancy technology coming along with nano technology, how long before we see nano capacitors?

And your bets please on how much capacity can we really realistically get from a nano carbon tube, nano whatever capacitor in the future... do you think we'll see battery sized capacitors holding twice or fifty times more capacity than your regular lithium batteries we have today?

I see companies working on the lithium battery up to 4x more capacity we have now, but anyone think capacitors (lightweight) are the future in energy? fast charge and discharge use and how many cycles? considerably more than any rechargeable battery... obviously we're not there yet but fingers crossed, i'm all for dumping batteries in favor of capacitor, huge amounts of energy at your finger tips... well for short bursts at least, but anyway.... let's see what happens..

interesting, but what's your views on batteries v capacitors

2

how long before we see nano capacitors?

Available now. Some of the "supercapacitors" currently available are based on carbon aerogels, a nano-structured form of conductive graphite (although "found" rather than "built.") Even a standard electrolytic capacitor has an Aluminum oxide layer on the order of 10-7 m, and might qualify.

Currently supercaps are far behind battery technology in energy density.

I don't think that caps are likely to catch up. Fundamentally, chemical bonds (battery technology) are always going to be "more nano" than a physical constructions capable of maintaining an electric field (capacitor technology), and therefore the batteries will always be able to hold more energy. Chemical bonds are the ultimate nano-tech (bond lengths are on the order of 0.1 nm)

Also, capacitors have rather non-ideal discharge characteristics...

3

let's suppose with the bendy technique using a lite-scribe as i posted in the link..

you could use Strips of this stuff and coat a solar powered car with this stuff, with a small several a/h lithium battery for keeping the capacitors and have the rest of the car coated with these strips with huge arrays of capacitors, have the solar panels charge just the capacitors and keep the lithium charged...

Lightweight solar powered cars :slight_smile:

4

Well, no, because energy density is in Wh/m3 or Wh/g
So you'd need total capacitor volume or mass comparable to the batteries (if the supercap gets to battery-like energy density), and that's still quite a lot. The cap has some advantages when it comes to charge/discharge rates (maybe; it depends on the rest of the cap construction), but that's not really the current limiting factor for electric cars.

5

Lifetimes might tip the efficiency balance. You only have to get enough power to do what's needed.

6

I'm betting on batteries, unless they ever do release the hidden patent the energy companies are secretly sitting on for the FLUX capacitor, then it will be back to the future for sure. :wink:

Lefty

7

retrolefty:
I'm betting on batteries, unless they ever do release the hidden patent the energy companies are secretly sitting on for the FLUX capacitor, then it will be back to the future for sure. :wink:

That was released a long time ago.