Skip to main content

Hybrid Supercapacitors are — well — Super

Kurt.energy is promoting a new line of hybrid supercapacitors. By itself, that wouldn’t be very newsworthy, but the company claims these graphene-based supercapacitors merge the best features of both supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries. Based on technology from a company called Shenzhen Toomen New Energy, the capacitors are optimized for either high energy or high power. They can reportedly charge and discharge 10-20 times faster than lithium-ion batteries. Of course, we’ve heard wild claims surrounding graphene capacitors before and, so far, they haven’t seemed very credible.

In addition to high performance, the company claims the capacitors are safe from overcharging, short circuit, and other safety issues that plague batteries. The devices are said to operate — including charging — from -40C to 80C. You can see a video from the company, below.


 Assuming this all proves out, it seems like the devices would open up a lot of new design possibilities. Designs would no longer need complex charging systems, active thermal management, and would degrade gracefully and safely.

New Atlas has a good write up where they interview the Belgian engineer who saw the Toomen devices at a trade show and after testing them brought them to market with Kurt.energy. According to that article, the capacitor uses a graphene electrode and a metallic oxide material for the other electrode. The energy storage is like that of a capacitor — there is no chemical reaction generating electricity.

The capacitors aren’t in full production yet. There are a few scaling problems with charging at such fast rates, too. According to the New Atlas article, a 10 kWh pack charged in 5 minutes would require a 100 kW charger. However, the new capacitors could have big implications for hybrid cars and solar. We also remember a supercap-powered bicycle that didn’t turn out very well.

With limited production, the price is still somewhat high although that is offset by the simplistic power management system required as well as the lower weight and size of the units. The safety, temperature range, and rapid charging might also tip the balance against traditional components.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, of course, and we haven’t seen these in real life. We will be interested to see if the components live up to the hype. We’ve seen graphene supercapacitors show up before and it still makes us suspicious. What do you think? Is this the next power revolution or just another wild claim?



from Hackaday https://ift.tt/2U3QBJU
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Play Doom – And More – On An NES

Doom was a breakthrough game for its time, and became so popular that now it’s essentially the “Banana For Scale” of hardware hacking. Doom has been ported to countless devices, most of which have enough processing ability to run the game natively. Recently, this lineup of Doom-compatible devices expanded to include the NES even though the system definitely doesn’t have enough capability to run it without special help. And if you want your own Doom NES cartridge, this video will show you how to build it . We featured the original build from [TheRasteri] a while back which goes into details about how it’s possible to run such a resource-intensive game on a comparatively weak system. You just have to enter the cheat code “RASPI”. After all the heavy lifting is done, it’s time to put it into a realistic-looking cartridge. To get everything to fit in the donor cartridge, first the ICs in the cartridge were removed (except the lockout IC) and replaced with custom ROM chips. Some modifica...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Flexible Permanence of Copper Tape Circuits

Somewhere between shoving components into a breadboard temporarily and committing them to a piece of protoboard or a PCB lies the copper tape method. This flexible Manhattan-style method of circuitry formed the basis for [Bunnie Huang]’s Chibitronics startup, and has since inspired many to stop etching boards and start fetching hoards of copper tape. [Hales] hit the ground running when he learned about this method , and has made many a copper tape circuit in the last year or so. He offers several nice tips on his site that speak from experience with this method, and he’ll even show you how to easily work an SMD breakout board into the mix. Generally speaking, [Hales] prefers plywood as the substrate to paper or cardboard for durability. He starts by drawing out the circuit and planning where all the tape traces will go and how wide they need to be. Then he lays out copper traces and pads, rubs the tape against the substrate to make it adhere strongly, and reinforces joints and laps w...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Newbie’s Guide To JTAG

Do you even snarf? If not, it might be because you haven’t mastered the basics of JTAG and learned how to dump, or snarf, the firmware of an embedded device. This JTAG primer will get you up to snuff on snarfing, and help you build your reverse engineering skills. Whatever your motivation for diving into reverse engineering devices with microcontrollers, JTAG skills are a must, and [Sergio Prado]’s guide will get you going. He starts with a description and brief history of the Joint Test Action Group interface, from its humble beginnings as a PCB testing standard to the de facto standard for testing, debugging, and flashing firmware onto devices. He covers how to locate the JTAG pads – even when they’ve been purposely obfuscated – including the use of brute-force tools like the JTAGulator . Once you’ve got a connection, his tutorial helps you find the firmware in flash memory and snarf it up to a file for inspection, modification, or whatever else you have planned. We always apprec...
Post a Comment
Read more