What I've always wondered is - why don't we put a supercapacitor between a an EV battery and the motor?<p>This means that EVs of all kinds, could not only get crazy acceleration, but could also recover all the energy of regen. Even battery packs with a very good layout can absorb a fraction of the acceleration energy, and less or none when the battery is cold or at the upper range of capacity.<p>I remember reading an article about a porsche in a car magazine (many) years ago that discussed not the horsepower for acceleration but also the horsepower absorbed by the brakes to decelerate.<p>It might have been 500 horsepower to accelerate the car, but since the brakes were very good, it could absorb 900+ horsepower when bringing it to a halt.
73 Wh/kg is a decent number. IIRC the previous gen Prius had 46Wh/kg batteries.<p>Perhaps with some reconfiguration it would be possible in the future to give those old machines some additional oomph, as the discharge limit in their NiMH battery packs is way below the combined power of the two motor-generators(21kW vs 60kW).
<i>The actual figures are a tested energy density up to 73 Wh/kg – thus about 28 percent of what today's state of the art EV batteries offer</i><p>So, no, this isn't useful for battery electric vehicles. Hybrids, maybe, for vehicles with an underpowered main engine and electric boost for acceleration.<p><i>... retaining 90 percent of their initial storage capacity after 10,000 full charge/discharge cycles.</i><p>So, not a good power supply filter either. 10,000 cycles of the power line rectified to DC is under a minute and a half.<p>There are applications for big pulsed power sources, but not that many of them. Flashguns for cameras. Aircraft carrier catapults. Nuclear weapons detonators. Railguns. Big spark generators. Most of the applications that need a huge power spike are military.
Sci-Hub link to the paper: <a href="https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202004560" rel="nofollow">https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202004560</a>
As a turbo for cars to enable focusing on super high wH/kg storage class batteries this is interesting.<p>But as power delivery for drones and rail guns these could be game changing.
I've always wondered about capacitors for bulk storage in cars. What happens in an accident? What happens when that capacity is bent/dented/broken? A Li battery will catch fire, the speed of that fire limited by the speed of the various chemical reactions. But a capacitor is an electrical device. The charge would move so much more quickly. Would this be more explosion than fire?
Anybody else resigned to scrolling by these headlines every month/week for the past five years? I just want to be notified when something is cheap, lasts, and out of the lab.
This is fantastic discovery, I don't want to take anything from it. If you would have your car battery in such form, in case of accident, there would be potential that all this static energy gets released at once, which wouldn't be pretty.<p>Again, really good discovery, even if capacity is not on par with current batteries, making it practical would allow for more reusable energy storage.
>>They will be excellent for quick-response power-smoothing and peak load management in industrial settings.<p>I know they are talking about feed back from very large multi-phase motors but...<p>I wonder if they could leverage the power from electrical storms? Literally lightning in a bottle?
> [...] research [...] the QUT team describes a design<p>Yeah ok cool, join the giant pile of revolutionary battery designs and remind me when it's a physical product, tested, verified and ready for mass production.