A Staggering 19x Energy Jump in Capacitors May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries (msn.com) Sandwiching layers on a chip is nothing new, so don't ask me what these boys are doing that nobody else thought of. Almost 20x the performance, means batteries will become all but obsolete. The real question is what are the best materials to make them out of, which an AI can help to figure out fast these days. Using supercapacitors, your cellphone will charge completely in seconds, you laptop in minutes. Hot enough to melt wires.
Yeah, supercaps today are taking over - not just for backup or last gasp applications, but powering all kind of tools and such.....handheld laser scanners are predominantly supercap now. You can get away with less battery if you can charge it faster.
Imagine ever scooter, boat, and skateboard with cheap high performance motors and supercaps. Drones and robots too.
Having a few thousand 18650 lithium cells stacked is obviously not a long term answer. I see the army has some tethered drones now, for observation - they run like 800V up the tether and down convert it at the drone. There is a startup here that is doing a large drone like that, tethered - more of a winged and propellered plane, maybe 40foot wingspread - but they will use it to generate power. They launch it up into the high level wind, flip the motors to generate mode and send power back down the tether.
The US is working on using high powered lasers to recharge drones. Theoretically, the drone can redirect the laser to each other in a network, recharging more than one at once. So far, its just an effort to recharge them half-way as fast as possible, but the lasers are becoming powerful enough to do all sorts of things, including punch holes right through an aircraft carrier.
Yeah, but you still need to have the watts to run the laser - and the laser material to be able to bang out a megawatt...then the atmospheric losses....conversion losses...yada yada yada...but great strategy for battlefield stuff where we have money to burn.
Using lasers for power transmission is actually the most efficient way. They punch a quick hole in the air at low power, and send the power through a vacuum. The system they're developing can also be used for communications, so you could download the entire library of congress if necessary.
