Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery | Hacker News Reader

Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery

arstechnica.com

I think the way we improve battery capacity in smartphones and cars will be to swap batteries for graphene capacitors. I've seen a couple of cool demos of these things, and they look awesome :)

In particular, think about the electric car - at the moment, they weigh much more than petrol counterparts because of all the batteries, and they have the rocket fuel problem of needing to accelerate all those batteries as well as the car and humans. If you can make the batteries out of carbon, even at the same volume they will be considerably lighter, and this alone will increase the range of EVs hugely! and, for free, you'll get the speedup in charge time. If manufacturing the things is as simple as using adapted DVD burners or paper presses, this lowers the barrier to adoption even faster. I'm really excited about this technology!

Hopefully we will actually see it in production... I really hope so... too often you hear nothing anymore after this kind of exciting announcement.

I know, that is kind of annoying. It makes me want to work out how to hack it together in my shed and start a company.

(if I had a shed. and a lawyer to deal with all the patent suits from the scientists.)

Patent suits from the SCIENTISTS?

I honestly don't think the scientists are not the ones responsible for that.

As a scientist who's studied at two unis with massive entrepreneurship and research monetisation schemes (Cambridge and Imperial) I have to disagree - the only people with graphene patents today will be research scientists or universities. They may not do anything with them, of course, but they'll still sue you if you try and use the application they patented.

Not everyone wants a lighter car, since heavier survives a collision better. When I got my first car, my dad advised me to get a nice heavy one, in conjunction with a quick recap of momentum mathematics on why the heavier vehicle has more survivability in a collision. A while back, a young, female friend of mine who drove a surprisingly large SUV, said that her dad bought it for her so that she would be safe.

So, not everyone is going to see this as a positive selling point...

The worst kind of arms race. Let's all just take up more space and burn more fuel on the road to be bigger than the next guy.

Did her father consider that SUVs are easier to roll? Also, while his point about momentum may be correct, its one datapoint among many when it comes to crash safety.

More mass doesn't just help when you hit other cars. It also helps when you, say, run into a wall. Or a moose. The more mass you've got, the slower anything that hits you can reduce your speed, the less harm that the sudden deceleration does to you.

This is an arms race mindset that overall creates a disaster for those not outside your vehicle. Of course you'll be safe and sound (precluding rollovers), but you've introduced a greater probability of killing someone you hit.

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/07/29/killer-cars-an-extra-...

Also, a heavier car isn't always safer than an equivalently sized lighter one.

How does momentum keep you safer?

On the other hand, with computer aided driving or simply better drivers, the lighter one will be much more maneuverable and it will avoid collisions much better, while also having more mileage.

In particular, if the car is FWD, you will understeer and lose control of the car by heavy braking much easier in a heavier car. A lighter one would simply steer away from the wall or the other car.

I know that I prefer the lighter one if the power and torque are the same.

I couldn't help but read this as:

> One simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery. See why duracell hates this

Too much internet time I guess :-)

One weird trick...

One weird trick to harvest karma on HN. Mods hate him!

There was actually a good thread on how these messages work the other day.

"it has a storage density that's right at the low-end of the range seen in lead-acid batteries" is this by volume or by weight? I would guess that the specific weight if the graphene version would be much lower than lead-acid, and if it is so and "the same" is by volume, this would be much more interesting for many applications.

The most interesting thing about capacitors, in my opinion, is that they can be charged extremely quickly. If you could recharge your battery in 30 seconds, it wouldn't actually need to last that long. Charging your batteries could be something you do a couple times a day, like going to the bathroom.

Charging quickly would be great, but having to do so frequently would be a pain.

You need access to a powerpoint, what if you are on a day trip?

Wherever people lay their head at night they'll almost always have access to a power socket and therefore 24 hours is the minimum acceptable duration a full charge should last.

On the other hand, that comes with high charging current. This isn't an issue for pocket batteries, but for really large ones, it's not as pretty.

Extremely quick discharge is probably more interesting, for a certain kind of interest. Near-instantaneous discharge of a couple of kJ into your skin (or wedding ring) would be pretty dramatic.

So would burning gasoline on your skin. So what?

Depending on the rate: Batteries could actually be bombs, where gasoline has to mix with air first. No oxidizer needed with batteries - just drive a nail through one, or smash it up as in an accident, and boom!

I haven't heard of any exploding batteries (only burning ones), but I've seen tons of dashcam videos with gas tanks exploding on impact.

We haven't seen any graphene battery failures yet at all! The article says they charge/discharge as supercapacitors. They will have a failure scenario more like Boom! than Flameout!

We've been following Moore's Law for decades now. What's really stopping us from a real mobile and internet-of-things revolution is a breakthrough in charge storage devices. I wonder how long until one of the many "new discoveries on X material to create new battery" can be practically feasible and marketable.

Moore's law actually helps battery powered devices too. As the switching elements get smaller they consume less power. The problem really is that we've at the same time increased our demands on the devices to the point where the gains were undone.

5 years ago cell phones had a longer battery life than smart phones do today.

This is why I love my Nokia 100.

I don't want or need a smartphone, that's what my computer - or on the go, my laptop - is for.

I want a reliable phone that will get me out of emergencies and sticky situations.

A smartphone that runs out of battery in a few measly hours, overheats, and has terrible design flaws simply does not do the job I want it to do.

Admittedly I had a very bad experience with an early model of HTC Desire, so I'm more untrusting of the things than most.

Smart phones have gotten pretty good about scaling power usage. When your not actively using them they can hold their charge for a long time (even while they are still listening for incoming calls). The only time you run into short battery life is when you are actually them to do intensive stuff. On the rare case where some background app is eating your battery life, you can even feel your phone get hot and know you should reboot it (or close the offending app).

If you read any green tech blogs, there seems to be a constant stream of battery breakthroughs in the lab. But why do they not materialize in commercial batteries? Li-ion has been stuck at about the same level for more than ten years.

I was trying to find some meta research on what fails with the commercialization of these technologies. There's probably hundreds of breakthroughs per year, or at least that's the impression you get. You'd think at least some of them could be scaled up in a relatively straightforward way. Or maybe it's just press release hype and the research hasn't been going anywhere for fifteen years...

I've always so defer the exact same thing. I always thought it would make an interesting blog; someone who just goes through the "breakthroughs" of five years ago and actually contacts the researchers and writes up what went wrong.

Who's with me?

If you write the blog I'll read it. Does that help?

It could require a lot more effort as there's no glamorous press releases to just copy paste - you'd have to contact people who might not be so willing to advertise their failures, and there might be rules preventing them from saying much.

But oh how it would be interesting! Just aggregate some blogs with a five year delay so there should have been ample time to have developed something.

Or just even write a few longer investigative pieces on why technology X failed to materialize despite immense promises.

Just about to follow the link. Bit worried it'll be to an unstoppable 20 minute video.

Tally ho!

And I'm just sitting here just waiting for some HN folk to tell me why this is farcical / never going to make to production. It's a lot quicker than reading the article and all getting my hopes up.

This is a nice result, I am hopeful it will hold up. There is a tremendous amount of cool stuff you can do with really high power density capacitors (besides weapons of course).

When I was putting the solar panels on my roof in 2003 I figured that if you had enough 'super caps' that you could build into your foundation then you could do a nearly off-grid low to no maintenance project. (Battery maintenance is a huge pain)

The other things you can do are things like smart phones you touch to a charger for a second to get another 8 hours of run time.

Super caps aren't right for homes. A home's power draw is relatively even (and so is solar charging), a super cap is for when the power draw or charge is very fast and very short.

For those interested in more info on this, this type of capacitors is a supercapacitor (the name is used only once in the article in a caption).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

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