This is exciting work, following a direct iterative path towards a true solid state battery.
No chemical or physical changes take place, its just a conductor with a very large surface area, and electrons are held on the surface.
Basic differences with current batteries are that
there are no heavy ,expensive, materials, no chemical changes or flamable gasses or liquids, no swelling or other physical changes durring charging cycles, and capacitors have 100 times the
number of charge cycles before degradation than the best chemical cells.
The key here is that they are growing a nano fibre structure on graphene, useing a very common
plastic feed stock, used in many electronic devices now.The current iteration is one full order of magnitude more energy dense than
current capacitor designs.And the upper limit for capacitive energy storage, is unknown.
It is currently possible to buy "supper- cap" strorage banks for off grid and other uses, and they are common in many consumer products, including cordless tools, etc.
I'm rather tired of these "$LABORATORY_EXPERIMENT could sweep the world" articles.
If the complete supply chains for all the ingredients of the thing do not already exist and operate in the billions of dollars, it can't conceivably "solve" anything at global scale in under three decades. More likely, seven decades.
In the world of atoms, scaling is not just a matter of emailing AWS. It's a matter of project plans and environmental reviews and planning permissions and financing. Multiplied several thousand fold.
In the mean time, announcements like this serve mainly to keep us passive, waiting for the miracle.
This is exciting work, following a direct iterative path towards a true solid state battery. No chemical or physical changes take place, its just a conductor with a very large surface area, and electrons are held on the surface. Basic differences with current batteries are that there are no heavy ,expensive, materials, no chemical changes or flamable gasses or liquids, no swelling or other physical changes durring charging cycles, and capacitors have 100 times the number of charge cycles before degradation than the best chemical cells. The key here is that they are growing a nano fibre structure on graphene, useing a very common plastic feed stock, used in many electronic devices now.The current iteration is one full order of magnitude more energy dense than current capacitor designs.And the upper limit for capacitive energy storage, is unknown. It is currently possible to buy "supper- cap" strorage banks for off grid and other uses, and they are common in many consumer products, including cordless tools, etc.
I'm rather tired of these "$LABORATORY_EXPERIMENT could sweep the world" articles.
If the complete supply chains for all the ingredients of the thing do not already exist and operate in the billions of dollars, it can't conceivably "solve" anything at global scale in under three decades. More likely, seven decades.
In the world of atoms, scaling is not just a matter of emailing AWS. It's a matter of project plans and environmental reviews and planning permissions and financing. Multiplied several thousand fold.
In the mean time, announcements like this serve mainly to keep us passive, waiting for the miracle.