Fancy charging up your electric car in 10 minutes?

[jbcarioca]

A brief article, well written and well explained:
Ultracapacitors, graphene, nanotubes: BBC sees the future


Fancy charging up your electric car in 10 minutes?

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

A brief article, well written and well explained:
Ultracapacitors, graphene, nanotubes: BBC sees the future


Fancy charging up your electric car in 10 minutes?

That's funny. 3 reasons not to read it.

 

[scaesare]

Unfortunately, the title is a bit click-baity. The article itself admits that augmenting your existing battery with supercapacitors for peak-load handling for a few seconds at a time is the only real practical approach for an EV, even with whatever new developments they believe they have. So "charging it in 10 minutes" isn't really possible.

 

[jbcarioca]

Unfortunately, the title is a bit click-baity. The article itself admits that augmenting your existing battery with supercapacitors for peak-load handling for a few seconds at a time is the only real practical approach for an EV, even with whatever new developments they believe they have. So "charging it in 10 minutes" isn't really possible.

Yes it is. Still with nanotechnology advancing rapidly we have some intriguing possibilities for ultracapacitors to ease stress on main batteries. How fast can this develop? They're already deployed in a number of aerospace applications, like some Airbus main door opening.

 

[scaesare]

Yes it is. Still with nanotechnology advancing rapidly we have some intriguing possibilities for ultracapacitors to ease stress on main batteries. How fast can this develop? They're already deployed in a number of aerospace applications, like some Airbus main door opening.

Agreed that it would be a cool application. If they can get the volumetric energy densities where they make sense, it would be interesting to see what it could do for acceleration.. or allowing regen at higher SOC's, etc...

 

[jbcarioca]

Agreed that it would be a cool application. If they can get the volumetric energy densities where they make sense, it would be interesting to see what it could do for acceleration.. or allowing regen at higher SOC's, etc...

Presently the applications in use are ones that require almost instant discharge and charge plus extreme durability. For aircraft doors, for example, the ultra capacitor approach saves lots of weight over the traditional counter-balanced approach and is more reliable. They are also used as starting power for ICE and smilier high-power-short-duration-frequent cycle applications.

They will keep improving for certain, but how soon they can be light and energy-dense enough to help with BEV's is a different question. They certainly would do marvels for regeneration and fast launches. Whether they will be able to do much else only time will tell. I think they will, mostly because clever nanotechnology will dramatically increase the effective surface area. A huge advantage is that they can use cheap ubiquitous materials.

 

[thenaimis]

I see these articles every few weeks and not one of these people looking for investors has ever even mentioned the logistics of supporting infrastructure. Yes you can charge supercapacitors in milliseconds. You might even be able to scale that up to a much larger charge. But how are you planning on delivering that much energy to a vehicle in 5 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever the wonder figure is this week? I've seen the M.V. Ampere and it has, I believe, two charging stations that it goes back and forth between, 1 hour round trip, during which time a battery bank on the shore is relatively slowly charged. But that's one boat and two charging stations. And that boat has a charging connector that by my estimate based on video is two connectors roughly 6 inches in diameter.

Is it possible? Absolutely, but it's not happening without massive changes in infrastructure and a bunch of compromising in car designs.

As I said at the start, these are mostly (if not entirely) people looking for investors that aren't particularly skeptical. Or someone comes up with an idea and then marketing gets hold of it and just scales everything up like it was magic.