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48 Comments
- johndi, on 10/12/2007, -4/+29Can you reach in your tinfoil hat, and pull the patent number out for us?
- RichyFreeway, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16Any evidence to support that?
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -2/+15When I posted a story on Digg about the RC solar car I made, that uses just one 10F ultracapacitor (no batteries), it got just 5 diggs.
But a story about supercapacitors alone gets (at the time of this writting) 10 times more digs. The world is a strange place :)
P.S. If anyone is interested, the story is here: http://digg.com/robots/Small_RC_car_using_a_super_capacitor_and_solar_panels - Nougat, on 10/12/2007, -5/+15"Yes and lets not forget the car that runs on water that the petrol companies are hiding."
http://www.H20car.org
I also recall reading an article in Popular Mechanics circa 1983 which contained Ford Motor Company's schematics for a car that would run on water. However, it required distilled heavy water - which comes from distilling seawater. Split H2O into hydrogen and oxygen, burn the hydrogen with the oxygen, most of the exhaust is water which is returned to the fuel systel. At the time, a gallon of distilled heavy water cost more per gallon than gasoline, so the car was not marketable. If there was a seawater distilling and delivery infrastructure anything like the existing oil refining and delivery infrastructure, water-as-fuel would be very inexpensive indeed. - JasonPrini, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12Like a nuclear battery? Alpha particles can do more than just detect smoke...
- zachgc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Love the end of the article. Awesome.
- jool, on 10/12/2007, -10/+15Yes and lets not forget the car that runs on water that the petrol companies are hiding.
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Maybe that specific type of ultracapacitors are only in the lab, but the ultracapacitors can be bought. I have 6 of them, one is 10F the other 5 are 50F.
A little expensive, but they are very nice toys :) - radu79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Umm, maybe because if they do that, all the cellphone, PDA, laptop, toys, cars, and so on would buy their stuff, effectively putting the other manufacturers out of business, or making them get a license for that technology?
- kacymartin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3because you can charge an ass-ton for them and have them put in about any freakin portable personal electronic device on the planet. Thus making a bajillion dollars.
- shoover, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3In all fairness, your car doesn't use nanotubes. Still worth the digg though!
- mudgod, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1BMW plans on using something similar basically replacing batteries with capacitors in their future semi-hybrid SUV's
http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/previews/38421/bmw_x5_hybrid.html - kacymartin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1and they can be charged a LOT faster than batteries can.
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So you are suggesting that instead of putting 3.6 volts in the car, which is 3 times the voltage the car was supposed to take in the first place, I should add another circuit to provide 12 volts to the car, and set the motor on fire? :)
- Al.x, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I digged your story now. You can still to the front page even though you're not in the queue.
- radu79, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You do get maybe 100 times more energy from them, but they can be recharged for only 300 to 500 times.
The ultracapacitors, on the other hand, can be recharged over 100K times, and can operate in extreme temperatures no battery can. - radu79, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Every single company can immensely benefit from such a technology, I highly doubt they would want to bury it.
- CodeTrap, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yeah.. just go buy the energizer rechargables. You spend a little more initally, but you get 200 times the life out of them.
- norris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1So I have been reading up on these that past 30m and this tech looks really promising when combined with fuel cells. By combining the two you can use weaker fuel cells to power larger vehicles and use ultra cap assistance when it is needed. The caps will fill back up when the fuel cell has excess juice to give. This would reduce the overall cost of a fuel cell vehicle.
Apparently this has already been done for some fuel cell buses. - cillian, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1RE what somebody said about a water car:
Yes, you can burn the hydrogen with the oxygen, to get energy. The only problem is, the best way to split water into hydrogen and oxygen is electrolysis. This, however, requires energy. Infact, the same amount of energy you get out of burning the hydrogen. So you can't just generate power from water - you have to put power in first - kinda like a rechargable battery, which doesn't come pre-charged. - cypherz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2dugg
- n00854180t, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I'll just say it has to do with specfic conditions when electromagnetism influences gravity (which is normally so small an interaction as to be very difficult to observe).
- kacymartin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2capacitors don't get discharged when not in use, batteries do. Capacitors can hold their charge for an extremely long time. And the benefit is the recharge time. If you had a battery that could power an iPod for X hours and a capacitor that could power it for the same X hours. It would take the battery a lot longer to recharge than the capacitor. Its jut the nature of how the energy is stored in the device that makes extremely large capacitors better than batteries.
actually there are polyacene batteries which are basically a merge of batteries and capacitors that are used in things like PDA's and Cellphones to hold information while the battery is not in the device. They are pretty handy in that they hold some properties of batteries and capacitors. i have 2 .6F polyacene capacitors powering a solar clock on my desk - GruntboyX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1its a great idea, all you are missing is some electronics. You can use a boost power supply with something i belive is called a linear regulator. Grab about 5 or 6 of these 50F super caps and you can use them as bulk storage. The boost supply will use switching to allow yout increase the voltage. Also the boost can regulate your voltage so it will never drop till you are just about out of juice. A friend of mine designed one of these for an RC CAR and plug it up 120V DC supply. He would race with it, pit charge in about 15 seconds or so and then head out back to the track without having to change batteries. And the benifit is his voltage never sagged over time. So he would lap people as they started to run low on juice. What you propose is very feasible, just need some electronics and such to make it work.
If you want to look for more information, Google switching power supplies, Boost, buck and there a few others that i cant think off of the top of my head. But its basically what dc to dc converters are made of. Come to think of it. You may be able to find a DC to DC converter that goes from 2.5V DC to 5V or 9 or 12V DC. This will allow you to increase the voltage, and use less current and allow you..in theory to prolong the juice in the caps, and make it more efficient.
I am looking at doing this for Airsoft, the guns use 8.4V batteries that add lots of weight to the guns, I figured i could loose a couple of pounds switching to caps. - kacymartin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1you could consider a car that used electrolysis to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen and used the hydrogen to power the car with a fuel cell a "water powered car". but it would really be a fuel cell car. or ultimately powered by a battery or whatever powered the electrolysis.
- Pplus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2This is a poorly written dupe of this: http://digg.com/science/The_Biggest_Breakthrough_in_*Battery_technology_in_200_years*
on which I commented this:
The first paragraph of the article is misleading. "Just about everything that runs on batteries -- flashlights, cell phones, electric cars, missile-guidance systems -- would be improved with a better energy supply." Problem being, things like flashlights and cell phones would be improved with a better energy supply, just not this alternative.
As Mousse said above, these guys are talking about short term storage devices. They are using cell phones as a way to get people interested in the article, but if you read it, the applications are really not anything that would improve handheld electronics. These would be used for very specific applications. - CraigJ, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I think we should just run the planet on dilithium crystals. It works on Star Trek so it must be real?
- ragingchikn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2:| i don't get the joke.... it's a joke right..... cause there's no way this guy is serious.....
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I would think that some handheld electronics would benefit greatly.
Imagine a little (calculator style) solar panel to maintain the charge in the cap for remote controls, flashlights, mp3 players.
Little things that when not in use just just sit around building a charge. A capacitor with a large capacity would make this practical - radu79, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1For a calculator yes, but for an MP3 player not yet.
They can't store too much energy (maybe just half an hour of playtime) and they get discharged even while not in use. - shagz7, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2only took 200 years... it's about time!
- tavisjohn, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Hello!!! Zero Point Modules DO NOT EXIST!
http://www.gateworld.net/omnipedia/technology/z/zeropointmodule.shtml
Are you confusing TV with Reality again? - oringo, on 10/12/2007, -7/+7The article provides no useful information at all; it's just another digg/style blog. No digg.
- Jetfire, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3No digg, Misleading Title for the main reason. The Title make is sound like they were comming to market now. "New Batteries at Long Last". This stuff is worst then Vaporware at the moment since it's still in the lab and cost way to much.
- willcode4beer, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0@Pplus
I guess you've never heard of that amazing invention that can control the discharge rate of a capacitor (it even works with batteries), its called a resistor.
You can go to wally world and buy a flashlight that you shake to charge a capacitor and have it light for quite a little while. - Pplus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I suppose if you wanted a calculator that would let you press one or two keys, or a flashlight that basically strobed once for at most a couple of seconds, or to listen to your favorite 2 seconds of your favorite song then these would be feasible.
Capacitors are fast discharge devices. They aren't magic batteries that have all of the upside and none of the down. - mrrbob, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0Just ask yourself if you where a battery maker... Why should I do something really stupid like produce a battery that would last longer and thus cut my income by some large percentage. Hmmmm... yes we will get right to work on that ASAP.... NOT!
- GruntboyX, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0But a startup would do this, to develop business. The problem is these start-ups get bought up by bigger corporations and their projects are slowed or terminated, or adjusted to meet the biggers corporation finicial outlook.
I believe we have seen this with Google, Microsoft, Boeing, Raytheon,Exon....the list i am sure could go on and on. - kacymartin, on 10/12/2007, -6/+3heres one i've submitted with a little more info:
http://digg.com/technology/Using_carbon_nanotubes_to_build_a_Super-capacitor - shoover, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4@Nougat
Your website link has no information, and is merely selling a book for $19.99 that 'claims' to show you how to run your car on water. Why don't YOU buy the stupid book and then make a website to show the rest of the world how to do it. Who knows, maybe the petroleum companies will pay you millions to shut up too!
Yea, sure... - rm999, on 10/12/2007, -8/+3How come the comments are always full of a single troll and 10 people who fell for it? It makes reading the comments really hard and makes me seriously question some people on here... I mod down people who reply to trolls because digg doesn't autocollapse replies to a modded down comment.
- Osjpr, on 10/12/2007, -7/+2I would believe :P
- dan00b, on 10/12/2007, -11/+5are you drunk, or have you just forgotten certain laws of physics that were developed by Newton?
GTFO! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -11/+3Which is nothing more than a dupe of a previous digg.
- luma, on 10/12/2007, -9/+0"There's no point in me verifying it. No one would believe me anyway."
Yeah we already got you covered on that one. - n00854180t, on 10/12/2007, -27/+3There's no point in me verifying it. No one would believe me anyway.
- Osjpr, on 10/12/2007, -26/+2CAN n00854180t VERIFY THAT CLAIM OR GTFO
- n00854180t, on 10/12/2007, -43/+8There's actually technology in existence that would allow one to have a battery that'd never need charging, and would last (virtually) forever. However, the major battery companies have deals in place so that these won't see the market for a very long time.
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