Tuesday June 27, 2006

"Super Battery"

sciencentral.com :

Joel Schindall and his team at M.I.T. plan to make long battery charge times and expensive replacements a thing of the past. Rechargable and disposable batteries use a chemical reaction to produce energy. "That's an effective way to store a large amount of energy," he says, "but the problem is that after many charges and discharges ... the battery loses capacity to the point where the user has to discard it." Capacitors contain energy as an electric field of charged particles between two electrodes. Capacitors charge faster and last longer than normal batteries. However, storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the electrodes, so even today's most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries.

The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes. Each nanotube is 30,000 times thinner than a human hair. The nanotube filaments increase the surface area of the electrodes and allow the capacitor to store more energy. Schindall says this combines the strength of today's batteries with the longevity and speed of capacitors. "It could be recharged many, many times perhaps hundreds of thousands of times, and ... it could be recharged very quickly, just in a matter of seconds rather than a matter of hours," he says.

This technology has broad practical possibilities for any device that requires a battery. Schindall thinks hybrid cars would be a particularly popular application, especially because current hybrid batteries are expensive to replace. Schindall also sees the ecological benefit to these reinvented capacitors. When ordinary batteries are disposed, toxic chemicals like cadmium can seep into the ground. "[The ultra-capacitor] is better for the environment, because it allows the user to not worry about replacing his battery," he says.

(2006-06-27 22:59:17 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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