3 ms·
> "Supercapacitors are not perfect. Existing iterations discharge power quickly, and are not ideal for steady output, which would be needed to power a house thr
by swores 2y ago
> "Supercapacitors are not perfect. Existing iterations discharge power quickly, and are not ideal for steady output, which would be needed to power a house throughout the day."
Could someone kindly explain to me how this works?
For example, if you had an empty lithium battery which can store X amount of power, and a fully charged supercapacitor which holds 10X, can you charge the lithium battery to full and leave 9X in the supercapacitor?
If no, why not and how do you (both safely and usefully) get energy out of a supercapacitor? Or if yes, could a relatively small battery between the SC and a house act as a buffer to stop it mattering that the SC discharges "too quickly and unsteadily"?
- IX-103 2y agoThe issue with a super-capacitor is that it leaks. If you put X Joules in there and wait a while then you will only have X/2 Joules. Wait a little longer and you'll only have X/4. So on the other hand, super-capacitors are great at charging and discharging rapidly with low loss. So if you want to fire a high powered laser for a few femtoseconds then they work great. You can't get power into and out of a battery that quickly because chemical reactions take time, so super-capacitors have their applications. It's just that holding power for more than a few minutes is probably not it.
- swores 2y agoThanks!
- EricE 2y agoYou just have to put regulation in for supercapacitors that batteries don't need. Batteries have natural internal resistance, so they "meter" the power out, whereas capacitors are perfectly happy releasing all of their energy at once (also known as a bomb). If accounted for I don't see it as a big deal, but it is a potentially explosive risk.
- swores 2y agoThanks!
- GrantMoyer 2y agoThere are some practical losses in efficiency from voltage conversions and such (a capcitor's voltage is proportional to the square root of it's stored energy, while a battery's voltage is a much flatter function of stored energy), but theoretically, yes you can do just that. The biggest issue is that capacitors typically have much lower energy densities than batteries.
- swores 2y agoThanks!