I work in pv/ battery industry in Belgium and we recently met a startup called ForE which created a hybrid super capacitor that is already commercialised as an ESS for home storage. Impressive specs : charging at 6C speed, 50k cycles with more than 80 % of energy. Dod of 100 %. Weight was about 70kg per 5kwh unit. They use lithium as the hybrid material. I can send you a mail with all their info, would be nice to cover !
It's funny that so many people focus on fast charging, not that it's not important, it certainly is, but imo the proliferation of level 2 destination chargers is far more important. Your car is parked most of the time, and if there are low speed, and thus low installation cost, chargers pretty much everywhere, the necessity of fast charging begins to only exit for road trips, and niche travel situations
Exactly! That’s one of my favorite points. Problem is that it requires a paradigm shift in thinking from the long standing norm of “fueling up at the station” to “destination charging”. A lot of urban planners and policymakers who still haven’t got that yet.
True. I have a ev and only time I have a problem is when it is time for holliday. Once a year I get problem planning the trip that extends the battery. Where and how long to wait and is there a outlet. Where we live a ev battery holds for a long trip but not for holliday.
@@joelsmith4394 it's kind of a funny thing to coming from my perspective because I'm an electrician, commercial buildings have an enormous amount of power available! Adding twenty 30 amp outlets would probably require adding 200 amp breaker in the main distribution panel, and then adding one new panel to feed all of those outlets. It's kind of stuff is done ALL THE TIME for servers in data centers, and it's a really simple job. As soon as you try to add things like fast chargers it gets orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive
We are deep into diminishing returns. Your everyday Tesla is going from single digits to 80% in half an hour. A Taycan in 15 min. Plus very very few people are doing 600+ mile days so they'll only have one charging stop. 15 minutes one way or the other doesn't matter on a 10 hour drive.
Interesting... Thanks Dave! [Electrical Engineer here...] But i don't really see how a buffer-capacitor bank would help with fast-charging an EV. To have this capability, one would need a capacitor-bank with, say, 80% the capacity of the EV's battery. Given the much lower energy-density of capacitors, even supercapacitors, that would be a capacitor-bank considerably larger than the car itself. 🤔 The other problem with fast-charging EVs, though, not addressed in this video, the grid-load of the charging-stations, is where _(large)_ capacitor-banks could prove to be useful. To charge a 60kWh battery (that's a _small_ EV...) in one hour, one needs to supply 60kW of power, for an hour. That's already 4 to 6 times as much power as an average European home draws in wintertime... To charge the same battery faster, say in 6 minutes, you'd need to supply 600kW. That's really an obscene amount of power. Not many places exist where the grid can provide such amounts of power. But... A capacitor-bank based fast-charger could charge itself _slowly_ from the grid, say with 50kW - 60kW, and then when an EV is connected, it could dump all that stored energy into the EV's battery in minutes (provided the battery can handle that, of course) and you're off. The brawback/compromise is that the charging-point would then need an hour or two to recharge itself before another EV can be fully charged.
Everything Electric Show,just did a video on this, which featured a new ''buffered' fast charger to do exactly what you described, except it uses LFP batteries instead of miracle capacitors.
@@docwatson1134level 3 fast charging uses 480vdc, 600kw means 1200amps. You would need six strands of 3/0 copper for that. It is unlikely that a regular sized human could comfortably use a plug/receptical with that much weight on it.
Hey Dave, American here, binding on TH-cam science and engineering channels just because I happen to be an American at this particularly …. point and time. Thanks for your kind, calm rationality! Your show today was likely a therapy session for many of us Yanks!
Just a general comment. Going from lab results to cost-efficient manufacturing is a long difficult road that very few inventions survive. I wouldn't hold my breath on this one either.
Interesting if it can be replicated and scaled up to commercial potential. I saw no mention of material or fabrication costs or methods. No way to know if this is simply an interesting experiment, results to be verified, or a potentially significant development.
Not just manufacturing. Also reliability. Things change when you move out a clean and safe lab environment. Even stuff like how does it handle different temperatures and swings in temperatures. Where I live we can experience 20+ degree temperature swings within 24 hours.
Some major problems with this supercapacitor speculation for EVs: 1) On charging, the supercap buffer would quickly fill up and then you'd be limited to the rate at which the battery can charge on its own. The supercap might actually end up slowing the overall charging time for a given amount of range, if space required for the supercap reduces space available for the battery. 2) For regen or acceleration for normal stops and go's, the battery can absorb much higher rates for say 5-8 seconds than it can absorb or output sustained for the say 15-20 minutes to descend or climb a 7%/20-mile mountain grade. Basically, when you consider the tradeoffs in the use of available space and cost of the supercap vs battery for the short stops/accels and longer hill climbs/declines, plus the incremental cost and space of the power electronics to handle higher currents / power, the low energy density of the supercap makes it unattractive for practically all EV or hybrid vehicle applications.
100% This. I don't how people think low capacity capacitors will benefit the charging time of the main battery. The mass is better spent on additional battery capacity that has much better energy density. I mainly see capacitors getting used for a bit of regen on some kind of ICE hybrids, where they can absorb more power than the small hybrid battery and even then it's a stretch.
I agree in all parts. One of the better comments. Capacitors are a good idea to offset the pulse of start of a charge [plug in or regen] though there size is insignificant and nothing is gained by using larger capacity ones.
@@blogobre Even for absorbing or generating an initial pulse, batteries of any size sufficient to propel a vehicle for any significant distance will be capable of generating or absorbing such a pulse without degradation of any kind. The pulse handling capability of the electrical system will basically be limited not by the battery, but rather by its power electronics, where capacitors or even ultracaps are employed to avoid overloading the power electronic's transistor devices (IGBTs, MCTS, MOSFETs, etc.).
It's really encouraging that these niche developments in material science and other sectors are occurring ever more frequently. They just might discover the magick-wand that will save our collective rear end. And thanks for helping keep us so well informed Dave 👍🙂
@@ronaldgarrison8478 No, that was political propaganda. I was warned/briefed in 1958 not to believe a thing in the newspapers by a 73 yr. old mentor who told me stories about the lies printed by Hurst papers that dated around the end of the century. I can extrapolate. If propaganda has deceived and helped the rulers rule for 100+ years, why not for 200+ years, in the USA? And elsewhere, since the printing press. Case in point: For the superstitious, the first big contract printing was for the Bible, King James Version.
Suoer caoacitors would be great not only for battery health during fast charging, but even more so for regen braking. Regenerating more electricity while braking extends range quite a bit while driving in cities.
Yes , an interesting development, but there is a bit of a flaw here. The Caps/Supercaps/Ultracaps are really good at short term charge rates but pretty poor at energy/mass , this means that a hybrid battery system with a small Cap/SC/UC is great as a brake/acceleration buffer but pretty useless at battery charging as you still have to transfer the energy into the primary storage battery , and that is dictated by the primary battery capability. We have used them in the past for short duration use on tram systems that need to cross short distances between overhead lines, such as conservation areas in cities.
@bellshooter Yeah, all of the times over the years I've considered ultra capacitors being pared with a battery, I always end up realising it's better off just using that weight to add more battery, except for if you use a small capacitor sized to take one hard regen, then discharge in the next few seconds of acceleration to take peak loads off the battery. Assuming that capacitor won't need replacing too often being used like that, and won't add too much more cost and complexity. Using them to reduce charge times is completely pointless until they can increase the energy density by multiple times. And at that point, the batteries will probably have a fast enough charge rate that supplying the charge at that rate will be as much of the limit as the batteries. And may not be even worth trying to improve charge rates much more. At 8.8 W/h per kg, these capacitors would only save a few seconds charging in the best case scenario.
Hi Dave. Just wanted to say that this channel makes me feel optimistic for the future, at a time when so much else in the world is trying to make me a pessimist. So, thanks.
With such high power, the copper tapes that these new compositions will be deposited on inside the capacitor might be heating up a lot, also regen breaking is already quite efficient however these caps could eliminate all regen losses due to capacitors charge discharge cycles(hybrid cars already have a massive capacitor inside their inverters for regen braking...) . These caps might just be a very good option for standard electronic devices as well so this is generally a very interesting news. Cheers!
The charging time discussion is mostly over. Currently the top spec platforms like the Taycan at 350 kW are going from single digits to 80% in 15 minutes or less. What we are waiting for is that type of charging performance to come down market, and be adopted by the legacy manufacturers who are a generation behind. The biggest issue they are facing now is adequate pack cooling.
350kW from 10% to 80% in 15minutes means trying to extract 1 MEGAWATT! Most houses use less than that in a MONTH! Please explain exactly how you can deliver near on 2,000 amps of 3 phase (480V)..... (Double that current if you are using single phase. And double it again if you're in the USA, 120v. That's 8,000 amps... You are living in cloud-cuckoo land if you think that's ever going to happen.)....
@@Chris-hx3om You are mixing up kW (unit of power) and kWh (unit of Energy). Edit: "Please explain exactly how you can deliver near on 2,000 amps of 3 phase (480V)..." I saw what I believe was an Out Of Spec Podcast episode where they mentioned Fast chargers with "virtual" transformers. The initial high voltage DC conversion is just switched at medium voltage directly. With 800V architecture you are out of the "low voltage" regime (limit around 700V) anyways, I am pretty sure coils are still needed: but they can be made far smaller (dependent on switching speed).
@@Chris-hx3om This threw me for a bit, until I realized you misread the units. They're talking about a peak charging rate of 350kW for the new Taycan Turbo S and 4S, not the battery capacity in kW*h. Firstly, it was a small exaggeration as it's only rated up to 320kW. The Taycan 4S has only an 87kW*h battery. Here's a quote from an article where they tested it on a 350kW capable charging station.. "Upon plugging in the Taycan 4S, the EA station delivered 295 kW right out of the gate, going from 8% to 30% in just four minutes. By 40% the car was steadily charging at 320 kW, dropping off to 250 kW after reaching about 65%. In the end, we went from 8% to 80% in a mere 16 minutes" Yes that still appears to be 666 amps if drawing from 480V source, but some level 3 chargers are truly rated up to 350kW charging speeds, so they pull it off somehow. I think in most locations you're unlikely to get that on all the charging stations at once (and never from both ports on a single station).
@@jamesphillips2285 Following my first reply I did a little digging around, and Electrify America does not give any hint at how they achieve 350kW charging rates. Best guess is each individual charging station uses two 480V 3 phase circuits each with a 400A breaker which is an available unit of service.
@@daemn42 🤦♂ Yes, quite right. 320kW is the POWER output, not the storage capacity. I was thinking at the time that it was a damn big battery, but didn't think any further as I know KIA have a massive battery in the EV9.... Anyway, it's a metric sh1t-ton of copper cabling that would be needed to feed these 'fast charging' charging places. I live in Australia and any trips planned are planned around fueling (I have a diesel car with a 1,200km range, so not so important to me), but an EV with a 300km range (maybe!) is going to need to be charging at every opportunity. I can imagine a dozen EVs (not uncommon to see just about anywhere in Australia is lines of cars waiting to fuel). The supply to those charging station will need to be truly epic!
I've always wondered why they don't use supercapacitors for launch from stop and regen applications; thanks for spelling it out. This sounds like great research; maybe one day, we will get to that dream.
@@JohanLofgren-jc4mhsupercapacitors and ultracapacitors are used worldwide in industry and trains, busses etc. Also Toyota uses supercapacitors in several hybrid models and in motorsport. We use supercapacitors in our windturbines for emergency stop/vane- positioning the blades. Much more reliable than quit ordinary industrial grade 24V batteries in the freezing cold (-40C).
@@mafarmerga Yes, and to get the sorts of energy delivery to charge in 'fast time' requires massive current. E=IxV/h. There's no way around that formula. If you want 50kWh in 10 minutes with a 480v source, the current needs to be 50kWh/480v/0.6hr = 173 amps. That's assuming 100% efficiency in all the conversion processes (AC to DC rectification, DC current regulation, losses in the cable to the vehicle, losses inside the battery due to the way the chemical processes work). Call it 200 amps. Now, that's for each car and a 10 minute charge of 50kWh. Picture a charging station out of a city, on a main route to a holiday destination. 10 car are all lined up and plugged in. 2,000 amps!
@@mafarmergaProbably not with such a low energy density. Makes them worse than useless for regular fast charging, if they're in the car. And for grid storage, maybe if they are extremely cheap, easy to make at scale and reliable, if they are going to have much benefit over LFP.
Wikipedia says Lithium supercapacitors are 10-15 Wh/kg. So why are we excited by 9 Wh/kg from Barium Titanate . Doesn't sound 19X to me? Now looking at the cost per KG, barium is way cheaper than Lithium, that might be exciting? I think I want a bit more information?
They are used in tandem. Charge caps quickly, trickle into the battery. Caps won't be the full charge, but good for a splash and dash, or to shorten total charging time.
Quite - the addition of a supercapacitor can be useful for handling short-term transients like braking and "boosted" acceleration, but won't affect battery charge times.
Charging stations themselves would greatly benifit from on-site capacitors that could supply full output to many cars, without putting the same strain on the grid to suppy at the rate needed.
Your battery might be limited to charging at 300 kW. That's the bulk of your capacity, say 80 kWh but if you also had 10 kWh of capacitor that could charge at 1000 kWh your total charge session time would be shorter.
@@dogsbodyish8403exactly, and this wasn’t explained very well. If you have two energy storage systems, one at 250 Wh/kg and the other at 8, maybe you can justify putting in 10-20% of your battery + cap weight into the cap side of things if it improves practical regen efficiency from 75% to 90%, but it doesn’t do a damn thing for charging the battery which has hundreds of times the energy storage. Chargers already ramp their power and don’t need caps on the car to handle spikes. So interesting for regen - and this video was very deceptive for having anything whatsoever to do with stationary charging times.
Indycar has just began using their new hybrid system, and it uses super capacitors. It's is incredible how fast the system charges and discharges. High level specs and overview can be found at the Indycar channel. I think a small super capacitor system for EVs to capture breaking energy and then deploy at high current demand like acceleration would be a nice addition if it helped to preserve the Li Ion battery.
The main reasons a EV manufacturer would not integrate supercapacitors would be, much higher cost, needs extra spaceclaim, added complexity, safety, much lower energydensity of supercapacitors (like 10 times at least (latest cell technology at 300Wh/Kg and increasing). There's just no need or businessmodel to make for in a electric car right now.
Really interesting! Although it only seems to be people who don't own EVs who complain about charging times. If the energy density of these capacitors is so low, presumably a lot of battery capacity would need to be sacrificed to make room for them? Similarly, if you prioritise battery capacity, presumably the capacitors won't be able to add more than a few miles per charge cycle? It's a nice idea, I can't help feeling that this is a raft of new problems for a solution to a problem which didn't exist in the first place.
I liked the idea of swappable batteries, like you do with Calor bottles, pull-in, drop off your flat battery and load up with an identical charged one.
I remember when I was in Australia in the 80s, one of the universities put forward the idea of EVs running on lead-acid batteries, with petrol stations replaced by electrolyte-changing stations. I'm no expert, but it did sound plausible to me...
I prefer this solution as well, but it requires too many layers of cooperation and standardization to be viable within the current market. :| And really I think the current market is so fundamental to the problem that it just needs to go too, but that's not exactly an easy sell. You'd have to have staffed battery replacement stations and a standard system across all EVs allowing them to easily release the battery as well as plug in a new one, all without the involved rig being a safety hazard on the road. Then you have to have all of these staffed battery replacement stations being willing to carry the necessary hazardous material insurance / licensing, as well as able to dispose of batteries that get dropped off that are too degraded to recharge. It's all of the costs associated with running a gas station, plus the need to actually store and dispose of batteries dropped off by customers, without the profit margins enjoyed by gas stations. And most of them would have to be full service, which adds extra costs that most gas stations have cut. EV chargers are already having issues just with installing and maintaining user-run, unstaffed charging stations. Nobody is going to put up front the capital to try and create a battery drop off station that manufacturers aren't even prepared to support.
A very poor idea. The inventory of batteries that must be socked at each charging station waiting to be fitted to a car would be huge. hese batteries are expensive and are not earning revenue while they are just sitting around. Having sttandard batteries means that manufacturers are not free to design their batteries to take advanttage of their specific vehicle layout. Swappable bateries might have made some sense when battery capacities were low and charging rates very slow. Those times thave passed.
Have you seen any video of battery removal from a car ? it would take half a day to take one down and putting it back up, there're high voltage involved, cooling pipes and coolant liquid plus a considerable number of bolts, the batteries are heavy as well... beside the time how much would a swap cost with all the professional work and equipment needed 24/7 ? the other thing is batteries would need to be standardised, mission almost impossible as there're tto many different vehicles which are physically different and have different power and cooling requirements.
I'm not clear how adding capacitors improves the charging speed of the overall battery pack if those capacitors aren't a decent fraction of the overall energy storage. Feels like having a wide funnel on a narrow tube - you can't fill the tube any faster, you've just dumped a bit more in at the top which will still take as long to flow in as if it were a narrow funnel. Can anyone enlighten me?
Exactly. That nice graphic of the car charging in seconds is fine if you just want to have the energy you can stuff into a reasonable weight of capacitors. In the real world you'd be stopping every block or two to do it again. At the figures given you'd need 28kg of capacitor for every 1kg of Li-Ion you want to charge.
Yeah, they will be worse than useless for plug in fast charging. Any small benefit will be literally out weighed by their excessive weight. 8.8 W/h per kg also means they will only store 8.8 kW/h per metric tonne.
It depends on the current state of the art in the geometry of the plates. Last time I looked they've been trying to change the geometry of the plates by, for example, making them spiky so as to increase the surface area of the plates without increasing the overall size of the capacitor. Energy storage is proportional to the capacitor plate surface area, so if they can drastically increase that without increasing the size of the overall capacitor, they will be able to store more energy in the same size package. Improvements in dielectric then help extend that. Haven't heard where they're at lately in the geometry research, as that will determine the next step which is how to actually manufacture them (without the spikes shorting out).
Capacitors in conjunction with batteries are the most optimal solution for sure. For even a very basic example; I have an annoying engine stop-start system on my 2.5-liter petrol powered car with a lead acid battery (originally). I've added a bank of ultra capacitors in parallel with the lead-acid battery to prevent a short battery life from being given many doses of hundred-amps draws during these auto engine shutoff-start cycles. I think I could extract a decade out of these batteries vs what would have otherwise laster under five. Less waste and resources being used that way I reckon or at least that's the hope.
This makes no sense at all. You're trying to protect the battery against the one thing they're designed to do really well (short bursts of high amps, shallow cycling), so you've effectively just added another thing that can fail. What kills lead acid car batteries is deep cycling, which can happen for a ton of different reasons. Your battery is going to fail at some point, but the auto stop/start function of your car isn't going to be it.
I had one of these stop start cars. The battery died in two years and was twice the cost of a normal battery to replace. So the capacitors in parallel with the battery may be a good idea.
An interesting concept with a lot of truth in it. All of my working life was in electronics mainly repairing all sorts of stuff. If I'm presented with something thats not working particularly something thats been around for a while I'm going to be looking at capacitors as the most likley cause of failure, especially the larger values that can store more energy. I'm sure that the folks who are developing this tech will know this too so they must be working on the relatively short life of capacitors when highly stressed. It will be interesting to see if they succeed. The Lamborghini Sián has a 34hp motor which is powered by a super capacitor whose sole purpose is to kick in and smooth out power delivery during gear changes.
I may be incorrect here, but I'm fairly certain that I've seen super capacitors with higher energy density. Based on the high-precision needed to manufacture this "breakthrough" tech, I can't imagine that the cost would outweigh the density and charge claims. This is another case of efficiency versus affordability. That's not to say that these wouldn't have their place, they just won't become as universal as something close in performance but cheaper. Thanks for sharing this research! ✌️
This would be best for energy transfer in the system like you said. But for actual main energy storage, you can only charge so fast without having a very robust charging cable and plug with lot of cooling, and they are already pretty hefty for the charging capabilities we have right now. Well unless they really step up the charging system voltage that is, it will pretty much need to be a lightning bolt going through a cable (not to that extreme but you know what I mean).
When it comes to these breakthroughs, the only thing that matters to me and probably a lot of people are, is the tech coming to market any time soon, not 20, 30, 50 years off, then if it is coming soon, will it use abundance resources to help keep cost low, and finally, will it be priced that most can afford to buy it, if it ticks those boxes, that it's a game changer, if it doesn't, then it might as well not exist, as it might be still decades off and might not even reach market at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be downbeat on this, but we keep hearing about these game changing techs that rarely make it to market, and even some that do, they are in limited capacity or so expensive to not really change anything, I suspect most of us are more interested in game changing tech that has the potential to come to market over a few short years, uses common resources that there's a lot around, and is affordable for the masses to buy, that for me is the real game changer, not the if's, maybe and someday tech that might or might not come to market.
At that density, you need ~20kg of capacitors to drive 1km. If you only had capacitors, you could likely get 25km range. And if it charged up in a minute, it could work for inner city transport. I know people who only tank a few liters when they are nearly empty. It wouldn't be any different from that. They never have a full tank.
Actually just ~3km would be enough if you combine this with a small regular battery(like 5kWh, enough for 20-30km detours) and wireless induction charging at traffic lights, parking spots and drive thru's etc. It could have some interesting possibilities for city mobility 🤔 You could easily recharge it by ~10% in mere seconds just passing over a wireless charging spot. 😁 (~20s @ 100kW,) It'd be a crazy amount of infrastructure work, but not impossible. Busses & trams could definitely benefit from a variation on this(possibly using overhead pantograf/physical connection at stops.
Despite their higher reliability a short in a capacitor, does not make a fire, but a bang. So potentially having KWh of energy stored that can be released in less than a mS can be spectacular.
Wouldn't the big advantage for regen be better realized if the majority of the captured power were used directly for powering the motor rather than going to the battery? So for example the car slows down and stops for a stop sign. The capacitors charge up from he regen. Then the capacitors discharge directly back to the motors for the acceleration from 0 to 40kmh or whatever and then the battery only starts discharging again when the car is rolling along at a constant speed, rather than for the big draw needed for acceleration? This would really improve efficiency for urban driving a lot, though maybe not so much for highway driving.
Capacitors don’t hold enough energy to either decelerate or accelerate your car. They work best at nanosecond and microsecond scales; supercapacitors extend that to milliseconds and ultracaps to seconds, but they are far too expensive per joule stored. Current batteries, however, can provide enough power for regen and acceleration at very high efficiencies; the efficiency limitation is at the electric motor and drivetrain, not the electricity storage device.
This is how the capacitors and electric motors in foemula 1 cars work. tthe capacittors give a power boost for acceleration over a very short ttime intterval. This is important for racing cars but irrelevant for road cars.
@@ursodermatt8809 yes, I understand that is how regen breaking currently works. What I'm saying - and I might be wrong! - is that batteries have a bottleneck to how much charge they can take in a few moments, and pushing the limit frequently does cause degradation in the long run. A capacitor of sufficient capacity could not only take in more power from the regen than the battery could, but would spare the battery the degradation caused by frequent rapid charge/discharge.
@@adamlytle2615 do you have an electric car? there is no bottle neck. even if there were, your bottle neck is only needed in emergency braking. "frequent rapid charge/discharge" , ??? you are driving like a hoon? even that kind of hooning will not affect a battery.
Another aspect of this capacitor is that its dielectric is composed of a crystal several atoms thick. However, the dielectric breakdown has to be equal to or greater than the battery voltage, which is probably on the order of hundreds of volts. So the dielectric must either be much thicker or a bunch of these capacitors will need to be connected in series with voltage equalization resistors in parallel. Either of these approaches will reduce the total capacitance probably by much more than the 19x factor. Then additional capacitors will need to be added in parallel to increase the total capacitance to the intended design value. The capacitor bank will need to be mounted very close to the battery to reduce IR drop and copper wiring. The capacitor bank may be as large as or larger than the battery itself. In addition, the capacitor banks will need to be protected against overvoltage spikes and excessive heat, which will require even more electronics and additional mounting space, increasing the overall cost of the capacitor bank. IMHO, this is the minimum needed to provide a reliable capacitor installation.
I do believe that heterogeneous energy storage solutions will become the standard for electric mobility. By that I mean a combination of media that offer inexpensive, high capacity, but slow charge and discharge rates, with media like lithium iron phosphate which are more expensive but faster, combined with ultra-fast media like capacitors. Combine all that with wireless charging and you can easily imagine buses that recharge at every stop or cars that can charge from 20 to 70% in under 5 minutes.
maybe it does... maybe it doesn't If all your generated electricity is carbon neutral, then you win. Right now, it isn't. and with so much pushback on wind and even more on nuclear, you have real problems.
I have a public EV charge point behind my office in Australia that allows charging for a donation. However, patronage is decreasing. I think this is due to newer cars having better batteries and longer ranges. People charge at home and don't need to top up as much as they did in the early days of Nissan Leafs etc. The time to charge may not be as important as it once was. The Electric Viking is talking about the new CATL battery that has a range of 1,000 KM (or miles ?). This also reduces the need to worry about charge times.
I have always thought a capacitor would be good to capture the energy in a lightning bolt, and use it for later. There are only a handful of places that have regular storms but these capacitors are heading in the right direction,
Thank you David, Ferrari is working on super capacitors for fast charging. Definitely an exciting topic to keep an eye on for innovation and future developments.
Fascinating, Dave! But I always wonder how much the wonder substances will cost to manufacture at scale and the attendant environmental costs. With that many syllables, there would appear to be lots of it here. To quote a famous You Tube thinker, let's "just have a think"!
Hang on here. If the energy density is far too low to replace Li-ion batteries, then how could these greatly improve charging times? To substantially charge a car, you have to substantially charge its main energy storage device, which i thought I heard you say would still have to be a battery. It is possible that these could help with picking up the energy generated by regenerative braking, but it's that really very important?
A small one for regen will be the only use, and even then I'm not sure how much modern batteries really need the help in an average road car. Maybe a track car or some specific heavy vehicle situations, but not much else. The faster charge thing makes no sense. If the capacitor is bigger enough to make any real difference to charge times it will weigh more than the rest of the vehicle, making it pointless.
The battery will only recharge at high speed for the time it takes to recharge that capacitor. It's great for short periods of regenerative braking, but not great for overall battery recharging speed. To explain: If you replace half of an original battery mass a capacity of 240 Wh/kg with capacitors which have mass capacity of 8 Wh/kg, you will end up with an energy storage system with an overall energy density of 124 Wh/kg. And that system can be recharged by +/- 4 Wh/kg rapidly.
I have thought for years that super capacitors would be the perfect addition to all electric cars/trucks. They can absorb or deliver electric energy much faster than any battery and can do so repeatedly without any noticable degradation in energy storage. If they were combined with batteries in vehicles they would allow rapid charging, full regen braking which would allow more energy capture during rapid braking and thereby increasing overall mileage. The battery could hold long term storage but the capacitors would allow for rapid charge/discharge.
With the supercapacitor's energy density still so low, I fail to see how it could substantially impact charging times, without making the car substantially heavier. Am I missing something ?
I think even in the best case scenario these could only hope to improve charge times by a couple of seconds, so basically pointless. Once you make the capacitor much bigger than 1 or 2 hard regens from highway speeds the weight will start to get out of control at an 8.8 W/h per kg energy density.
Just use the capacitors for the instant jolt of energy you get from regenerative breaking and then slowly feed it back into the battery at a reasonable rate
"IF" as always this proves out. It is these kind of adjacent technologies that will improve, from the outside , our batteries and help us move forward in our goal of reducing or eliminating our fossil fuel use. Thank you for your regular and continuing reporting the developments.
I think supercapacitors could be interesting for the rapid liberation of energy and charging. Charging while breaking and discharge while acceleating. The lithium battery is there for the more or less constant speed while driving on the road. Maybe have a think.
A super-duper capacitor is not going to change the recharge rate at a charge station. They can only improve regenerative braking where a large pulse is spread out so that the rate of charging the battery can be lower.
You would be surprised. You can see what Tesla is doing with their liquid cooled cables. To double the current capacity the diameter of your conductor only needs to increase by slightly over 25%. Plus, with such short charging sessions you can manage your thermal rise. Everything will be getting hotter, but it only has to survive that massive output for 5 minutes. Then it ostensibly will have time to cool down before the next charging session.
@@ursodermatt8809 losses to resistance in the cable are not the issue here, it's rejecting that heat efficiently. That's why I'm discussing both the liquid cooled cables and the duty cycle of that cable. It's like having a water cooled TIG torch, It's not running 24/7, but when you're using it 10 minutes an hour you're pushing it hard for a given conductor size due to the ergonomics required by the user.
What I miss about this development is that, as far as I followed, the capacitor is still just a "buffer" between the charger and the battery. It can take power x19 faster from the charger but the battery still needs to pull the power from the capacitor fast enough or else all you get is a small-capacity capacitor filled up for a few seconds then it still has to drip-feed it into the battery, no? What am I missing?
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. With such a low energy density, it won't make any sense to have more than a couple of hundred watt hours of storage at most. So you can charge that couple of hundred watt hours pretty quick (like 3 seconds or so), but then you're just back to charging the battery as normal. It will probably only save a few seconds over the whole fast charge.
Mazda already use a large capacitor to recover some eneryby during a slow down of a car. Energy could be used to power air conditioning or other electical periferials save same mpg
As others also mention, whenever we talk about charging times, we must always use kWh and not just kW. Our electricity grids cannot bear the loads that are really being dealt with at present, unless we install a lot of diesel generators around. Supercharging with such large amounts of energy is not only dangerous, but also shortens the lifetime of the batteries.
The ridiculously poor energy density means these have no place in an EV. You'd need a physically large and heavy bank of these in an EV to absorb enough charge to then pass on to the battery pack at a lower rate, it makes zero sense.
🤔 I feel like capacitors would be a good match with something like or MesoDyne or LightCell convertor. 8.875Wh/kg means a 25kg cap can provide 100kW of boost for almost eight seconds. That would get your vehicle off the line and up hills, with the convertor providing baseline power to the system.
Faster fill ups. Electricity can be envisioned a lot like water. If you want to fill up your BEV battery faster is a lot like saying you want to fill up your swimming pool faster. If you use a 1 inch garden hose; it will take a long time; so why not use a firehose? Sounds great in theory right? However if the amount of water available is only enough to fill a garden hose the fire hose won't help. If your neighborhood water source is a water tank, but the water tanks is only twice as big as your swimming pool; if others already emptied the tank by filling up their new swimming pools ; you won't even get a drop. Most of the Grid doesn't have the capacity to charge so fast.
Whenever I hear a claim about very fast charging I look at the amount of power required to make that happen. 350kW chargers will charge an EV within 15-30 minutes. Cutting charging time in half means doubling the power supplied by the charger. It also will greatly increase waste heat which will make the process less efficient. We rapidly get to charging speeds that would require multiple Megawatt chargers. 19 times faster means over 6 MW. In my opinion, the chargers we have a pretty well as fast as we need them to be. It would be nice if they were as fast as fuelling with gas, but then again, when charging, you don't have to wait beside the car until charging is done.
You do have to wait with the car til it's done charging if you charge on the go. I personally think if we can get it down to 5 mins or less, people will be happy with that. They probably don't mind having a cigarette break or scrolling through their favorite social media app for a few minutes while it charges.
@@user72974 what I mean is that my routine when I'm traveling long distances in my EV is to plug the car, go to the restaurant and get a meal or take a bio break. I don't have to wait beside the car for that and the car alerts me when I have enough to continue my trip. My real life experience is that charging is already so fast that I only have time to get a table and order my meal before I need to move the EV because it's charged and I don't want to incur idle fees.
@@user72974 the charging tech is not the problem, nor is the battery tech. The grid just cannot supply that amount of power. to get to 5 minutes the grid of practically any country would require a major overhaul.
@@user72974for me I find destination charging the ‘fastest’ option and cheapest . Fastest because I can plug into the 7kw charger and walk off , returning in the morning . Either a fast charger you have to wait half hour in the vehicle . So oddly slower chargers take less ( near none ) of my time
That's true, but if the technology works, there are still plenty of uses for it that don't involve multi-megawatt power supplies. For example, laptops and mobile phones could use it to pick up near-instant charges at airports for people who forgot to plug their devices in the night before a flight. E-bikes could use it for 5-minute quick charges at level 2 charging stations designed for cars. Even for cars, if the technology could be used to reduce slowdowns in charging speeds as the battery gets fuller, which wouldn't require any upgrades to chargers or utilities. And, even a charger with 6 MW power supply is not completely infeasible. Data centers, for example, consume far more than that, it's just a question of where they're located relative to the high-power infrastructure.
That's super interesting. EVs could be a mix of traditional LFP~ battery for day-to-day use, along with super fast charging (and more dense) batteries that "give you 50km autonomy in 60 seconds of charge"
I believe the LED effect was first discovered in 1909. To achieve a working commercially produced battery I think this new development will take about the same amount of time it took to create the first LED to making a 4K TV.
Capacitors are the one of the main reasons that electronics stop working. Decades repairing electronic units taught me that one of the first things one does after checking the obvious - is it plugged in? - is check all the electrolytic capacitors. The new 'super capacitors' have been used to replace the 12 volt battery in cars for many years as they tick all the boxes and do not pose so much of an environmental risk. I have just had to replace my 65" television because a capacitor blew in the HDMI circuit of my Virgin Tivo box which took out not only the Tivo but my TV as well. Only the red channel got through for a time - until it failed too. In an EV, I imagine that super capacitors might look tempting but just as the electrolyte in EV batterys has a shelf life, it is the same for capacitors.
@@avsystem3142 It is very difficult to make a non electrolytic capacitor without a long lifetime. Even electrolytics will las indefinitely if they are appropriately derated.
Sounds amazing. In very simple terms, does this mean those super amazing capacitors collect the charge first then release it slowly to the batteries? (Over 1/2 a century ago I could take in smart stuff quickly, but now I need capacitors like Dave to simplify it.)
What rarely is mentioned that if you want to recharge a large battery (or capacitor) you need a very good power supply. We are years away from having anywhere near the capacity if EVs were the norm. Already we have charge rates reducing when an additional EV plugs into the charger. I thought I might be into an EV in 5 years (4.5 now) but thinking longer than that now.
I don't really understand how a capacitor which only makes up a small amount of the total energy of the car's battery would significantly reduce it's charging time. How would this play out Plug in, get 500KW to fill the capacitor for 1 minute then 1C charge the rest of the pack for 30 mins? Or is the capacitor charging quickly, then discharging into the rest of the pack then repeating multiple times over to average a very quick charge cycle? Or does the capacitor take a much higher proportion of the total energy of the pack and therefore have a bigger influence that way? Given it's lower energy density what does that mean for vehicle weight?
Yeah speeding up regular charging makes no sense with such a low energy density. Even your 500kW for 1 minute scenario would put a max of 8333 W/hs into the capacitor. And a capacitor that size at 8.8 W/h per kg would need to be around 947 kg (2088 pounds). So these won't be that practical for regular fast charging or really anything other than to help to battery with a fews seconds of hard regen.
I think it is needed to point out that to get a lot of electric energy stored in capacitors and batteries in a very short time, you need to have a source that can provide this energy. To be able to store 100 kWh in lets say 3 minutes we are talking about more than 2 MW (energy losses not included). It means that if we have an EV with a 400 V system we will need to have at least 5 kA current. If we also consider most battery technologies charging charateristics, we will possibly need 10 kA initially in the charging process.
I work in pv/ battery industry in Belgium and we recently met a startup called ForE which created a hybrid super capacitor that is already commercialised as an ESS for home storage. Impressive specs : charging at 6C speed, 50k cycles with more than 80 % of energy. Dod of 100 %. Weight was about 70kg per 5kwh unit. They use lithium as the hybrid material. I can send you a mail with all their info, would be nice to cover !
Great, It would make sense for regen too.
It's funny that so many people focus on fast charging, not that it's not important, it certainly is, but imo the proliferation of level 2 destination chargers is far more important.
Your car is parked most of the time, and if there are low speed, and thus low installation cost, chargers pretty much everywhere, the necessity of fast charging begins to only exit for road trips, and niche travel situations
Exactly! That’s one of my favorite points. Problem is that it requires a paradigm shift in thinking from the long standing norm of “fueling up at the station” to “destination charging”. A lot of urban planners and policymakers who still haven’t got that yet.
True. I have a ev and only time I have a problem is when it is time for holliday. Once a year I get problem planning the trip that extends the battery. Where and how long to wait and is there a outlet. Where we live a ev battery holds for a long trip but not for holliday.
@@joelsmith4394 it's kind of a funny thing to coming from my perspective because I'm an electrician, commercial buildings have an enormous amount of power available! Adding twenty 30 amp outlets would probably require adding 200 amp breaker in the main distribution panel, and then adding one new panel to feed all of those outlets.
It's kind of stuff is done ALL THE TIME for servers in data centers, and it's a really simple job.
As soon as you try to add things like fast chargers it gets orders of magnitude more complicated and expensive
We should have simple 120volt outlest on every Road side parking and IT would be more then enough for overnight charge
We are deep into diminishing returns. Your everyday Tesla is going from single digits to 80% in half an hour. A Taycan in 15 min. Plus very very few people are doing 600+ mile days so they'll only have one charging stop. 15 minutes one way or the other doesn't matter on a 10 hour drive.
Interesting... Thanks Dave! [Electrical Engineer here...] But i don't really see how a buffer-capacitor bank would help with fast-charging an EV. To have this capability, one would need a capacitor-bank with, say, 80% the capacity of the EV's battery. Given the much lower energy-density of capacitors, even supercapacitors, that would be a capacitor-bank considerably larger than the car itself. 🤔
The other problem with fast-charging EVs, though, not addressed in this video, the grid-load of the charging-stations, is where _(large)_ capacitor-banks could prove to be useful. To charge a 60kWh battery (that's a _small_ EV...) in one hour, one needs to supply 60kW of power, for an hour. That's already 4 to 6 times as much power as an average European home draws in wintertime... To charge the same battery faster, say in 6 minutes, you'd need to supply 600kW. That's really an obscene amount of power. Not many places exist where the grid can provide such amounts of power. But... A capacitor-bank based fast-charger could charge itself _slowly_ from the grid, say with 50kW - 60kW, and then when an EV is connected, it could dump all that stored energy into the EV's battery in minutes (provided the battery can handle that, of course) and you're off. The brawback/compromise is that the charging-point would then need an hour or two to recharge itself before another EV can be fully charged.
👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👏👏👏👏👏
Everything Electric Show,just did a video on this, which featured a new ''buffered' fast charger to do exactly what you described, except it uses LFP batteries instead of miracle capacitors.
Yes, but...just how hefty a set of conductors do you need for 600KW?
@@docwatson1134 They already have 500kW chargers in common use in China, so maybe look that up?
@@docwatson1134level 3 fast charging uses 480vdc, 600kw means 1200amps. You would need six strands of 3/0 copper for that. It is unlikely that a regular sized human could comfortably use a plug/receptical with that much weight on it.
Hey Dave, American here, binding on TH-cam science and engineering channels just because I happen to be an American at this particularly …. point and time.
Thanks for your kind, calm rationality! Your show today was likely a therapy session for many of us Yanks!
Binging even!
Thanks for summarising this paper! Very interesting!
Thank you for another wonderful video! You explained this new kind of capacitor very well.
Good news, presented so well, I only knew about electrolytic capacitors and supercapacitors. Also thanks to the team !!!
Thanx one again Dave. When it comes to helping me stay on top of the arguments of all the electric nay sayers you are an absolute star... 🌟
He's flat wrong on this one! Lots of people posted comments to that end including me.
Just a general comment. Going from lab results to cost-efficient manufacturing is a long difficult road that very few inventions survive. I wouldn't hold my breath on this one either.
Not to mention capacitors break down after a few years. Even if they have solved that problem it will take years to prove it.
@@frankdelao4067 Electrolytics die in a few decades because the electrolyte dries out. Other kinds last much much longer.
Interesting if it can be replicated and scaled up to commercial potential. I saw no mention of material or fabrication costs or methods. No way to know if this is simply an interesting experiment, results to be verified, or a potentially significant development.
Iows, capitalism massively slows down innovation.
Not just manufacturing. Also reliability. Things change when you move out a clean and safe lab environment. Even stuff like how does it handle different temperatures and swings in temperatures. Where I live we can experience 20+ degree temperature swings within 24 hours.
Thank you so much Dave, for chewing all this highly interesting, yet incredibly complicated data into bits that I can actually swallow.
I love the use of your orange lamps on set, it's so very novel and quite unique!
Some major problems with this supercapacitor speculation for EVs:
1) On charging, the supercap buffer would quickly fill up and then you'd be limited to the rate at which the battery can charge on its own. The supercap might actually end up slowing the overall charging time for a given amount of range, if space required for the supercap reduces space available for the battery.
2) For regen or acceleration for normal stops and go's, the battery can absorb much higher rates for say 5-8 seconds than it can absorb or output sustained for the say 15-20 minutes to descend or climb a 7%/20-mile mountain grade.
Basically, when you consider the tradeoffs in the use of available space and cost of the supercap vs battery for the short stops/accels and longer hill climbs/declines, plus the incremental cost and space of the power electronics to handle higher currents / power, the low energy density of the supercap makes it unattractive for practically all EV or hybrid vehicle applications.
100% This. I don't how people think low capacity capacitors will benefit the charging time of the main battery. The mass is better spent on additional battery capacity that has much better energy density. I mainly see capacitors getting used for a bit of regen on some kind of ICE hybrids, where they can absorb more power than the small hybrid battery and even then it's a stretch.
I agree in all parts. One of the better comments.
Capacitors are a good idea to offset the pulse of start of a charge [plug in or regen] though there size is insignificant and nothing is gained by using larger capacity ones.
@@blogobre Even for absorbing or generating an initial pulse, batteries of any size sufficient to propel a vehicle for any significant distance will be capable of generating or absorbing such a pulse without degradation of any kind. The pulse handling capability of the electrical system will basically be limited not by the battery, but rather by its power electronics, where capacitors or even ultracaps are employed to avoid overloading the power electronic's transistor devices (IGBTs, MCTS, MOSFETs, etc.).
It's really encouraging that these niche developments in material science and other sectors are occurring ever more frequently. They just might discover the magick-wand that will save our collective rear end. And thanks for helping keep us so well informed Dave 👍🙂
Popular Mechanics has been clickbait 'science' BS before clickbait was a thing. Hell, before the internet was a thing.
@@JobyFluorine-ru4bd Roughly similar to what was once called "yellow journalism."
@@ronaldgarrison8478 No, that was political propaganda. I was warned/briefed in 1958 not to believe a thing in the newspapers by a 73 yr. old mentor who told me stories about the lies printed by Hurst papers that dated around the end of the century. I can extrapolate. If propaganda has deceived and helped the rulers rule for 100+ years, why not for 200+ years, in the USA? And elsewhere, since the printing press. Case in point: For the superstitious, the first big contract printing was for the Bible, King James Version.
i used to read popular mechanics 50 years ago, when i was a kid, and even then i knew they were full of baloney
Predatory journal?
I know right, I can only imagine the size of the cable and cooling system they would need to charge a battery that fast!
Excellent video as usual Dave. Very informativ piece on an extremely important piece of research that nibody else seems to have picked ip. Well.done!
Always informative...and excellently presented
Suoer caoacitors would be great not only for battery health during fast charging, but even more so for regen braking. Regenerating more electricity while braking extends range quite a bit while driving in cities.
Well done, thank you.
All improvements are important to progress.
Then go ahead and throw your cell phone into the trash because it's an illusion.
Nihilism is a copout
Yes , an interesting development, but there is a bit of a flaw here. The Caps/Supercaps/Ultracaps are really good at short term charge rates but pretty poor at energy/mass , this means that a hybrid battery system with a small Cap/SC/UC is great as a brake/acceleration buffer but pretty useless at battery charging as you still have to transfer the energy into the primary storage battery , and that is dictated by the primary battery capability.
We have used them in the past for short duration use on tram systems that need to cross short distances between overhead lines, such as conservation areas in cities.
Exactly, I was trying to understand how the caps would help high power charing for more more than a few seconds.
yes, most uninformed do not understand that.
as far as i am concerned it is just a gimmick concerning ev charging
@bellshooter Yeah, all of the times over the years I've considered ultra capacitors being pared with a battery, I always end up realising it's better off just using that weight to add more battery, except for if you use a small capacitor sized to take one hard regen, then discharge in the next few seconds of acceleration to take peak loads off the battery. Assuming that capacitor won't need replacing too often being used like that, and won't add too much more cost and complexity.
Using them to reduce charge times is completely pointless until they can increase the energy density by multiple times. And at that point, the batteries will probably have a fast enough charge rate that supplying the charge at that rate will be as much of the limit as the batteries. And may not be even worth trying to improve charge rates much more. At 8.8 W/h per kg, these capacitors would only save a few seconds charging in the best case scenario.
That’s a fantastic approach
Hi Dave. Just wanted to say that this channel makes me feel optimistic for the future, at a time when so much else in the world is trying to make me a pessimist. So, thanks.
Spoken for truth.
Same for me. Thank you Dave.
bull-shit!
With such high power, the copper tapes that these new compositions will be deposited on inside the capacitor might be heating up a lot, also regen breaking is already quite efficient however these caps could eliminate all regen losses due to capacitors charge discharge cycles(hybrid cars already have a massive capacitor inside their inverters for regen braking...) . These caps might just be a very good option for standard electronic devices as well so this is generally a very interesting news. Cheers!
The charging time discussion is mostly over. Currently the top spec platforms like the Taycan at 350 kW are going from single digits to 80% in 15 minutes or less. What we are waiting for is that type of charging performance to come down market, and be adopted by the legacy manufacturers who are a generation behind. The biggest issue they are facing now is adequate pack cooling.
350kW from 10% to 80% in 15minutes means trying to extract 1 MEGAWATT! Most houses use less than that in a MONTH!
Please explain exactly how you can deliver near on 2,000 amps of 3 phase (480V)..... (Double that current if you are using single phase. And double it again if you're in the USA, 120v. That's 8,000 amps... You are living in cloud-cuckoo land if you think that's ever going to happen.)....
@@Chris-hx3om You are mixing up kW (unit of power) and kWh (unit of Energy).
Edit:
"Please explain exactly how you can deliver near on 2,000 amps of 3 phase (480V)..."
I saw what I believe was an Out Of Spec Podcast episode where they mentioned Fast chargers with "virtual" transformers.
The initial high voltage DC conversion is just switched at medium voltage directly. With 800V architecture you are out of the "low voltage" regime (limit around 700V) anyways,
I am pretty sure coils are still needed: but they can be made far smaller (dependent on switching speed).
@@Chris-hx3om This threw me for a bit, until I realized you misread the units. They're talking about a peak charging rate of 350kW for the new Taycan Turbo S and 4S, not the battery capacity in kW*h. Firstly, it was a small exaggeration as it's only rated up to 320kW. The Taycan 4S has only an 87kW*h battery. Here's a quote from an article where they tested it on a 350kW capable charging station.. "Upon plugging in the Taycan 4S, the EA station delivered 295 kW right out of the gate, going from 8% to 30% in just four minutes. By 40% the car was steadily charging at 320 kW, dropping off to 250 kW after reaching about 65%. In the end, we went from 8% to 80% in a mere 16 minutes"
Yes that still appears to be 666 amps if drawing from 480V source, but some level 3 chargers are truly rated up to 350kW charging speeds, so they pull it off somehow. I think in most locations you're unlikely to get that on all the charging stations at once (and never from both ports on a single station).
@@jamesphillips2285 Following my first reply I did a little digging around, and Electrify America does not give any hint at how they achieve 350kW charging rates. Best guess is each individual charging station uses two 480V 3 phase circuits each with a 400A breaker which is an available unit of service.
@@daemn42 🤦♂ Yes, quite right. 320kW is the POWER output, not the storage capacity. I was thinking at the time that it was a damn big battery, but didn't think any further as I know KIA have a massive battery in the EV9....
Anyway, it's a metric sh1t-ton of copper cabling that would be needed to feed these 'fast charging' charging places. I live in Australia and any trips planned are planned around fueling (I have a diesel car with a 1,200km range, so not so important to me), but an EV with a 300km range (maybe!) is going to need to be charging at every opportunity. I can imagine a dozen EVs (not uncommon to see just about anywhere in Australia is lines of cars waiting to fuel). The supply to those charging station will need to be truly epic!
I've always wondered why they don't use supercapacitors for launch from stop and regen applications; thanks for spelling it out. This sounds like great research; maybe one day, we will get to that dream.
Yes, how much are supercapacitors used in city buses, garbage trucks, forklift trucks, elevators etc which are constantly "accelerating and braking" ?
@@JohanLofgren-jc4mhsupercapacitors and ultracapacitors are used worldwide in industry and trains, busses etc. Also Toyota uses supercapacitors in several hybrid models and in motorsport.
We use supercapacitors in our windturbines for emergency stop/vane- positioning the blades. Much more reliable than quit ordinary industrial grade 24V batteries in the freezing cold (-40C).
Popular Mechanics is the National Enquirer of Technology,
They used to be an interesting thing to read. They were often far from accurate reports but they were better about technology than the news on TV
the Foxnews of Technology,
Thank you!
"Science Bods" Dave?...thanks as always.
Thanks! Very good video as always
Cheers Dave, interesting stuff, let's hope it works out
The two areas Dave mentioned, reducing EV charging times and large scale storage/response seems like the two best uses of this technology.
and two of the most contradictive as well.
Reducing charging times mean increasing charging current (it's proportional). How do you get that much current to the charging stations?
@@Chris-hx3om Level 3 DC charging, uses a 3-phase 480 volt AC electric circuit.
@@mafarmerga Yes, and to get the sorts of energy delivery to charge in 'fast time' requires massive current. E=IxV/h. There's no way around that formula. If you want 50kWh in 10 minutes with a 480v source, the current needs to be 50kWh/480v/0.6hr = 173 amps. That's assuming 100% efficiency in all the conversion processes (AC to DC rectification, DC current regulation, losses in the cable to the vehicle, losses inside the battery due to the way the chemical processes work). Call it 200 amps. Now, that's for each car and a 10 minute charge of 50kWh. Picture a charging station out of a city, on a main route to a holiday destination. 10 car are all lined up and plugged in. 2,000 amps!
@@mafarmergaProbably not with such a low energy density. Makes them worse than useless for regular fast charging, if they're in the car. And for grid storage, maybe if they are extremely cheap, easy to make at scale and reliable, if they are going to have much benefit over LFP.
This is a seriously exciting development, thanks for sharing
Wikipedia says Lithium supercapacitors are 10-15 Wh/kg. So why are we excited by 9 Wh/kg from Barium Titanate . Doesn't sound 19X to me? Now looking at the cost per KG, barium is way cheaper than Lithium, that might be exciting? I think I want a bit more information?
Thank you for alerting to this and to other emerging or promising technologies. I realize they won't all come to fruition, but some of them might.
caps to store regen then import into battery or for motor for acceleration will be used
Why should a capacitor decrease the charging time of the battery? The charging time for the battery will always stay the same.
They are used in tandem. Charge caps quickly, trickle into the battery. Caps won't be the full charge, but good for a splash and dash, or to shorten total charging time.
Quite - the addition of a supercapacitor can be useful for handling short-term transients like braking and "boosted" acceleration, but won't affect battery charge times.
Charging stations themselves would greatly benifit from on-site capacitors that could supply full output to many cars, without putting the same strain on the grid to suppy at the rate needed.
Your battery might be limited to charging at 300 kW. That's the bulk of your capacity, say 80 kWh but if you also had 10 kWh of capacitor that could charge at 1000 kWh your total charge session time would be shorter.
@@dogsbodyish8403exactly, and this wasn’t explained very well. If you have two energy storage systems, one at 250 Wh/kg and the other at 8, maybe you can justify putting in 10-20% of your battery + cap weight into the cap side of things if it improves practical regen efficiency from 75% to 90%, but it doesn’t do a damn thing for charging the battery which has hundreds of times the energy storage. Chargers already ramp their power and don’t need caps on the car to handle spikes.
So interesting for regen - and this video was very deceptive for having anything whatsoever to do with stationary charging times.
Great video as usual👏
I had a lot of questions about capacitors.
I think you just answered them.
really?
Another good one to follow up on then. Sounds promising.
Love your content
Indycar has just began using their new hybrid system, and it uses super capacitors. It's is incredible how fast the system charges and discharges. High level specs and overview can be found at the Indycar channel. I think a small super capacitor system for EVs to capture breaking energy and then deploy at high current demand like acceleration would be a nice addition if it helped to preserve the Li Ion battery.
The main reasons a EV manufacturer would not integrate supercapacitors would be, much higher cost, needs extra spaceclaim, added complexity, safety, much lower energydensity of supercapacitors (like 10 times at least (latest cell technology at 300Wh/Kg and increasing).
There's just no need or businessmodel to make for in a electric car right now.
Brilliant explanation, I think 🤔👍🏼👊🏻
Good explanation! thanks!
Really interesting! Although it only seems to be people who don't own EVs who complain about charging times. If the energy density of these capacitors is so low, presumably a lot of battery capacity would need to be sacrificed to make room for them? Similarly, if you prioritise battery capacity, presumably the capacitors won't be able to add more than a few miles per charge cycle? It's a nice idea, I can't help feeling that this is a raft of new problems for a solution to a problem which didn't exist in the first place.
I liked the idea of swappable batteries, like you do with Calor bottles, pull-in, drop off your flat battery and load up with an identical charged one.
I remember when I was in Australia in the 80s, one of the universities put forward the idea of EVs running on lead-acid batteries, with petrol stations replaced by electrolyte-changing stations. I'm no expert, but it did sound plausible to me...
I prefer this solution as well, but it requires too many layers of cooperation and standardization to be viable within the current market. :| And really I think the current market is so fundamental to the problem that it just needs to go too, but that's not exactly an easy sell.
You'd have to have staffed battery replacement stations and a standard system across all EVs allowing them to easily release the battery as well as plug in a new one, all without the involved rig being a safety hazard on the road. Then you have to have all of these staffed battery replacement stations being willing to carry the necessary hazardous material insurance / licensing, as well as able to dispose of batteries that get dropped off that are too degraded to recharge.
It's all of the costs associated with running a gas station, plus the need to actually store and dispose of batteries dropped off by customers, without the profit margins enjoyed by gas stations. And most of them would have to be full service, which adds extra costs that most gas stations have cut.
EV chargers are already having issues just with installing and maintaining user-run, unstaffed charging stations. Nobody is going to put up front the capital to try and create a battery drop off station that manufacturers aren't even prepared to support.
A very poor idea. The inventory of batteries that must be socked at each charging station waiting to be fitted to a car would be huge. hese batteries are expensive and are not earning revenue while they are just sitting around. Having sttandard batteries means that manufacturers are not free to design their batteries to take advanttage of their specific vehicle layout. Swappable bateries might have made some sense when battery capacities were low and charging rates very slow. Those times thave passed.
@@dungbetel
never heard of it
Have you seen any video of battery removal from a car ? it would take half a day to take one down and putting it back up, there're high voltage involved, cooling pipes and coolant liquid plus a considerable number of bolts, the batteries are heavy as well... beside the time how much would a swap cost with all the professional work and equipment needed 24/7 ? the other thing is batteries would need to be standardised, mission almost impossible as there're tto many different vehicles which are physically different and have different power and cooling requirements.
5:15... Hello- I was listening to you as I typed something elsewhere, heard this and I think my ears glazed over.
I'm not clear how adding capacitors improves the charging speed of the overall battery pack if those capacitors aren't a decent fraction of the overall energy storage. Feels like having a wide funnel on a narrow tube - you can't fill the tube any faster, you've just dumped a bit more in at the top which will still take as long to flow in as if it were a narrow funnel. Can anyone enlighten me?
yeah, I had the same question.
Exactly. That nice graphic of the car charging in seconds is fine if you just want to have the energy you can stuff into a reasonable weight of capacitors. In the real world you'd be stopping every block or two to do it again. At the figures given you'd need 28kg of capacitor for every 1kg of Li-Ion you want to charge.
Yeah, they will be worse than useless for plug in fast charging. Any small benefit will be literally out weighed by their excessive weight.
8.8 W/h per kg also means they will only store 8.8 kW/h per metric tonne.
It takes me less than one minute to charge per week. In my old fossil it took 10 to 30 minutes depending if I had to go out to full up.
It depends on the current state of the art in the geometry of the plates. Last time I looked they've been trying to change the geometry of the plates by, for example, making them spiky so as to increase the surface area of the plates without increasing the overall size of the capacitor. Energy storage is proportional to the capacitor plate surface area, so if they can drastically increase that without increasing the size of the overall capacitor, they will be able to store more energy in the same size package. Improvements in dielectric then help extend that. Haven't heard where they're at lately in the geometry research, as that will determine the next step which is how to actually manufacture them (without the spikes shorting out).
I added the comment before watching this episode on this new capacitor. It seems the two make a powerful, no pun intended, combination.
Capacitors in conjunction with batteries are the most optimal solution for sure.
For even a very basic example; I have an annoying engine stop-start system on my 2.5-liter petrol powered car with a lead acid battery (originally). I've added a bank of ultra capacitors in parallel with the lead-acid battery to prevent a short battery life from being given many doses of hundred-amps draws during these auto engine shutoff-start cycles. I think I could extract a decade out of these batteries vs what would have otherwise laster under five.
Less waste and resources being used that way I reckon or at least that's the hope.
This makes no sense at all.
You're trying to protect the battery against the one thing they're designed to do really well (short bursts of high amps, shallow cycling), so you've effectively just added another thing that can fail. What kills lead acid car batteries is deep cycling, which can happen for a ton of different reasons. Your battery is going to fail at some point, but the auto stop/start function of your car isn't going to be it.
I had one of these stop start cars. The battery died in two years and was twice the cost of a normal battery to replace. So the capacitors in parallel with the battery may be a good idea.
Interesting. Thank you.
An interesting concept with a lot of truth in it. All of my working life was in electronics mainly repairing all sorts of stuff. If I'm presented with something thats not working particularly something thats been around for a while I'm going to be looking at capacitors as the most likley cause of failure, especially the larger values that can store more energy. I'm sure that the folks who are developing this tech will know this too so they must be working on the relatively short life of capacitors when highly stressed. It will be interesting to see if they succeed. The Lamborghini Sián has a 34hp motor which is powered by a super capacitor whose sole purpose is to kick in and smooth out power delivery during gear changes.
I may be incorrect here, but I'm fairly certain that I've seen super capacitors with higher energy density. Based on the high-precision needed to manufacture this "breakthrough" tech, I can't imagine that the cost would outweigh the density and charge claims. This is another case of efficiency versus affordability. That's not to say that these wouldn't have their place, they just won't become as universal as something close in performance but cheaper.
Thanks for sharing this research! ✌️
This would be best for energy transfer in the system like you said. But for actual main energy storage, you can only charge so fast without having a very robust charging cable and plug with lot of cooling, and they are already pretty hefty for the charging capabilities we have right now.
Well unless they really step up the charging system voltage that is, it will pretty much need to be a lightning bolt going through a cable (not to that extreme but you know what I mean).
When it comes to these breakthroughs, the only thing that matters to me and probably a lot of people are, is the tech coming to market any time soon, not 20, 30, 50 years off, then if it is coming soon, will it use abundance resources to help keep cost low, and finally, will it be priced that most can afford to buy it, if it ticks those boxes, that it's a game changer, if it doesn't, then it might as well not exist, as it might be still decades off and might not even reach market at all.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be downbeat on this, but we keep hearing about these game changing techs that rarely make it to market, and even some that do, they are in limited capacity or so expensive to not really change anything, I suspect most of us are more interested in game changing tech that has the potential to come to market over a few short years, uses common resources that there's a lot around, and is affordable for the masses to buy, that for me is the real game changer, not the if's, maybe and someday tech that might or might not come to market.
At that density, you need ~20kg of capacitors to drive 1km.
If you only had capacitors, you could likely get 25km range.
And if it charged up in a minute, it could work for inner city transport.
I know people who only tank a few liters when they are nearly empty. It wouldn't be any different from that. They never have a full tank.
It's not for storage, it's for recharging, and regen braking. It's interesting, lets see how it works outside the lab.
Actually just ~3km would be enough if you combine this with a small regular battery(like 5kWh, enough for 20-30km detours) and wireless induction charging at traffic lights, parking spots and drive thru's etc.
It could have some interesting possibilities for city mobility 🤔
You could easily recharge it by ~10% in mere seconds just passing over a wireless charging spot. 😁 (~20s @ 100kW,)
It'd be a crazy amount of infrastructure work, but not impossible. Busses & trams could definitely benefit from a variation on this(possibly using overhead pantograf/physical connection at stops.
Despite their higher reliability a short in a capacitor, does not make a fire, but a bang. So potentially having KWh of energy stored that can be released in less than a mS can be spectacular.
Very interesting, great vid ❤
This is beyond my pay grade but I firmly believe that we will make huge strides forward in EV performance in a very short time.
Wouldn't the big advantage for regen be better realized if the majority of the captured power were used directly for powering the motor rather than going to the battery? So for example the car slows down and stops for a stop sign. The capacitors charge up from he regen. Then the capacitors discharge directly back to the motors for the acceleration from 0 to 40kmh or whatever and then the battery only starts discharging again when the car is rolling along at a constant speed, rather than for the big draw needed for acceleration? This would really improve efficiency for urban driving a lot, though maybe not so much for highway driving.
Capacitors don’t hold enough energy to either decelerate or accelerate your car. They work best at nanosecond and microsecond scales; supercapacitors extend that to milliseconds and ultracaps to seconds, but they are far too expensive per joule stored.
Current batteries, however, can provide enough power for regen and acceleration at very high efficiencies; the efficiency limitation is at the electric motor and drivetrain, not the electricity storage device.
This is how the capacitors and electric motors in foemula 1 cars work.
tthe capacittors give a power boost for acceleration over a very short ttime intterval. This is important for racing cars but irrelevant for road cars.
the batteries already do that
@@ursodermatt8809 yes, I understand that is how regen breaking currently works. What I'm saying - and I might be wrong! - is that batteries have a bottleneck to how much charge they can take in a few moments, and pushing the limit frequently does cause degradation in the long run. A capacitor of sufficient capacity could not only take in more power from the regen than the battery could, but would spare the battery the degradation caused by frequent rapid charge/discharge.
@@adamlytle2615
do you have an electric car?
there is no bottle neck.
even if there were, your bottle neck is only needed in emergency braking.
"frequent rapid charge/discharge" , ???
you are driving like a hoon? even that kind of hooning will not affect a battery.
Another aspect of this capacitor is that its dielectric is composed of a crystal several atoms thick. However, the dielectric breakdown has to be equal to or greater than the battery voltage, which is probably on the order of hundreds of volts. So the dielectric must either be much thicker or a bunch of these capacitors will need to be connected in series with voltage equalization resistors in parallel. Either of these approaches will reduce the total capacitance probably by much more than the 19x factor. Then additional capacitors will need to be added in parallel to increase the total capacitance to the intended design value. The capacitor bank will need to be mounted very close to the battery to reduce IR drop and copper wiring. The capacitor bank may be as large as or larger than the battery itself. In addition, the capacitor banks will need to be protected against overvoltage spikes and excessive heat, which will require even more electronics and additional mounting space, increasing the overall cost of the capacitor bank. IMHO, this is the minimum needed to provide a reliable capacitor installation.
I do believe that heterogeneous energy storage solutions will become the standard for electric mobility. By that I mean a combination of media that offer inexpensive, high capacity, but slow charge and discharge rates, with media like lithium iron phosphate which are more expensive but faster, combined with ultra-fast media like capacitors. Combine all that with wireless charging and you can easily imagine buses that recharge at every stop or cars that can charge from 20 to 70% in under 5 minutes.
Every step forward helps in the fight against climate change. Thanks for the vid!
maybe it does... maybe it doesn't
If all your generated electricity is carbon neutral, then you win. Right now, it isn't. and with so much pushback on wind and even more on nuclear, you have real problems.
I have a public EV charge point behind my office in Australia that allows charging for a donation. However, patronage is decreasing. I think this is due to newer cars having better batteries and longer ranges. People charge at home and don't need to top up as much as they did in the early days of Nissan Leafs etc. The time to charge may not be as important as it once was.
The Electric Viking is talking about the new CATL battery that has a range of 1,000 KM (or miles ?). This also reduces the need to worry about charge times.
I have always thought a capacitor would be good to capture the energy in a lightning bolt, and use it for later. There are only a handful of places that have regular storms but these capacitors are heading in the right direction,
Thank you David,
Ferrari is working on super capacitors for fast charging. Definitely an exciting topic to keep an eye on for innovation and future developments.
Fascinating, Dave! But I always wonder how much the wonder substances will cost to manufacture at scale and the attendant environmental costs. With that many syllables, there would appear to be lots of it here. To quote a famous You Tube thinker, let's "just have a think"!
Thanks
Don't ask me. I just watch all your videos because you are such a hoot......I do get some stuff. Best wishes.
With these things, I’m a big fan of the “I’ll believe it when I see it in a production vehicle” principle, but this would be awesome.
Hang on here. If the energy density is far too low to replace Li-ion batteries, then how could these greatly improve charging times? To substantially charge a car, you have to substantially charge its main energy storage device, which i thought I heard you say would still have to be a battery.
It is possible that these could help with picking up the energy generated by regenerative braking, but it's that really very important?
A small one for regen will be the only use, and even then I'm not sure how much modern batteries really need the help in an average road car. Maybe a track car or some specific heavy vehicle situations, but not much else.
The faster charge thing makes no sense. If the capacitor is bigger enough to make any real difference to charge times it will weigh more than the rest of the vehicle, making it pointless.
The battery will only recharge at high speed for the time it takes to recharge that capacitor. It's great for short periods of regenerative braking, but not great for overall battery recharging speed.
To explain: If you replace half of an original battery mass a capacity of 240 Wh/kg with capacitors which have mass capacity of 8 Wh/kg, you will end up with an energy storage system with an overall energy density of 124 Wh/kg. And that system can be recharged by +/- 4 Wh/kg rapidly.
Ways to increase efficiencies… Love it!
good for them, what does it mean tho. love that
I have thought for years that super capacitors would be the perfect addition to all electric cars/trucks. They can absorb or deliver electric energy much faster than any battery and can do so repeatedly without any noticable degradation in energy storage. If they were combined with batteries in vehicles they would allow rapid charging, full regen braking which would allow more energy capture during rapid braking and thereby increasing overall mileage. The battery could hold long term storage but the capacitors would allow for rapid charge/discharge.
I think more likely we'll see a hybrid. Having a 5kWh capacitor and a 60kWh battery would be a great match.
With the supercapacitor's energy density still so low, I fail to see how it could substantially impact charging times, without making the car substantially heavier. Am I missing something ?
I think even in the best case scenario these could only hope to improve charge times by a couple of seconds, so basically pointless.
Once you make the capacitor much bigger than 1 or 2 hard regens from highway speeds the weight will start to get out of control at an 8.8 W/h per kg energy density.
Just use the capacitors for the instant jolt of energy you get from regenerative breaking and then slowly feed it back into the battery at a reasonable rate
191 joules/cm3 is 53Wh/l. Amazing for a capacitor but pretty crummy for an EV battery
"IF" as always this proves out. It is these kind of adjacent technologies that will improve, from the outside , our batteries and help us move forward in our goal of reducing or eliminating our fossil fuel use. Thank you for your regular and continuing reporting the developments.
I think supercapacitors could be interesting for the rapid liberation of energy and charging. Charging while breaking and discharge while acceleating. The lithium battery is there for the more or less constant speed while driving on the road. Maybe have a think.
A super-duper capacitor is not going to change the recharge rate at a charge station. They can only improve regenerative braking where a large pulse is spread out so that the rate of charging the battery can be lower.
Those are going to be some chunky charging cables.
Don't u just need // charging from caps?
Could be interresting to know how China's caps run Street cars do it.
Charged during stops
Lot's of electrons need BIG pipes!
You would be surprised. You can see what Tesla is doing with their liquid cooled cables. To double the current capacity the diameter of your conductor only needs to increase by slightly over 25%. Plus, with such short charging sessions you can manage your thermal rise. Everything will be getting hotter, but it only has to survive that massive output for 5 minutes. Then it ostensibly will have time to cool down before the next charging session.
@@otm646
sure, but!
cooled cables do not reduce resistance that markedly.
@@ursodermatt8809 losses to resistance in the cable are not the issue here, it's rejecting that heat efficiently. That's why I'm discussing both the liquid cooled cables and the duty cycle of that cable.
It's like having a water cooled TIG torch, It's not running 24/7, but when you're using it 10 minutes an hour you're pushing it hard for a given conductor size due to the ergonomics required by the user.
What I miss about this development is that, as far as I followed, the capacitor is still just a "buffer" between the charger and the battery. It can take power x19 faster from the charger but the battery still needs to pull the power from the capacitor fast enough or else all you get is a small-capacity capacitor filled up for a few seconds then it still has to drip-feed it into the battery, no?
What am I missing?
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. With such a low energy density, it won't make any sense to have more than a couple of hundred watt hours of storage at most. So you can charge that couple of hundred watt hours pretty quick (like 3 seconds or so), but then you're just back to charging the battery as normal. It will probably only save a few seconds over the whole fast charge.
In the case of wind turbines (VAT) and thermal batteries .Capacitors could stop load on the turbines so enabling them to work at low speeds
Mazda already use a large capacitor to recover some eneryby during a slow down of a car. Energy could be used to power air conditioning or other electical periferials save same mpg
As others also mention, whenever we talk about charging times, we must always use kWh and not just kW. Our electricity grids cannot bear the loads that are really being dealt with at present, unless we install a lot of diesel generators around. Supercharging with such large amounts of energy is not only dangerous, but also shortens the lifetime of the batteries.
The ridiculously poor energy density means these have no place in an EV. You'd need a physically large and heavy bank of these in an EV to absorb enough charge to then pass on to the battery pack at a lower rate, it makes zero sense.
🤔 I feel like capacitors would be a good match with something like or MesoDyne or LightCell convertor. 8.875Wh/kg means a 25kg cap can provide 100kW of boost for almost eight seconds. That would get your vehicle off the line and up hills, with the convertor providing baseline power to the system.
Faster fill ups. Electricity can be envisioned a lot like water. If you want to fill up your BEV battery faster is a lot like saying you want to fill up your swimming pool faster. If you use a 1 inch garden hose; it will take a long time; so why not use a firehose? Sounds great in theory right? However if the amount of water available is only enough to fill a garden hose the fire hose won't help. If your neighborhood water source is a water tank, but the water tanks is only twice as big as your swimming pool; if others already emptied the tank by filling up their new swimming pools ; you won't even get a drop. Most of the Grid doesn't have the capacity to charge so fast.
Whether this is the present case or not, the solution to the EV charging time problem really seems to lie in the capacitors. Thanks, Dave!
Whenever I hear a claim about very fast charging I look at the amount of power required to make that happen. 350kW chargers will charge an EV within 15-30 minutes. Cutting charging time in half means doubling the power supplied by the charger. It also will greatly increase waste heat which will make the process less efficient. We rapidly get to charging speeds that would require multiple Megawatt chargers. 19 times faster means over 6 MW. In my opinion, the chargers we have a pretty well as fast as we need them to be. It would be nice if they were as fast as fuelling with gas, but then again, when charging, you don't have to wait beside the car until charging is done.
You do have to wait with the car til it's done charging if you charge on the go. I personally think if we can get it down to 5 mins or less, people will be happy with that. They probably don't mind having a cigarette break or scrolling through their favorite social media app for a few minutes while it charges.
@@user72974 what I mean is that my routine when I'm traveling long distances in my EV is to plug the car, go to the restaurant and get a meal or take a bio break. I don't have to wait beside the car for that and the car alerts me when I have enough to continue my trip. My real life experience is that charging is already so fast that I only have time to get a table and order my meal before I need to move the EV because it's charged and I don't want to incur idle fees.
@@user72974 the charging tech is not the problem, nor is the battery tech. The grid just cannot supply that amount of power. to get to 5 minutes the grid of practically any country would require a major overhaul.
@@user72974for me I find destination charging the ‘fastest’ option and cheapest . Fastest because I can plug into the 7kw charger and walk off , returning in the morning . Either a fast charger you have to wait half hour in the vehicle . So oddly slower chargers take less ( near none ) of my time
That's true, but if the technology works, there are still plenty of uses for it that don't involve multi-megawatt power supplies. For example, laptops and mobile phones could use it to pick up near-instant charges at airports for people who forgot to plug their devices in the night before a flight. E-bikes could use it for 5-minute quick charges at level 2 charging stations designed for cars.
Even for cars, if the technology could be used to reduce slowdowns in charging speeds as the battery gets fuller, which wouldn't require any upgrades to chargers or utilities.
And, even a charger with 6 MW power supply is not completely infeasible. Data centers, for example, consume far more than that, it's just a question of where they're located relative to the high-power infrastructure.
That's super interesting. EVs could be a mix of traditional LFP~ battery for day-to-day use, along with super fast charging (and more dense) batteries that "give you 50km autonomy in 60 seconds of charge"
I believe the LED effect was first discovered in 1909. To achieve a working commercially produced battery I think this new development will take about the same amount of time it took to create the first LED to making a 4K TV.
Capacitors are the one of the main reasons that electronics stop working. Decades repairing electronic units taught me that one of the first things one does after checking the obvious - is it plugged in? - is check all the electrolytic capacitors. The new 'super capacitors' have been used to replace the 12 volt battery in cars for many years as they tick all the boxes and do not pose so much of an environmental risk. I have just had to replace my 65" television because a capacitor blew in the HDMI circuit of my Virgin Tivo box which took out not only the Tivo but my TV as well. Only the red channel got through for a time - until it failed too.
In an EV, I imagine that super capacitors might look tempting but just as the electrolyte in EV batterys has a shelf life, it is the same for capacitors.
No 12 volt car bateries have been replaced by supercapacitors. Their energy density is far too low.
Capacitors used in consumer electronics are manufactured to be as cheap as possible, not to have long lifetimes.
@@avsystem3142 It is very difficult to make a non electrolytic capacitor without a long lifetime. Even electrolytics will las indefinitely if they are appropriately derated.
Sounds amazing. In very simple terms, does this mean those super amazing capacitors collect the charge first then release it slowly to the batteries? (Over 1/2 a century ago I could take in smart stuff quickly, but now I need capacitors like Dave to simplify it.)
What rarely is mentioned that if you want to recharge a large battery (or capacitor) you need a very good power supply. We are years away from having anywhere near the capacity if EVs were the norm. Already we have charge rates reducing when an additional EV plugs into the charger. I thought I might be into an EV in 5 years (4.5 now) but thinking longer than that now.
I don't really understand how a capacitor which only makes up a small amount of the total energy of the car's battery would significantly reduce it's charging time.
How would this play out
Plug in, get 500KW to fill the capacitor for 1 minute then 1C charge the rest of the pack for 30 mins?
Or is the capacitor charging quickly, then discharging into the rest of the pack then repeating multiple times over to average a very quick charge cycle?
Or does the capacitor take a much higher proportion of the total energy of the pack and therefore have a bigger influence that way? Given it's lower energy density what does that mean for vehicle weight?
Yeah speeding up regular charging makes no sense with such a low energy density.
Even your 500kW for 1 minute scenario would put a max of 8333 W/hs into the capacitor. And a capacitor that size at 8.8 W/h per kg would need to be around 947 kg (2088 pounds). So these won't be that practical for regular fast charging or really anything other than to help to battery with a fews seconds of hard regen.
I think it is needed to point out that to get a lot of electric energy stored in capacitors and batteries in a very short time, you need to have a source that can provide this energy. To be able to store 100 kWh in lets say 3 minutes we are talking about more than 2 MW (energy losses not included). It means that if we have an EV with a 400 V system we will need to have at least 5 kA current. If we also consider most battery technologies charging charateristics, we will possibly need 10 kA initially in the charging process.