
Simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery - tambourine_man
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/08/simple-technique-puts-graphene-capacitors-on-par-with-lead-acid-battery/
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tehwalrus
I think the way we improve battery capacity in smartphones and cars will be to
swap batteries for graphene capacitors. I've seen a couple of cool demos of
these things, and they look awesome :)

In particular, think about the electric car - at the moment, they weigh _much_
more than petrol counterparts because of all the batteries, and they have the
rocket fuel problem of needing to accelerate all those batteries as well as
the car and humans. If you can make the batteries out of carbon, even at the
same volume they will be considerably lighter, and this alone will increase
the range of EVs hugely! and, for free, you'll get the speedup in charge time.
If manufacturing the things is as simple as using adapted DVD burners or paper
presses, this lowers the barrier to adoption even faster. I'm really excited
about this technology!

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prewett
Not everyone wants a lighter car, since heavier survives a collision better.
When I got my first car, my dad advised me to get a nice heavy one, in
conjunction with a quick recap of momentum mathematics on why the heavier
vehicle has more survivability in a collision. A while back, a young, female
friend of mine who drove a surprisingly large SUV, said that her dad bought it
for her so that she would be safe.

So, not everyone is going to see this as a positive selling point...

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andrewvc
The worst kind of arms race. Let's all just take up more space and burn more
fuel on the road to be bigger than the next guy.

Did her father consider that SUVs are easier to roll? Also, while his point
about momentum may be correct, its one datapoint among many when it comes to
crash safety.

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glenra
More mass doesn't just help when you hit other cars. It also helps when you,
say, run into a wall. Or a moose. The more mass you've got, the slower
anything that hits you can reduce your speed, the less harm that the sudden
deceleration does to you.

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boothead
I couldn't help but read this as:

> One simple technique puts graphene capacitors on par with lead-acid battery.
> See why duracell hates this

Too much internet time I guess :-)

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drcoopster
One weird trick...

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boothead
One weird trick to harvest karma on HN. Mods hate him!

There was actually a good thread on how these messages work the other day.

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danmaz74
"it has a storage density that's right at the low-end of the range seen in
lead-acid batteries" is this by volume or by weight? I would guess that the
specific weight if the graphene version would be much lower than lead-acid,
and if it is so and "the same" is by volume, this would be much more
interesting for many applications.

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alwaysdoit
The most interesting thing about capacitors, in my opinion, is that they can
be charged extremely quickly. If you could recharge your battery in 30
seconds, it wouldn't actually need to last that long. Charging your batteries
could be something you do a couple times a day, like going to the bathroom.

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moconnor
Extremely quick discharge is probably more interesting, for a certain kind of
interest. Near-instantaneous discharge of a couple of kJ into your skin (or
wedding ring) would be pretty dramatic.

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rorrr2
So would burning gasoline on your skin. So what?

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JoeAltmaier
Depending on the rate: Batteries could actually be bombs, where gasoline has
to mix with air first. No oxidizer needed with batteries - just drive a nail
through one, or smash it up as in an accident, and boom!

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rorrr2
I haven't heard of any exploding batteries (only burning ones), but I've seen
tons of dashcam videos with gas tanks exploding on impact.

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JoeAltmaier
We haven't seen any graphene battery failures yet at all! The article says
they charge/discharge as supercapacitors. They will have a failure scenario
more like Boom! than Flameout!

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sazpaz
We've been following Moore's Law for decades now. What's really stopping us
from a real mobile and internet-of-things revolution is a breakthrough in
charge storage devices. I wonder how long until one of the many "new
discoveries on X material to create new battery" can be practically feasible
and marketable.

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jacquesm
Moore's law actually helps battery powered devices too. As the switching
elements get smaller they consume less power. The problem really is that we've
at the same time increased our demands on the devices to the point where the
gains were undone.

5 years ago cell phones had a longer battery life than smart phones do today.

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James_Duval
This is why I love my Nokia 100.

I don't want or need a smartphone, that's what my computer - or on the go, my
laptop - is for.

I want a reliable phone that will get me out of emergencies and sticky
situations.

A smartphone that runs out of battery in a few measly hours, overheats, and
has terrible design flaws simply does not do the job I want it to do.

Admittedly I had a very bad experience with an early model of HTC Desire, so
I'm more untrusting of the things than most.

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gizmo686
Smart phones have gotten pretty good about scaling power usage. When your not
actively using them they can hold their charge for a long time (even while
they are still listening for incoming calls). The only time you run into short
battery life is when you are actually them to do intensive stuff. On the rare
case where some background app is eating your battery life, you can even feel
your phone get hot and know you should reboot it (or close the offending app).

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cranefly
Just about to follow the link. Bit worried it'll be to an unstoppable 20
minute video.

Tally ho!

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ghayes
And I'm just sitting here just waiting for some HN folk to tell me why this is
farcical / never going to make to production. It's a lot quicker than reading
the article and all getting my hopes up.

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ChuckMcM
This is a nice result, I am hopeful it will hold up. There is a tremendous
amount of cool stuff you can do with really high power density capacitors
(besides weapons of course).

When I was putting the solar panels on my roof in 2003 I figured that if you
had enough 'super caps' that you could build into your foundation then you
could do a nearly off-grid low to no maintenance project. (Battery maintenance
is a huge pain)

The other things you can do are things like smart phones you touch to a
charger for a second to get another 8 hours of run time.

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ars
Super caps aren't right for homes. A home's power draw is relatively even (and
so is solar charging), a super cap is for when the power draw or charge is
very fast and very short.

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shameless_1
For those interested in more info on this, this type of capacitors is a
supercapacitor (the name is used only once in the article in a caption).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor)

