During my surfing rounds I found Tavrima, a canadian company that makes super capacitors.
These are slightly out of the ordinary, they're as big as small form oil drums (5 gallons) and they hold up to 45 KJ of energy !
I had never seen anything like this and wanted to share it with you because battery technology is pretty much unchanged since 1910 and this begins to look like a viable contender.
These stack up favourably against lead-acid cells in several respects, for one they don't have a sulfation issue, they don't care about environmental temperature as much and they don't have cycling issues. Also you can 'deep discharge' them all the way to 0 without damage.
A typical 12 V battery frame contains about 1 KWh, or 3600 KJ, these supercaps seems to store about 40 KJ, and are twice as large, so at face value it seems like we're a factor of (3600/40)*2=180 away from a useable system.
But, that's based on discharging the battery 100%, a 100 A for one hour discharge on a 100 Ah battery. In practice, if you do that it's battery murder, so you try to keep to about 20% of that, which reduces your 100 Ah battery's capacity to effectively 20Ah, so instead of a powerdensity difference of 1:180, it's more like a factor of 36, which seems to be very close to attainable in my lifetime, and no longer science fiction.
One of the more interesting applications they have on their homepage is that they power dragsters with these babies.
Aside from the energy density comparision metric there is also the price issue, lead-acid batteries are relatively cheap, and with these being on the leading edge I expect the price tag to totally knock you out, but I think this technology is starting to come of age.
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