Fractal Ultra-Capacitors

1750 Views 5 Replies 4 Participants Last post by Ziggythewiz, Feb 3, 2011

HellHarvest

Discussion Starter · Feb 1, 2011

Has anyone read about these?

A capacitor can be used as a battery for a very small amount of energy. The energy stored in a capacitor is (C*V^2)/2.

But recent collaborations between mathematicians and electrical engineers have found a way to optimize the internal surface area of a capacitor, giving it a higher capacitance. The dream is to be able to use a fractal capacitor to store portable energy, such as in a car or other portable device.

We've all seen blogs about using capacitor banks to fuel cars, but you have to have an enormously large capacitor bank in the bed of an EV truck to be able to make it work.

By using fractal capacitors, they've been able to increase capacitance by a factor of about 2.3.
http://www.chic.caltech.edu/Publications/fractal_caps.PDF

It's not much so far, but at least it's interesting.

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PhantomPholly

· #2 · Feb 2, 2011

That's good news, but even an improvement of 10-fold only puts it in the realm of the best batteries today. Given that those are expected to improve, my suspicion is that capacitors will be playing catch-up in energy density for quite some time. Too, "growing a fractal structure" is liable to be very expensive for quite some time.

Who knows - by the time it's economical maybe EEStor will have a working prototype?

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HellHarvest

Discussion Starter · #3 · Feb 2, 2011

Yeah, I dunno about EEstor. I read about what they were doing a year or two ago and then just no updates. They still haven't put anything on the market yet, I dunno why.

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· #4 · Feb 2, 2011

I dunno why.

Doh! Cause they don't got nothun.

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JRoque

· #5 · Feb 2, 2011

Hi. I agree with Phantom. The cost/size/weight/performance ratio is just not there. The controller will be much happier with the caps close by but I'm not sure it's worth the effort for the whole system.

JR

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Ziggythewiz

· #6 · Feb 3, 2011

I don't think they could ever fully replace batteries, but could certainly help performance as they are much more efficient to charge/discharge.

Just like CPUs use cache on the chip that's much smaller, more expensive, and higher performing than RAM, an EV could use a bank of capacitors to provide a boost for accelerating and could capture regen more efficiently.

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