If you have a large number of very challenging problems that hold you back, why not just solve them all in a single go?
The full story can be found here:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/how-a-microscopic-supercapacitor-will-supercharge-mobile-electronicsPeople figured out how to make superconductors (with 10000x the state-of-the-art energy density) scalably, cheaply and environmentally friendly.
It involves zapping graphene oxide with lasers in a similar manner to how DVD burners burn DVDs to create a material with an absolutely insane surface area: A single gram of the material has a surface area of about
2630m2. (according to WolframAlpha that comes out to be a relative scale factor of more than
. For comparison, for a sphere that scale factor would be
![\sqrt[3]{6} \ \sqrt[6]{\pi} \ \approx \ 2.2](/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?\sqrt[3]{6} \ \sqrt[6]{\pi} \ \approx \ 2.2)
and a cube would achieve
.)
Along with a couple other clever innovations, the results are insane. Basically the holy grail of electrical storage has been achieved with capacitors that
- have insane energy density
- have significantly reduced charge leakage
- have a longer livespan
- are much cheaper to produce
- are much smaller than currently available capacitors
- are flexible because of the super thin form factor
- are saver for both the environment and household usage
- are expected to be Moore's law scalable
And the group also manufactured a proof-of-concept (i.e. very likely much improvable) hybrid capacitor-battery which achieved 10x the energy density of current batteries while also being able to be charged and de-charged much faster as well as being a lot more efficient than normal batteries.
April 28, 2011, 07:04:56 PM
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