Comment on New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds
cygnus@lemmy.ca 5 months agoCould you have a bunch of them and draw from them in sequence?
Comment on New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds
cygnus@lemmy.ca 5 months agoCould you have a bunch of them and draw from them in sequence?
brie@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Increasing capacitance (how much charge is stored to reach a certain voltage) or the voltage it is charged to would indeed increase the capacity. Putting several in parallel would work, as would making a bigger capacitor. The main problem as far as I can tell is that the energy density of even supercapacitors is low, so you’d need a much larger volume to have the same capacity (and thus a much thicker phone).
cygnus@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Thanks for this - I was doing some reading in the meantime which confirms what you’re saying about power capacity.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_electric_vehicle
Thevenin@beehaw.org 5 months ago
Yeah, this matches my experience.
A supercapacitor buffer will cost around twice as much and deliver around 1/10th the watt-hours of a similarly-sized lead acid battery. And lead acid isn’t exactly great to begin with.
Capacitors are useful, but only in applications where the total amount of energy stored is more-or-less unimportant.