The Super Supercapacitor

Sounds cool. But for a car to capacitor charge within seconds would require practically an infinite amount of current.

 

They said 1 minute in the film. If you have 10 times the power of a tesla super charger 1200 KW, you would charge 20kwh in a little over a minute. Problems today are cost and weight.

That leads to something called an ultra battery, a battery married to a super cap, which can provide the power of a super cap, but the energy density close to a battery, but requires some additional electronics for each. The super cap can handle rapid charging from brakes, and bursts of power for acceleration.

 

The problem is a cap stores the energy as voltage versus a battery that stores it as current. To add energy, it has to be boosted up, active electronics, and get it back, reduce the voltage. In contrast, a battery tends to hold a relatively constant voltage (compared to the cap) which makes it a 'nicer' energy storage device.

"Nice" is a relative term but it means you don't need power electronics to deal with the much greater voltage changes of an ultra-cap.

Bob Wilson

 

If frogs could fly, their butts wouldn't keep hitting the ground.

 

It is not technically difficult to make a 1200 KW charger, the problem with doing such a solution is current cost and weight of the super caps. Really they could remove some technical challenges to quick charging.

Until the price comes down to the levels of lithium, I would expect them to be used in ultra batteries. With an ultra battery in a small batteried phev like the prius phv, the acceleration limitation could be removed, and more regen braking could be recovered.

 

When you have Joe Consumer or some minimum wage high school drop out working at a charging station dealing with 1200 volts at 1000 Amps or 600 Volts at 2,000 Amps or some other combinatio0n adding up to 1,200,000 Watts, that isn't an event I would care to be near. Remember, we live in a world where some people can't tell the throttle from the brake after they have been driving 20 years.

 

The SAE specked chargers make sure they are plugged in correctly before they apply power. Now there are some extra things you need to do to be safe over around 100KW, which is why they set the current standard there. Again, I do not think this will happen anytime soon, simply for cost reasons. Joe consumer does seem to be able to pour gasoline at power rates this high. I have only seen in movies where you pour the gas on the ground or someone else instead of in the car. Electricity should be safer

Now on those folks mistaking the brake from the gas, its not those with only 20 years experience, these folks normally have more than 40. Cars don't have safety interlocks like car chargers.

 

Here's your 100KW:

Just ya' can't get a 30 charge clip any more.

Bob Wilson

 

Toyota's using super caps in this. It's a start.