supercapacitor

55 Articles

Building Experience And Circuits For Lithium Capacitors

December 2, 2024 by 22 Comments

For the cautious, a good piece of advice is to always wait to buy a new product until after the first model year, whether its cars or consumer electronics or any other major purchase. This gives the manufacturer a year to iron out the kinks and get everything ship shape the second time around. But not everyone is willing to wait on new tech. [Berto] has been interested in lithium capacitors, a fairly new type of super capacitor, and being unwilling to wait on support circuitry schematics to magically show up on the Internet he set about making his own.

The circuit he’s building here is a solar charger for the super capacitor. Being a fairly small device there’s not a lot of current, voltage, or energy, but these are different enough from other types of energy storage devices that it was worth taking a close look and designing something custom. An HT7533 is used for voltage regulation with a Schottky diode preventing return current to the solar cell, and a DW01 circuit is used to make sure that the capacitor doesn’t overcharge.

While the DW01 is made specifically for lithium ion batteries, [Berto] found that it was fairly suitable for this new type of capacitor as well. The capacitor itself is suited for many low-power, embedded applications where a battery might add complexity. Capacitors like this can charge much more rapidly and behave generally more linearly than their chemical cousins, and they aren’t limited to small applications either. For example, this RC plane was converted to run with super capacitors.

Carbon–Cement Supercapacitors Proposed As An Energy Storage Solution

July 19, 2024 by 29 Comments

Although most energy storage solutions on a grid-level focus on batteries, a group of researchers at MIT and Harvard University have proposed using supercapacitors instead, with their 2023 research article by [Nicolas Chanut] and colleagues published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The twist here is that rather than any existing supercapacitors, their proposal involves conductive concrete (courtesy of carbon black) on both sides of the electrolyte-infused insulating membrane. They foresee this technology being used alongside green concrete to become part of a renewable energy transition, as per a presentation given at the American Concrete Institute (ACI).

Functional carbon-cement supercapacitors (connected in series) (Credit: Damian Stefaniuk et al.)

Putting aside the hairy issue of a massive expansion of grid-level storage, could a carbon-cement supercapacitor perhaps provide a way to turn the concrete foundation of a house into a whole-house energy storage cell for use with roof-based PV solar? While their current prototype isn’t quite building-sized yet, in the research article they provide some educated guesstimates to arrive at a very rough 20 – 220 Wh/m3, which would make this solution either not very great or somewhat interesting.

The primary benefit of this technology would be that it could be very cheap, with cement and concrete being already extremely prevalent in construction due to its affordability. As the researchers note, however, adding carbon black does compromise the concrete somewhat, and there are many questions regarding longevity. For example, a short within the carbon-cement capacitor due to moisture intrusion and rust jacking around rebar would surely make short work of these capacitors.

Swapping out the concrete foundation of a building to fix a short is no small feat, but maybe some lessons could be learned from self-healing Roman concrete.

Crank-Powered Train Uses No Batteries Or Plugs

April 12, 2024 by 5 Comments

The prolific [Peter Waldraff] is at back it with another gorgeous micro train layout. This time, there are no plugs and no batteries. And although it’s crank-powered, it can run on its own with the flip of a switch. How? With a supercapacitor, of course.

The crank handle is connected a 50 RPM motor that acts as a generator, producing the voltage necessary to both power the train and charge up the supercapacitor. As you’ll see in the video below, [Peter] only has to move the train back and forth about two or three times before he’s able to flip the switch and watch it run between the gem mine and the cliff by itself.

The supercapacitor also lights up the gem mine to show off the toiling dwarfs, and there’s a couple of reed switches at either end of the track and a relay that handles the auto-reverse capability. Be sure to stick around to the second half of the video where [Peter] shows how he built this entire thing — the box, the layout, and the circuit.

Want to see more of [Peter]’s trains and other work? Here you go.

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A Supercapacitor From Mushrooms

April 1, 2024 by 28 Comments

The supercapacitor is an extremely promising energy storage technology, and though they have yet to reach parity with the best batteries in terms of energy density, offers considerable promise for a future of safe and affordable energy storage. Perhaps best of all from our point of view, they are surprisingly simple to make. A practical supercapacitor can be made on the bench by almost anyone, as the ever-resourceful [Robert Murray-Smith] demonstrates using mushrooms as his feedstock.

The idea of a supercapacitor is to replace the flat plate on the simple capacitor from your physics textbook with one that has as large a surface area as possible for charge to accumulate on. In this case the surface is formed from organic charcoal, a substance which retains something of the microscopic structure of whatever it was made from. Mushrooms are a good feedstock, because their mycelium structure has a naturally huge surface area. He takes us in the video below the break through the process of carbonizing them, much easier when you have a handy kiln than trying the charcoal-burner method, and then grinds them to a powder before applying them as a paste with a binder to a piece of graphite foil. With two of these electrodes and a piece of paper towel as a dielectric, he demonstrates a simple benchtop supercapacitor running a small electric motor for a surprisingly longer time than we expected.

We’d like to see further work on home made supercapacitors, as we believe they have immense potential as well as storing the stuff. Meanwhile, this is by no means the most unexpected supercapacitor material we’ve seen.

Continue reading “A Supercapacitor From Mushrooms” →

a) Schematic illustration of energy storage process of succulent plants by harnessing solar energy with a solar cell, and the solar cell converts the energy into electricity that can be store in APCSCs of succulent plants, and then utilized by multiple electrical appliances. b–d) The energy is stored in cactus under sunlight by solar cell and then power light strips of Christmas tree for decoration.

Succulents Into Supercapacitors

January 11, 2024 by 17 Comments

Researchers in Beijing have discovered a way to turn succulents into supercapacitors to help store energy. While previous research has found ways to store energy in plants, it often required implants or other modifications to the plant itself to function. These foreign components might be rejected by the plant or hamper its natural functions leading to its premature death.

This new method takes an aloe leaf, freeze dries it, heats it up, then uses the resulting components as an implant back into the aloe plant. Since it’s all aloe all the time, the plant stays happy (or at least alive) and becomes an electrolytic supercapacitor.

Using the natural electrolytes of the aloe juice, the supercapacitor can then be charged and discharged as needed. The researchers tested the concept by solar charging the capacitor and then using that to run LED lights.

This certainly proposes some interesting applications, although we think your HOA might not be a fan. We also wonder if there might be a way to use the photosynthetic process more directly to charge the plant? Maybe this could recharge a tiny robot that lands on the plants?

Building A Rad Super Capacitor RC Plane

December 25, 2023 by 15 Comments

[Tom Stanton] is a fan of things like rubber band planes, and has built many of his own air-powered models over the years. Now, he’s built a model powered by a supercapacitor for a thoroughly modern twist on stored-energy flying toys.

It’s not a wholly original idea; [Tom] was inspired by a toy he bought off-the-shelf. His idea, though, was to make one that could be hand-cranked to charge it to make it more like the rubber-band planes of old. He thus built his own geared generator for the job using a big pile of magnets and 3D printed components. It’s capable of putting out around 17 volts when cranked at a reasonable speed. Hooked up to the toy plane, his hand-crank generator was able to fully charge the plane in just a few turns.

His generator was really overkill for the small toy, though. Thus, he elected to build himself a much larger supercapacitor-powered model. He wired up a pack of six supercapacitors in series, designed for roughly 18 volts. The pack was given balance leads to ensure that no individual capacitor was charged beyond its 3.0 V rating. The pack was placed inside a nice aerodynamic printed fuselage. The plane was then given a brushless motor and prop, speed controller, servos, and an RC receiver. Indeed, far from a simple throwable model, it’s a fully flyable RC plane.

The plane is quite a capable flyer with plenty of power, but a fairly short run time of just under two minutes. Though, with that said, it can be recharged in just about that same amount of time thanks to its supercapacitor power supply. [Tom] reckons it should be capable of a 1:1 crank time to flight time ratio in ideal conditions.

Supercapacitors are super cool, but we don’t see enough of them. They’ve popped up here and there, and obviously have many important applications, but we’re not sure they’ve had a real killer app in the consumer space. XV Racers were killer fun, though. Continue reading “Building A Rad Super Capacitor RC Plane” →

Sailor Hat Adds Graceful Shutdown To Pis

September 18, 2023 by 45 Comments

Even though Windows and other operating systems constantly remind us to properly eject storage devices before removing them, plenty of people won’t heed those warnings until they finally corrupt a drive and cause all kinds of data loss and other catastrophes. It’s not just USB jump drives that can get corrupted, though. Any storage medium can become unusable if certain actions are being taken when the power is suddenly removed. That includes the SD cards on Raspberry Pis, too, and if your power isn’t reliable you might consider this hat to ensure they shut down properly during power losses.

The Raspberry Pi hat is centered around a series of supercapacitors which provide power for the Pi temporarily. The hat also communicates with the Pi to let it know there is a loss of power, so that the Pi can automatically shut itself down in that situation to prevent corrupting the memory card. The hat is more than just a set of backup capacitors, though. The device is capable of taking input power from a wide range of sources and filtering it for the power requirements of the Pi, especially in applications like boats and passenger vehicles where the input power might be somewhat noisy. There’s an optocoupled CAN bus interface as well for those looking to use this for automotive applications.

The entire project is also available on the project’s GitHub page for those wishing to build their own. Some sort of power backup is a good idea for any computer, though, not just Raspberry Pis. We’ve seen uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) with enough power to run an entire house including its computers, to smaller ones that’ll just keep your Internet online during a power outage.

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