This Emerging Technology could bring a revolution to the ways energy is created and utilized. From generation of electricity to it storage in batteries, the technology has evolved within its own. We just could not imagine our lives without batteries. They have been so integral part of our life.
Battery storage helps to power devices on the go and give us a wire-free life. Most of our devices are powered by these electric storage units called batteries.
The Next Step in Technology :
After getting compact batteries high power batteries, batteries that would charge within seconds and decade’s lasting batteries we could look forward to devices without batteries. Yes, you have read it right. If the technology gets through we could just imagine how electric gadgets will work.
The devices will be plug free and we can just imagine the walls of your house acting as power storage to run lights and appliances. This could also mean that your laptop has no battery and the laptop casing itself provides the power for your laptop. The same could also apply for the mobile devices too.
How does the technology work?
Vanderbilt University’s graduate student Andrew Westover and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Cary Pint have developed ‘super-capacitors’ that could accomplish this task. Capacitors by its own can store very less amount of energy as compared to the same sized batteries. But however they discharge electricity slowly.
“These devices demonstrate – for the first time as far as we can tell – that it is possible to create materials that can store and discharge significant amounts of electricity while they are subject to realistic static loads and dynamic forces, such as vibrations or impacts,” said Pint. “Andrew has managed to make our dream of structural energy storage materials into a reality.”
– Cary Pint. Assistant Professor Mechanical Engg, Vanderbilt University.
The super-capacitor stores electricity by assembling electrically charged ions on the surface of a porous material, instead of storing it in chemical reactions the way batteries do. So that it can charge and discharge in minutes, instead of hours, and operate for millions of cycles, instead of thousands of cycles like batteries.
Environment and User friendly Technology:
This technology would be user friendly as it has the capacity to eradicate the use of battery in mobile devices thus bringing down the device weight. It could make way for more compact electrical devices.
Although the Li-ion batteries can be recycled and Guidelines have been set up for the same the batteries still are left without recycling. As it is understood that these super capacitors have longer serving life than the batteries, it will help in bringing down e-waste.
Thus if these Super-capacitors as they are called are practically successful this could change the way devices work. You could look forward to house walls storing power back up, car chassis that can store power, laptops, mobile phones and other gadgets whose casing provide power to the devices.
Its very useful and important to our mobile. I like it…