Battery / Capacitor Hybrid

I wrote a while back about the changing idea on energy storage in the form of batteries to that of capacitors. Well it seems a couple of researchers at Brown University working with some new energy storing materials have come up with a hybrid of the two. These two engineers, Tayhas Palmore and Hyun-Kon Song, publishing in Advanced Materials have described their new work as a hybrid of a capacitor and a battery allowing for long term storage of energy while maintaining a large supply of energy, on top of which is the ability to recharge an a very short space of time. They have indicated that there are a few issues involving consistent recharging that must still be overcome, however the initial foray into this new area of energy storage looks very promising.


Some pretty big names (NASA, U.S. Air Force) are showing considerable interest in this technology, and hopefully in the not too distant future we will be looking at this technology showing up in the consumer marketplace. Imagine an electric car that you could recharge in 10 minutes and drive for 1000km before having to think about recharging again. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

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