EEStar EEStor, a Texas company run by ex-IBM employees, is set to make a long awaited breakthrough in battery tech, claiming that it has a capacitor based battery which will up the range of an electric car to 500 miles on a single charge.
Conventional batteries convert electrical energy into chemical energy, where it is stored and then converted back. This conversion process takes time: that’s why charging a battery can take several hours. Capacitors, on the other hand, store power as an electrical charge between insulated metal plates, effectively static electricity, waiting to flow.
Up until now, though, the storage has been too small due to limitations in insulating the plates: if the power "leaks" between the plates, the battery discharges. The best part? Instant charging (and discharging too, if you want it – think camera flashes, which already use capacitors)
EEStor uses barium titanate as the insulator, to give a reported 10x boost in energy density over a standard battery. The tech will go live this year, initially used in electric cars made by ZENN Motor Co, an investor in EEStor. Chief of ZENN, Ian Clifford, told AP:
The Achilles’ heel to the electric car industry has been energy storage. By all rights, this would make internal combustion engines unnecessary.
We can’t wait to get this into portable devices. No more queuing for a power strip at CES. Or at least you can say "mind if I plug in for a second" and actually mean it.
Texas startup says it has batteries beat [AP/Yahoo News via the Ars]