[LINK] O/t: Supercapacitors

[Stephen Loosley]

Supercapacitors Are About To Blow Past Batteries as the Kings of Power

A new model lets scientists run ions through thousands of supercapacitor 
pores instead of just one at a time.

BY CAROLINE DELBERT JUN 10, 2024 
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a61016235/supercapacitors-batteries-kings-of-power/


A new paper could give energy scientists a better way to design 
supercapacitors.

Capacitors are a circuitry tool, and supercapacitors use them in a 
battery-like design.

Batteries move energy using chemical reactions, and these can 
deteriorate over time.

Much of the modern world relies on battery charging — from the world’s 
billions of mobile devices to electric cars, scooters, and assisted 
bicycles. Inside these rechargeable batteries, ions are passed from one 
side to another to spend the charge, then reversed in order to recharge.


Special materials called supercapacitors could blow this huge battery 
market wide open, turning one steady drip of battery charging into a 
showerhead.

In newly published research, scientists propose a new model for studying 
supercapacitors, giving other researchers a better way to study how a 
different battery paradigm might work.

In a typical battery, there are extra electrons in circulation in the 
form of ions—particles with a different number of electrons than that 
substance has in its neutral state—inducing a positive or negative 
charge overall.

Ions are packed into a battery and forced through a material that skims 
off the electrons, which become electrical current as they flow out of 
the battery’s terminal. Eventually, the supply of electrons is depleted, 
and the battery is dead.

In a rechargeable battery, those ions can regain electrons and return to 
the start, ready to have those new electrons skimmed off in a new cycle.

Discovery May Create New Breed of Capacitors

A supercapacitor is a newer concept that combines the design of a 
battery with the physics of a capacitor. A capacitor has two layers of 
conductive material with an insulator (like, for example, glass) between 
them. This insulator causes energy to build up on either side, but not 
pass through.

In a supercapacitor design, energy instead accumulates on the surface in 
an electric field that holds the electrons in place. This difference is 
key: the particles aren’t joining and being stripped from atoms and 
molecules as part of a chemical reaction, which saves energy and 
prevents wear over time.


The thing is, everything in science must be codified in a way that lets 
researchers compare like with like when needed. That means we need to 
emulate supercapacitors and run the numbers in exactly as much depth as 
we can with traditional batteries.

“Due to the high computational demands of direct numerical simulations 
and a lack of interfacial boundary conditions for reduced-order models, 
the current understanding of [surface-based] charging is limited to 
simple geometries,” the researchers explain.

In other words, just like video game consoles, the computer simulations 
of supercapacitors must be built one generation at a time.


Ankur Gupta of the University of Colorado Boulder led this new paper, 
published now in peer reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). Gupta and the other two 
authors used existing formulae to build an efficient way to model 
thousands of charge-storing surface pores in just a few minutes.


Gupta explained in a University of Colorado Boulder statement that his 
team used existing knowledge of flow through pores—like the study of 
water filtration—and applied that knowledge to the flow of energy over a 
porous material. They also considered Kirchoff’s law, which is a 
foundational principle that underpins the study of current and circuitry 
design. In their system of ions flowing over a system of many pores, the 
law had to be modified to account for the proverbial chaos.

With the new model in hand, the team hopes that other researchers will 
be able to continue to design and test new supercapacitors. Gupta also 
hopes that contributing to this “somewhat under-explored” area will help 
energy scientists continue to improve our future.

“The primary appeal of supercapacitors lies in their speed,” Gupta said 
in the university statement. “So how can we make their charging and 
release of energy faster? By the more efficient movement of ions.”



Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at 
Pop Mech. She's also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her 
favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday 
things, and the philosophy of it all.

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