Super Caps! How Do They Work?
Everything You Wanted To Know About Super Caps But Were Afraid To Ask
Super capacitors are familiar to those who also know about super pipes; but just how much do you know about how they work? At it’s heart it is a capacitor which uses far more porous electrodes than normal, which vastly increases the surface areas for chemical reactions to occur and generate voltage but this also means it can take far longer to charge than a conventional capacitor. Just how to reduce the time it takes a new super cap design to charge is apparently a hotly debated topic amongst scientists and the topic of a recent study which PhysicsWorld posted about.
The news is good for fans of quick discharging cells, as the research discussed suggests that the estimates may be significantly inflated and that charge times may be nowhere near as long as first theorized.
Supercapacitors store far more charge than conventional dielectric capacitors by using porous electrodes, which can have surface areas as large as several square kilometres. A significant downside of these nanopores is that supercapacitors take far longer to charge than their conventional cousins.
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For someone who grew up on micro-Farads and thinking a 0.01 Farad capacitor was huge, the first day I ran into a 300F cap was disturbing.
And now we have ones ten times that size.