Australian technology firm, cap-XX, may give the global mobile electronics industry the charge it needs to enable next generation portable computing and wireless devices. Perched on the northern edge of Sydney's silicon strip at Lane Cove, the company has designed a portable power source that will let you operate your mobile phone, laptop or PDA for longer than a conventional battery but charge it in a matter of seconds.
Currently mobile power storage solutions are overwhelmingly dominated by battery technology. cap-xx's solution emerged from supercapacitor research originating at the CSIRO and continued by the company as a commercial project since it received R&D grants from the Federal and New South Wales Governments in 1997.
cap-XX CEO Anthony Kongats says that supercapacitor technology brings conventional batteries and capacitors onto common ground. "Supercapacitors bridge the gap between as capacitors and traditional batteries," he said. "Batteries can store lots of energy but they're low on power -- capacitors can't store much energy but, whatever they can store, they release very quickly." The new supercapacitors will be able to do both.
Conventional batteries store energy electro-chemically when a power source is applied to them. When the battery is called upon for use the chemical reaction is reversed releasing that energy. In either direction the process is a slow one, meaning that it doesn't release or store power quickly over time. That voltage needs to reach an acceptable level before it can run a device - without confusing things, that is achieved through a conventional capacitor.
In contrast, conventional capacitors store and release energy rapidly through a physical process that involves charging the surface of a substance with electrons (think of children scuffing their shoes on carpet and then gleefully looking for a victim to zap). The main impediment to using this system is finding a material that can store a useful amount of energy in a feasibly small space for use in portable electronic devices.
For obvious reasons, Kongats was unable to divulge too much about the company's solution to the problem, but suffice to say it has a Tardis-like miracle to it. Using carbon materials the combined research and development effort behind cap-XX has managed to store sufficient chargeable surface area half-a-kilometre square into a volume 30mm by 15mm by 15mm. To put that statistic in perspective, a Lithium-Ion battery is roughly 50mm x 30mm x 10mm.
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