Energy Storage tagged posts

Storing heat as electricity. Credit: Image courtesy of Linköping Universitet

A supercondenser has been developed that can be charged by the sun. It contains no expensive or hazardous materials, has patents pending, and it should be fully possible to manufacture it on an industrial scale. In the future we could have a completely new type of energy storage, charged by heat energy – eg during the day when the sun shines, or by waste heat from an industrial process. The heat is converted to electricity, which can be stored until it is needed.

Simply put, a supercondenser is energy storage: a type of battery that consists of an electrolyte of ions between two electrodes. The charge is stored next to the electrodes, most often in carbon nanotubes...

Intelligent cell of the Fraunhofer IPA: A microcontroller records physical parameters such as temperature and state of charge. If a cell is empty, it switches itself off automatically. Credit: © Fraunhofer IPA

The battery is the heart of the electric car. Fraunhofer Researchers have developed an energy storage device which is significantly more cost-effective over the entire life cycle in comparison with previous models. If one of the more than one hundred battery cells is defective, it can be replaced easily. Until now, the entire battery had to be replaced.

The core of electric cars are their batteries. So far, these have been monolithic blocks in which the individual battery cells as well as the necessary technology have been housed...

Illustration of the asymmetric supercapacitor, consisting of vertically aligned graphene nanosheets coated with iron nitride and titanium nitride as the anode and cathode, respectively. Credit: © 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Supercapacitors can be charged and discharged tens of thousands of times, but their low energy density compared to conventional batteries limits their application for energy storage. Now, A*STAR researchers in Singapore have developed an ‘asymmetric’ supercapacitor based on metal nitrides and graphene that could be a viable energy storage solution.

A supercapacitor’s viability is largely determined by materials its anodes and cathodes are comprised...