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Had a good few hits from start caps over the years.Quote:
Originally Posted by donh54
You want to try working on inverter boards in these modern ****box AC units.
Turn off the power,wait 30 minutes,disconnect and carefully remove from unit,put it down on something metal,and it will short out and jump 10mm in the air....
The biggest problem with capacitors is that their terminal voltage varies directly with the state of charge. The electronics needed to supply a stable voltage to the car's propulsion system would have to be able to handle a wide input voltage and would probably be somewhat inefficient. One would hope that these super caps would be really cheap to manufacture in bulk.
Supercapacitors have been "the coming thing" for a couple of decades. Their advantages are obvious - far higher efficiency than any battery, far longer life than any battery, almost zero self-discharge, use no strategic materials, and very high rates of charge/discharge are possible.
But there are a few disadvantages - As Bee Utey says, the terminal voltage varies directly as the state of charge, which, while it complicates the electronics, does make it easy to measure the state of charge.
More significantly, manufacture of them is relatively expensive compared to batteries, and they are physically fragile compared to batteries (supercapacitors, not capacitors) because to get the "supercapacity" means having both the dielectric and the plates very, very thin. And physical damage can mean very rapid self discharge, with serious safety issues. I don't think that currently they are able to match lithium for either energy/kg or energy/cubic metre, but except for vehicles, that may not be an issue.