(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student's invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds.

Story...

Supercapacitors have been around for a couple years. I assume this is some sort of innovation that makes them better somehow?

Of course. Sans details, it sounds like a new capacitor material/matrix is what she's developed.

Several clips <video1> <video2> exist that should provide more insight as to how things work.

Here's the 'gen:
http://www.usc.edu/CSSF/Current/Projects/S0912.pdf

If the energy density attainable in supercapacitors can be increased significantly (and successfully, outside the lab!), big changes might be on the way. Satisfactory electric cars is just one of the things to spring to mind.

The problem of preventing a catastrophic, instantaneous accidental discharge of all that stored energy - !BOOM! - remains to be addressed.

(What has this to do with Puppy? Well, for a while now I've been wondering whether I could use supercaps to overcome a longstanding problem - the habit of the electricity company of giving supply dips too brief for the UPS to cut in, juuust long enough to lose RAM content, juuust before I was due to save stuff to disc. Grrrrr! Guess that might be worth a thread of its own).

OK. ......unless these caps, like batteries need a trickle-charge to increase their lifespan....