My cellphone battery is dead. Again.
We talk a lot in these pages about the hype cycle for technologies – how a scientific principle or a budding business goes from unknown to the talk of the town in no time flat. This often happens long before it's ready to clear the high bar set for it by the public's zeal for disruptive change. Still, hyperbolic expectations to be disappointed or not, the cycle that drives interest in technologies also drives investment – and without investment, no scientific advance would ever amount to much change in our everyday lives. So, it behooves us to pay close attention to what's growing increasingly popular in the hype stage, as it will shape the future soon to come.
These days it seems that a novel new energy-storage device – a potential battery replacement called the supercapacitor – is grabbing more of the limelight. Nothing like a name that sets expectations high right out of the gate, eh? Sounds like something Intel's marketing department came up with (forget WiFi… it's WiMAX), but actually it came from NEC way back in 1978, when it marketed the first commercial version of the device.
If the technology lives up to its promise, it could forever change the way we think of portable devices from mobile phones to electric cars. Many a pundit is calling for the end of batteries with the advent of the supercapacitor. That's not quite the case (the implications are different, but nearly as big), but it stems from a basic misunderstanding. You can be sure that meme will adhere to the technology as important new scientific advances bring it mainstream. So, this week I want to provide you a quick breakdown on what the real potential is, and what actually makes it a potential game-changer.
My method of determining just what might be on the cusp of a breakout in public attention is decidedly unscientific – but when I see a pattern start to pop up among the many questions I get every day about tech, it can often be telling. Five years ago, 3D printing went from something only geeks like me saw in places like MIT's D-Lab to a topic of fascination in tech magazines and the province of dedicated DIYers. Now it is an exploding business, and has captured the public's attention in a big way. Sure, not all of our tangents turn into super fads (we never expected electrical brain stimulation to go mainstream). But if the change in frequency of mentions keeps heading up for supercpacitors, it'll be worth knowing the real deal before the hype kicks into high gear.
Sincerely,
Alex Daley
Chief Technology Investment Strategist
Casey Research
The End of the Battery – Getting All Charged Up over Supercapacitors
By Alex Daley
Imagine not having to charge your cellphone for weeks on end... or an electric car that can be charged up for a 300-mile trip in about the same time it takes to fill a gas tank, instead of having to plug it in overnight. Battery-makers have been trying to sell us that dream for years, yet – as Boeing clearly demonstrated with its Dreamliner – the technology still has a ways to go.
Sure, the new Tesla Model S can get nearly 300 miles per charge, but it takes anywhere from 8+ hours using an RV/campsite type outlet (which many owners of the luxury car are paying to have installed in their garages) to 65+ hours using a standard 110V home outlet to charge it up. If you are lucky enough to live or work near one of their "supercharger" stations, you can fill it half up in just 30 minutes, but there are very few available right now.
However, there's a technology on the horizon that promises to throw everything we know about batteries out the window, by storing far more power in the same space, and filling that space back up in a fraction of the time that normal recharging requires.
I opened my inbox numerous times in the past week to find the same question from lots of different sources. One from our own Doug Hornig summed them all up quite well with a simple question:
"Is this for real?"
Doug was referring to an article in the recent issue of Nature Communications on a novel way to mass-produce so-called superconductors on the super-cheap – using no more equipment than the average home CD/DVD burner. Hacked together by a group of research scientists at UCLA, the ingenious technique is a way of producing layers of microscopically nuanced lattices called graphene, an essential component of many superconductor designs. It holds the promise of rapidly dropping prices for what was until now a very expensive process.
You see, we've known about the concept of supercapacitors for decades. In fact, their antecedent, the capacitor, is one of the fundamental building blocks of electronics. Long before the Energizer Bunny starting banging its away around our television screens, engineers had been using capacitors to store electrical charge – originally as filters to help tune signals clearly on wireless radios of all sorts. The devices did so by storing and releasing excess energy, but only teeny amounts of it... we're talking millions of them to hold what a simple AA battery can.
Over the years, however, scientists worked on increasing their storage capacity. Way back in 1957, engineers at General Electric came up with the first supercapacitor... but back then there were no uses for it. So, the technology stayed in the lab until 1978, when NEC started marketing the tech (and calling it a "supercapacitor" for the first time) as a solution for backing up computer memory during power outages. For hanging on to a few milliamps of power for an hour or so, there was no better tool for the job – at least until watch batteries were employed at a hundredth of the cost.
Despite decades of on-and-off research interest, it wasn't until the dawn of the age of nanomaterials that the supercapacitor became competitive with batteries. As materials could be produced more accurately and the size of the supercapacitor's components could be driven down, its advantages became apparent.
- A typical 3.6-volt lithium-ion battery (LIB) – some of the better technology on the market – can take up to an hour to charge to full capacity, and certainly no less than 10 minutes in the best case. It can only be charged 500 to 1000 times before it starts to seriously degrade.
- A typical, recent-vintage 2.5-volt supercapacitor, however, can typically be charged in a few seconds – and it can last for hundreds of thousands or even a million charge cycles.
Imagine that: connect up a few supercapacitor cells in a chain, and charge up a power drill in 30 seconds.
However, that's where the comparisons end between supercapacitance and batteries. Unfortunately, in their current state, supercapacitors can only hold about 30 watt-hours of charge per kilogram. That's only 20% of what the typical LIB can manage. What they lack in storage they make up for in power delivery, though. Unlike slowly discharging LIBs, if you need a quick zap of juice, a supercapacitor can deliver as much as 10 times the power at a time.
Quick to charge and quick to discharge, they've become a popular choice for things like guarding server farms against brownouts and powering components in hybrid cars – and companies like private startup Ioxus have been able to fill those specialized needs. But their biggest Achilles heel has always been cost, which runs around 20 times as much as LIBs, putting the technology out of reach of all but highly specialized applications.
That's where the team at UCLA comes in. Instead of manufacturing their double-layer capacitors using some sort of high-end manufacturing equipment from the semiconductor industry in a clean room with millions in supporting infrastructure, they used a very sophisticated new device called a… DVD burner. Yep, one of those LightScribe models available for $40 at NewEgg and shipped with every desktop computer these days. By employing its laser and a novel layer of substrates, the team was able to print 100 small sheets of graphene-based superconductors, right on top of a compact disc:
The resulting microsized capacitance layers demonstrate all the same quick charge and discharge as normal supercapacitors, but thanks to the ability to remove binders and polymer fillers with this new manufacturing technique, they have an energy density that rivals microbatteries.
In other words, the best of both worlds – and to boot they are flexible, unlike the competition, allowing them to be incorporated into wearable computers, roll-up displays, and all sorts of form factors as yet unheard of.
The UCLA experiment shows that we're just starting to scratch the surface with supercapacitor research. Thanks to all the advances in micro- and nanoscale materials created by industries like microchips and solar cells, our understanding of how to make a better capacitor is magnitudes improved over just a decade ago.
That's creating a small rush in research in the space, which just may hit commercial pay dirt in the next few years. After all, UCLA doesn't have a lock on supercapacitor research. Another contributor to the increased chatter: At the end of January of this year, a small, quasi-stealth-mode startup company out of Texas called EEstor published a press release with results of independent testing of its supercapacitor-based electrical storage. Buried in the highly technical release was a simple translation: We're now able to produce these things at scale, and make them as energy-dense as lithium-ion batteries; and someone else has (finally) run the numbers to provide third-party verification.
EEStor, over the many years it's been touting its research technology, has made some very bold claims about the potential for it to store as much as 10 times the amount of energy per kilogram as current LIBs. If those predictions come to fruition, the company may in fact have a game-changer. Until then, the January release is just an incremental step forward for the company, which has been widely accused of overhyping itself and never delivering, hurting the whole supercapacitor industry in the process.
Advances like those out of UCLA have the supercapacitor industry – in recent history, a regularly mocked corner of the power-storage research world – starting to buzz with excitement once again. When Elon Musk, founder of the aforementioned Tesla Motors, tweeted the other day with a teasing note about putting his "money where [his] mouth is," the community started speculating about whether the company would ditch its current battery tech and buy out one of the supercapacitance startups it's been rumored to be in talks with, such as the super-secretive Silicon Valley outfit Quantumscape (which also happens to be founded by Jagdeep Singh, CEO of CET portfolio company Infinera). While Musk is a big public proponent of supercapacitors' potential, his company still relies on standard batteries for its production vehicles, just like everyone else.
That vague announcement later only amounted to striking a deal with a bank to lock in the Model S's resale value with a Mercedes S class, to make leasing a little easier. It came along with a press conference that included underwhelming updates to its battery strategy: Tesla will be ditching the 43-kWh battery option and upgrading everyone to the longer-range 60-kWh battery, after only 4% of preorders went for the smaller (and $10,000 cheaper) version. In other words, the company is sticking with the tried-and-true battery approach for the time being, and working to make sure owning a Model S is as painless as traditional batteries will let it be.
For the supercapacitor community, this was a letdown. However, with all this research lowering costs, increasing capacity, and smoothing out power distribution problems that have plagued the technology for years, we may just be on the verge of the new era for energy storage that's been long promised.
Even if the time to market for supercapacitors has been cut in half, it's not a sure bet just yet. Many other technologies are vying to replace the battery too, including the long-vaunted fuel cell. If this team in Calgary is any indication – it's just found a way to make hydrogen fuel from green power sources 1,000 times cheaper than before – the race will be a close one.
Bits & Bytes
Dark Matter Detected? (CERN)
Dark matter makes up about 25% of the universe (five times as much as the "normal" matter that makes up you, me, and everything we can see), but we still don't know what it is. It has been observed indirectly through its interaction with normal matter but has never been detected directly – perhaps until now. Yesterday, the international team running the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer announced the first results in its search for dark matter. The team, whose findings will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, report the observation of an excess of positrons (the antimatter counterpart of the electron) in the cosmic ray flux.
While an excess of antimatter within the cosmic ray flux was first observed about 20 years ago, its origin remains unexplained. Supersymmetry predicts that the positrons could be produced when two particles of dark matter collide and are annihilated. Another possibility, however, is that the positrons originate from pulsars (super-dense, rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit a powerful beam of electromagnetic radiation) distributed throughout the galactic plane. But according to AMS spokesperson Samuel Ting, "Over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter, or whether they have some other origin." Exciting stuff.
A Noninvasive Way to Track Cancers (MIT Technology Review)
Doctors typically use invasive (and often expensive) biopsy procedures to diagnose cancer. But what if they could just take a simple blood test to receive a diagnosis? Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are cells that have shed into the vasculature from a tumor and circulate in the bloodstream. An easy and accurate way to detect them is sort of a holy grail in cancer diagnostics, because not only do they constitute the seeds for subsequent growth of additional tumors in other organs (metastasis), but finding them from a simple test would allow for much earlier diagnosis, which would allow for much higher survival rates. To date, this has proven to be a major technological challenge because CTCs make up such a small portion of the total cells in circulating blood. Scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School may be close to an answer. They say they've built a microfluidic device that can quickly grab nearly any type of tumor cell, an advance that may one day lead to simple blood tests for detecting and tracking cancer.
The Future Evolution of Smartphone Cameras (ExtremeTech)
While the advancements in smartphone camera technology may have had the undesirable effect of motivating our friends to take a picture of every meal they eat and post it on Facebook, at least we no longer have to lug around a separate device to snap a shot of something we actually care about – like one of our kids doing something cute. But after years of racing towards higher megapixel counts, technologists are coming to realize that more isn't always better, and there are other areas of mobile camera technology that require improvements. Take a look at some of the recent innovations in mobile camera technology.
Bubba Watson's Hovercraft Golf Cart (Gizmag)
It was a natural progression of events for Bubba Watson: win the Master's, then team up with Oakley and Neoteric Hovercraft to produce the world's first hovercraft golf cart. Enjoy.
