http://www.physorg.com/news104161454.html

Sounds like the dielectric is toxic, but perhaps it will lead to non-toxic super dielectrics.

Note that electric cars made by Tesla already out accelerate gasoline supercars. The key point is that efficient and portable energy storage is a huge problem unless you can drag around banks of lead acid batteries.

Thank you googleplex for correcting the article.
Top electric cars start at peak torque.
So they are almost automatically better, especially Tesla's and the Lightning Electric car.

Tesla and others use high-density Lithium Ion batteries. And I believe there was an article in the news recently about high-density Li-Ion cells that charge extremely rapidly, somewhere around 15 minutes for 250 miles of range. The tech has gotten a lot better just in the past five years!

Capacitors with even seven times the capacity of existing ones still come no where near the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries of roughly the same cost/weight. The main use of capacitors in, for example, a vehicle, is not to store the long-term energy. Capacitors are used to supply a burst of energy to the electric motors which would not be possible straight from the batteries. This is because batteries inherently have a much higher internal electrical resistance than do capacitors. This burst of current is made possible by (simplistically speaking) connecting the capacitors in parallel with the batteries. The batteries can slowly (over a matter of several seconds) charge the capacitors, and the batteries provide a cruising current to the electric motors. However, when high acceleration is needed, the capacitors are able to efficiently supply a very high current to the motors for a short time.

aerogel is costly but has about 50x the capacity of aluminum electrolytics and longer lifetime.

The dielectrics being promulgated by EEStor are claimed to yield higher energy density in their ultracapacitors than Li-ion. ot sur whether that's higher than 7-fold.

ferroelectric polymer "polyvinylidene fluoride" (PVDF)

other folks started back in the late seventies and early eighties looking
at ferroelectrics used as a battery.

Vacuum capacitors consist of two separate metal plates or cylinders which have no dielectric material, indeed, no atoms of any kind for that matter, between them - where then is the charge stored?

I saw an article back similar to this from MIT where they can charge these things in a much faster time than batteries and they got them to hold a charge these mix between capacitors and batteries. I think the charge time was around 15 minutes.

Ultra-capacitors would probably be used in concert with a high-capacity battery system. One area were high-density capacitors may be used is in the regenerative charging systems. Capacitors can absorb energy much more quickly than any existing rechargeable battery technology. They are ideal candidates for capturing high burst energy from regenerative braking systems. They could then distribute this energy to provide acceleration assist or re-charge main battery systems.

One big problem with capacitors as energy storage is the voltage drop. Unlike batteries, where the chemical reactions pretty much always produces a fixed voltage right through to discharge, the more energy in a capacitor, the higher the voltage, a huge difficulty for the inverter/charger electronics in auto drivetrains.

Caps would also be good to use in stop-go situations, like in traffic, parking lots, etc, it's much more efficient and easier on the batteries. And this sounds like an inexpensive material to make, too, these are both popular, non-toxic plastics. Hope it works!

Now im not scientist actually im still a high school student but why would we want the acceleration of electric cars to equal to that of gas powered cars (referring to the start of the article where it says soon we may have electric cars that can accelerate at the same speed of gas powered cars). I always thought that electric powered cars had a faster acceleration then almost all production gas powered cars because they can harness the energy quicker, or maybe there are some special top secret electric cars im yet to hear of.

I hope Exxon-Mobile or Chevron are not sponsers of this research.

This, and battery research both have a direct bearing on the future potential sales of petroleum products.

Chevron holds the patents for large format Ni-Hyd [or Ni-something], and Exxon-Mobile actually manufacture the special polymer membrane or film that is the basis for lithium light weight batteries. see: AutoblogGreen.com

GM is the parent of Cobasys battery and yet seems to have contracted with A123 for the Volt*s new battery pack. Will they buy out A123 battery?

I just hope GM and the big Oil boys do not sit on things to prevent us from buying EV*s while they push hybrids to keep the ICE alive and the demand for gas and diesel strong enough to keep prices up.

The coming influx of clean super efficient TDI diesel as in the VW Golf / Jetta and the Jeep Grand Cherokee td makes hybrids impractical. Bosch is building a multi-million$ ceramic filter plant in Poland. Reduces diesel particulate from 25% down to 5%.

I would buy an EV-1 or a Rav4 EV today, but as you know. We can*t= TG

This is good news, and I always love to hear anything good about capacitors or batteries when their energy density is increased. But this is also very frustrating to those of us rooting for electric vehicles because we want it to be great news, but have no idea how to judge this one.

Is it 7 times better energy density than a "capacitor" or 7 times better energy density than a "supercapacitor"? There is a big difference here guys...give us a clue. One is very boring, the other is really exciting news.

How about someone clarifying which they refer to, or better yet, give us a number we can deal with like 100Wh/kg?

Dave