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Could Ultracapacitors Realize Their Full Potential...With Laxatives

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Supercapacitors present an amazing opportunity to move away from batteries
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and into a world where almost instant charging is the norm.
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But their drawbacks mean we can’t use them widely...yet.
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Experiments with a new class of materials that are related to soap and laxatives (yes, laxatives)
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could bring us one step closer to a world with no more pesky chemical batteries.
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So here’s the deal with batteries.
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Many batteries we’re familiar with are chemical,
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which means they use some kind of charged chemical, like lithium, to store energy.
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Lithium ion batteries are in everything from your phone and your laptop to electric cars,
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but they’ve got some downsides. You’ve gotta wait ages for them to charge.
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They start degrading basically as soon as they leave the factory,
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and they’re very expensive to replace because they’re super resource intensive—
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which also means they’re really not great for the environment.
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They also contain highly flammable electrolytes, meaning they pose a safety risk.
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I’m sure we all remember the exploding hoverboards of several years back.
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These are issues for consumer electronics, yes,
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but also means there are some serious restrictions for using these kinds of batteries in say, our energy grid.
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Enter an excellent alternative: supercapacitors.
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And just to be clear—supercapacitors are the same concept as capacitors,
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which we use in many products today, just with some materials added to help them hold more charge.
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Instead of chemical energy like batteries,
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capacitors store energy in the form of static electricity:
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you know, the same kind that shocks you
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when you touch someone after shuffling across the carpet in your socks.
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Supercapacitors consist of two electrode plates soaked in a liquid electrolyte, separated by an insulator.
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Apply a voltage, and voilá, opposite electric charges build up on the plates, creating an electric double-layer,
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allowing them to store more energy than regular capacitors.
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So a supercapacitor’s energy is stored in its electric field, whereas a battery’s is stored in its chemical makeup.
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There’s a key thing to understand here when we talk about the difference between batteries
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and supercapacitors: energy density vs. power density.
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Energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a given mass,
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whereas power density is how fast that energy can be discharged.
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So supercapacitors have a much higher power density than batteries,
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meaning they can pack a real punch of energy real fast when you need them to.
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But they also have a much lower energy density than chemical batteries,
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meaning they can store less energy overall.
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But they also recharge super fast:
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supercapacitors can be charged in seconds or minutes,
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rather than the hours it can take to charge a battery as big as the one in your electric car.
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These trade-offs exist because supercapacitors can only store as much energy as they can hold
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at the interface of their electrodes and their electrolyte.
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Picture it like this: if a battery is a sponge, full of energy,
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a supercapacitor is only able to use the surface of its sponge.
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Sure, you can get the water out faster...but it holds less water.
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This has been the main thing keeping supercapacitors from becoming our energy storage of choice—
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they just don’t hold enough energy to reasonably power the stuff we use every day.
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But new materials could change that.
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The researchers are calling them SAILs, short for surface-active ionic liquids,
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and you may be surprised to hear that their molecular components are also found in something
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we use everyday...soap.
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Or more accurately, detergents.
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Like soap and even laxatives,
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this new class of electrolytes contain molecules that are dipolar,
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meaning that their heads and tails have opposite charges.
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This means that unlike conventional electrolyte materials,
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these ionic liquids can self assemble into a bi-layer structure, a little bit like a sandwich.
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And their charge and the way they assemble is the crucial part.
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The dense layers of charged ions at the surface of the electrode allow them to store much more energy...
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maybe as much as a lithium ion battery.
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But there is a lot more work to be done.
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These supercapacitors still require certain temperatures and voltages
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to achieve their impressive leap in energy storage.
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The researchers also emphasize the need to keep developing this technology,
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and entire systems that incorporate SAILs to make supercapacitors practical on a larger scale.
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But this work is hugely exciting and could take us one step closer to a new era
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of almost instantly rechargeable,
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cheaper, and more environmentally friendly energy storage...
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hopefully changing the way we charge forever.
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For more info on supercapacitor technology, check out this video here,
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and subscribe to Seeker to make sure you stay up to speed with all your technological breakthroughs.
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If there’s another one you want to see us cover, leave it in the comments down below.
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As always, thanks so much for watching—and we’ll see you next time.

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