{"id":1697,"date":"2018-03-07T19:03:32","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T11:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/?p=1697"},"modified":"2018-03-07T19:03:32","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T11:03:32","slug":"fancy-charging-up-your-electric-car-in-10-minutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/?p=1697","title":{"rendered":"Fancy charging up your electric car in 10 minutes?"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure class=\"media-landscape has-caption full-width lead\"><span class=\"image-and-copyright-container\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"js-image-replace\" src=\"https:\/\/ichef-1.bbci.co.uk\/news\/660\/cpsprodpb\/9504\/production\/_100284183_hi044452539.jpg\" alt=\"Lamborghini's Terzo Millennio electric supercar prototype\" width=\"976\" height=\"549\" \/><span class=\"off-screen\">Image copyright<\/span><span class=\"story-image-copyright\">AFP\/GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/span><figcaption class=\"media-caption\"><span class=\"off-screen\">Image caption<\/span><span class=\"media-caption__text\">Lamborghini&#8217;s Terzo Millennio electric supercar prototype uses supercapacitors in its design<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"story-body__introduction\">Imagine being able to charge your electric car in minutes rather than hours, or your smartphone in seconds.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s the enticing prospect being touted by researchers who reckon they&#8217;ve discovered a new material that could boost the performance of a carbon-based supercapacitor &#8211; sometimes called an ultracapacitor &#8211; a type of energy storage device that can be charged very quickly and offload its power very quickly, too.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Donald Highgate, director of research at Superdielectrics Ltd, says a material he originally developed for soft contact lenses is also surprisingly good at holding an electrostatic field.<\/p>\n<ul class=\"story-body__unordered-list\">\n<li class=\"story-body__list-item\"><a class=\"story-body__link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/resources\/idt-sh\/disruptors_smart_power\">The Disruptors &#8211; Smart Power &#8211; BBC News<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Very simply, supercapacitors don&#8217;t produce electricity through chemical reactions as conventional batteries do, they create these electrostatic fields.<\/p>\n<p>Dr Highgate is working with Bristol and Surrey universities to develop supercapacitors using the new polymer and hopes that they could eventually rival, or even surpass, lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries &#8211; so long as they manage to replicate prototype performance on a large scale.<\/p>\n<p>So far, supercapacitors have been good at providing quick bursts of power &#8211; to start a car engine, for example, or to give trains a boost when accelerating. They&#8217;re also well-suited to harvesting energy from vehicles when they brake, making them an important component in electric vehicles.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"media-landscape has-caption full-width\"><span class=\"image-and-copyright-container\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"responsive-image__img js-image-replace\" src=\"https:\/\/ichef-1.bbci.co.uk\/news\/624\/cpsprodpb\/14E9A\/production\/_100285658_gettyimages-909742720.jpg\" alt=\"Electric car being charged\" width=\"976\" height=\"549\" \/><span class=\"off-screen\">Image copyright<\/span><span class=\"story-image-copyright\">GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/span><figcaption class=\"media-caption\"><span class=\"off-screen\">Image caption<\/span><span class=\"media-caption__text\">Would electric cars become much more popular if we could charge them in 10 minutes?<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>And national electricity grids use them to provide quick power top-ups when balancing supply and demand.<\/p>\n<p>South Korea&#8217;s capital Seoul is hoping to have 3,500 supercapacitor-powered buses operating by 2020, and they&#8217;re also being used in Shanghai, China. European car maker PSA Peugeot Citroen has been using them in its cars since 2010 &#8211; supercapacitor maker Maxwell Technologies says more than a million vehicles now incorporate its products.<\/p>\n<p>But to date, supercapacitors haven&#8217;t been very good at holding much power or holding on to that power for very long.<\/p>\n<p>This poor energy density, as it&#8217;s called, the amount of power they can hold per kilogramme, has put them at a significant disadvantage to li-ion batteries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Image copyrightAFP\/GETTY IMAGESImage captionLamborghini&#8217;s Terzo Millennio electric supercar prototype uses supercapacitors in its design Imagine being able to charge your electric car in minutes rather than hours, or your smartphone in seconds. That&#8217;s the enticing prospect being touted by researchers who reckon they&#8217;ve discovered a new material that could boost the performance of a carbon-based [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":485,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/485"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/rozaimi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}