New Ultracapacitor Batteries Recharge in Seconds
One of the downsides to all of the toys we apparently cannot live without out these days is the need to keep charging the darn things. Most gadgets nowadays are powered by Lithium Ion rechargeables, which take between 1 and 5 hours to top up, so a big round of applause to researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who have come up with ‘nanotube’ batteries, which can be charged in just a few seconds.
In fact the batteries are really capacitors, or ‘ultracapacitors’, which store an electrical charge, as opposed to batteries, which generate electricity through chemical reactions, but the end result is the same a little box full of enough volts and amps to power our widgets. As well as super-fast charging the new power packs are reputed to have a 10 year life (Li-Ion packs deteriorate from the day they’re made and generally don’t last much beyond 5 years) and if the scientists have got their sums right they should have a storage capacity around 25 times greater than li-ion batteries of the same size.
