Battery vendors push ultracapacitor wrappers to give Li-ions more bite • The Register

A pair of battery vendors are hoping that a new design which incorporates the use of an ultracapacitor material will help to improve and extend the life of lithium-ion battery packs.

via Battery vendors push ultracapacitor wrappers to give Li-ions more bite • The Register.

First a little background info on what is a capacitor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultracapacitor#History

In short it’s like a very powerful, high density battery for smoothing out the “load” of an electrical circuit. It helps prevent spikes and dips in the electricity as it flows through a device. But with recent work done on ultra-capacitors they can be more like a full-fledged battery that doesn’t ever lose it’s charge over time. When they are combined up with a real live battery you can do some pretty interesting things to both the capacitor and the battery to help them work together, allowing longer battery life, higher total amount of charge capacity. Many things can flow from combining ultracapacitors with a really high end Lithium ion battery.

Any technology, tweak or improvement that promises at minimum 10% improvement over current Lithium ion battery designs is worth a look. They’re claiming a full 15% in this story from The Reg. And due to the re-design it would seem it needs to meet regulatory/safety approval as well. Having seen the JAL Airlines suffer battery issues on the Boeing 787, I couldn’t agree more.

There will be some heavy lifting needing to be done between now and when a product like this hits the market. Testing and failure analysis will ultimately decide whether or not this ultra-capacitor/Lithium ion hybrid is safe enough to use for consumer electronics. I’m also hoping Apple and other manufacturer/design outfits like Apple are putting some eyes, ears and phone calls on this to learn more. Samsung too might be interested in this, but are seemingly more reliant for battery designs outside of their company. That’s where Apple has the upperhand long term, they will design every part if needed in order to keep ahead of the competition.