Hybrid Hopes or Hype?

Dean Sigler Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Batteries are achieving increasingly high capacities and outputs, though at a frustratingly slow pace, especially for those of us who want that much hoped-for lightweight power pack that will make the electric backpack helicopter of our dreams a practical reality.  For cars, a viable and attractive alternative to pure battery use in hybrid propulsion is described in an Earth2Tech entry supplied by Dr. Seeley.  That entry describes a three-step approach to making ultracapacitors and batteries into friendly allies in propusion. First, ultracaps should not compete with batteries, but enhance them. “Second, get creative to bring costs down quickly. Third, embrace the niche.” The big problem with batteries is being able to take in or put out large amounts of power without reaching a thermal meltdown point. Batteries are good at storing energy, though.  Capacitors can take on or release large power bursts, but have only about 5-percent of the energy storage capacity per weight of the best lithium batteries at …