About the episode
Many devices, including pacemakers, defibrillators, radar systems and electric vehicles, cannot function without a capacitor.
This is an electrical component with which electricity can be stored and released very quickly. In a pacemaker, for example, this component ensures that electrical pulses can be delivered to the heart in rapid succession and that they are high enough to ‘reset’ the heart when necessary.
But with each charge and discharge, not only is energy lost, the capacitor also becomes less reliable with each cycle. And yet it must be able to charge and discharge billions of times.
Researchers from the University of Twente have now developed a new type of capacitor. One that consists of several thin layers of different materials. By adding those layers they were able to increase efficiency to more than 90 percent.
This means that less than 10 percent of the electrical charge is lost during charging. That is twice as much energy loss compared to existing designs.
The capacitor continues to work well at different temperatures of between 25 and 200 degrees and can charge and discharge up to 10 billion times. Enough to do this once per second for more than 300 years. And so this design will last a lot longer.
Read more about the research here: Breakthrough in capacitor technology
