From: Frank Acland … this is the latest T-shirt design, from CEO Shaun McCarthy's Facebook profile:
“The battery is dead” Which is News to a genuine entrepreneur like Elon Musk. Yet, it is true that semantics is blurring the distinction between battery and capacitor, or between those two and the fuel cell. This effectively relegates the only the lowly alkaline battery to the throw-away garbage it has become. Eventually, higher performance batteries (which used to be call “betteries” in the heyday of EEStor) will be engineered to have greater and greater capacitance for a number of reasons and the dividing line will disappear – but maybe not the old name. The SC (supercap) or BatCap (which is different from the SC) and advanced systems which use graphene to complement ion charge carriers are moving towards hybridization. Hopefully, this is what ADGEX (or maybe Steorn) has accomplished. But don’t hold your breath. Even PhysOrg cannot keep it all straight –still calling the SC device a “battery” http://phys.org/news/2014-09-greater-capacity-batteries-smaller-devices.html To confuse matters, the supercapacitor (sometimes called ultracapacitor) is electrochemical like the battery but with extreme capacitance at low voltage (~1.2 v) dictated by chemistry. These bridge the gap between the old electrolytic capacitors and one-time batteries. The SC store more energy and tolerate many more discharge cycles but are larger in size per unit of energy. The EEStor device has much higher voltage (up to 2000 v) and on paper looks superior to any SC or the lithium ion battery by a factor of 2-3, but the developers cannot demonstrate this in a working product. To complete the semantic muddiness, Supercaps have “pseudocapacitance” which can be achieved by Faradaic electron charge-transfer with or without redox reactions. Going further, pseudocapacitance can be combined with a superior dielectric to give the best of all worlds, arguably including high voltage. Plus – we should remember that capacitors technically do not “store charge”.... Instead, charge is segregated and transported via the external circuit as EMF and stored as energy in the electric field between the plates but not as charge on the plates. To “charge a capacitor” is not to store actual electrostatic charge - but to use circuits to store energy in a dielectric using electrons as charge carriers. In short, we are adding “information and control,” in order to hybridize the battery of tomorrow. Also, there is a small but necessary amount of charge separation that establishes the open circuit voltage across any battery. The point being that, despite semantic difficulties, a hybrid device will emerge, combining the best features of a range of storage devices - and the actual name we give it will probably remain the same = battery. Shaun should change his message: The battery is dead. Long live the battery ! Using both ions and electrons as charge carriers is an advantage, but what about self-recharging? Can that little trick be a function of sequentially oscillating both polarities of charge carrier? Where would the excess energy come from? It is clear that the SC has a hysteresis-like memory and appears to self-charge, but that feature cannot be used to do real work and invalidate the 2nd Law. Or … not yet… but when a device has massive capacitance, it is metaphorically like a hundred mile deep crater. It can effectively draw in a flow of external energy which otherwise seems to be too weak. Background energy seems weak because there is usually no “sink”… yet ambient heat will be extremely robust when you can engineer a zero degree kelvin heat sink ! Self-charge for net gain is far from proved, but in a way – it is easier to rationalize than LENR, and certainly more useful as a practical expedient. If ADGEX starts shipping these eternal lamps, demonstrating a valid energy anomaly – then everything changes no matter what AR may do with the ECat … that seems to be the bottom line.
