One of the things I noticed in Mills' apparatus is his use of supercaps -
in this case Maxwell P285 supercaps. Supercaps sound great until you dig
into the details. Supercaps are somewhere between a battery and a
capacitor in specifications. One of the core specifications that is a
problem for repeated discharges is the rated number of charge-discharge
cycles. These supercaps are rated for 1M charge-discharge cycles
(lifetime), which sounds like a lot compared to a battery. However, if you
were doing as Mills describes and operating at 1000 pulses/second, these
supercaps are going to expire after 16.7 hours of operation. This is a
fundamental characteristic of supercaps, and makes them an unfit component
for use in a power system. Such critical components should be rated for a
minimum of 10k hours of typical operation to create a reliable system.
This will be a painful engineering problem to overcome, but not
insurmountable. They may just have to use a huge bank of conventional
capacitors.
