Sorry, I mis-counted my divisions ... the supercaps would expire after 16.7 MINUTES - they are only rated for 1M discharges, so at 1000/sec, you get 1000sec or 16.7 minutes.
On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Bob Higgins <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. >
