Researchers from Twente are making important improvements to capacitors

About the episode

Many devices, including pacemakers, defibrillators, radar systems, and electric vehicles, cannot operate without a capacitor.

This is an electrical component through which electricity can be stored and released very quickly. In a pacemaker, for example, this component ensures that electrical impulses can be delivered to the heart in rapid succession and are loud enough to “reset” the heart when necessary.

But with each charge and discharge, not only is power lost, but the capacitor also becomes less reliable with each cycle. However, 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. It consists of several thin layers of different materials. By adding these layers, they were able to increase efficiency to more than 90 percent.

This means losing less than 10 percent of the electrical charge during charging. This is twice the energy loss compared to current designs.

The capacitor continues to work well at different temperatures between 25 and 200 degrees and can charge and discharge up to 10 billion times. It is enough to do this once per second for more than 300 years. So this design will last longer.

Read more about the research here: Breakthrough in capacitor technology