Welcome to Laser Pointer Forums - discuss green laser pointers, blue laser pointers, and all types of lasers

How to Register on LPF | LPF Donations

Holy $#!% Ultra-Capacitor

Wolfman29

Wolfman29

0
Joined
Jan 14, 2011
Messages
3,816
Points
63
Hey everyone. So a fellow electronics geek like me pointed out that I should buy some ultracaps since there is a sale of them on Electric Goldmine right now.

Inquisitive me asked, "Well, how much do they cost? $200?" He coolly answered, "Nope. $10."

Thinking to myself, there's no way these are that special if they are only $10. But they frakkin' are.

Take a look at these: Maxwell 2600 Farad 2.5VDC Boostcap-The Electronic Goldmine

They are 2.5V, 2600 FARADs. Not milifarads, FARADS. They can store 8.6kJ of energy, which is about half that of an AA battery, it's frakkin' rechargeable, and it can dump it's energy faster than any other energy storage device out there.

Not exactly sure what to do with it yet because blow crap up with huge current discharges... but how amazing would it be to discharge 2600 AMPS for 2.6 seconds? That's enough current and voltage to power probably somewhere around a thousand 445s at 1.3A for 2.6 seconds.

Isn't that frakkin' incredible?
 





Great find, I'm tempted to buy some now and make an array.

"Buy 100 for $8.00 each"... :cool:
 
I know, right? :O 8.6kJ per cap... And it can discharge it all really, REALLY quickly.

EDIT: I worked it out, at full charge I believe it would take, at the minimum, 18.2s to discharge fully (I think I saw somewhere that it was 7mOhm internal resistance?), so that's 472W of power.
 
Last edited:
Wolfman29 said:
Not milifarads, FARADS.
Click to expand...

Here's a pet peeve of mine. Capacitors generally are noted in microfarads unless lower than 1uF or greater than 1F. Yet for some reason I see people abbreviating "microfarads" with "mF" instead of "uF." I understand why people do it, but still... :tinfoil:

Aaaanyway. While these are big caps, the big problem is the low voltage. They just won't want to discharge quickly. They will also take about ten years to charge. :(

And you wouldn't really get ~8kJ into one of them. I wouldn't want to risk one of them blowing up on me...

What did they come from, anyway?

-Trevor
 
heh. Check out this vid.



The rest of his videos are worth watching too.
 
Last edited:
They sure will discharge quickly. With an internal resistance on the scale of single milliOhms, they should be able to discharge on the order of 20 seconds or so. And while that's not much for a normal capacitor, for that first instant of time of those 20 seconds, you're pumping out 350 AMPS. Even once it's nearly done discharging, it's still outputting over 100 AMPS of current.

And I have heard of people charging these in 20 minutes or so, but you just need a high-power system.

And yeah, the whole millifarad bugs me too, I was just letting people know that it wasn't a typo :P

Anyway, these are just a new family of ultra-capacitors. They use nanofoam with an aerogel dielectric, or so I have heard, so their surface area is huge.
 
Oh man, so tempted to buy one of these. Capacitors freak me out though... even the little ones. Gonna have to buy me some rubber gloves or something. :p

Great find.
 
Haha. Thanks. But these things shouldn't be dangerous at all unless you stick it on your tongue - 2.5V isn't even enough to barely break the skin.
 
Damn guys! Where do I sign?

Shipping not available to Australia... anyone want to reship it for me?
 
Wolfman29 said:
Haha. Thanks. But these things shouldn't be dangerous at all unless you stick it on your tongue - 2.5V isn't even enough to barely break the skin.
Click to expand...

I'm sold! Gonna weld me some coins to stuff!

(My hands are starting to sweat just thinking about it :undecided: )

:crackup:
 
Wow Nice Find , was going to try and get 10 of then :D , but they dont ship to uk :(
 
Last edited by a moderator:
bobhaha said:
Damn guys! Where do I sign?

Shipping not available to Australia... anyone want to reship it for me?
Click to expand...

I can drop ship for ya :beer: . You will have to cover the full cost though :(

Edit. Not really wanting to ship 100 units out though so if you do a GB im out.
 
Last edited:
Would these caps have any practical use for a normal electronics geek?
Makes me want to make a huge array and start vaporizing stuff :evil:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top