‘Breakthrough in capacitor technology’
Minh Duc Nguyen in the lab (Photo: UT)
April 25, 2024 – Pacemakers, defibrillators, radar technology and electric vehicles all need electrical components called capacitors that can store and release a lot of energy in a matter of a few microseconds. Researchers at the University of Twente have recently found a way to increase these capacitors’ storage, efficiency and durability.
Researcher Minh Duc Nguyen and his colleagues are working on a type of capacitor that uses multiple thin layers of different materials. By adding layers they were able to increase the efficiency to over 90%. This means it loses less than 10 % of the electric charge used for charging. That is two times less energy loss compared to the usual designs. It functions in a wide temperature range of 25–200 °C and can charge and discharge up to 10 billion times. Enough to do it once every second for over 300 years.
The research was recently published in Advanced Materials titled ‘Toward Design Rules for Multilayer Ferroelectric Energy Storage Capacitors – A Study Based on Lead-Free and Relaxor-Ferroelectric/Paraelectric Multilayer Devices’.
