The battery has not progressed far beyond the basic design developed by Alessandro Volta in the 19th century. In the past couple of years, there has been a breakthrough in batteries and in the future you could see a new design in power tools.
Imagine a power tool battery that could be charged up in minutes rather than hours. A company called Loxus Inc. has created a hybrid energy-storage device that could recharge power tools in minutes and might never need to be replaced.
They are working on a hybrid Battercapacitor or an Ultracapacitor. According to www.ultracapacitors.org, “The Ultracapacitor is both a battery and a capacitor. Ultracapacitors could allow laptops and cell phones to be charged in a minute. Unlike laptop batteries, which start to lose their ability to hold a charge after a year or two (several hundred charge/discharge cycles), ultracapacitors have hundreds of thousands of charge/discharge cycles and could still be going strong long after the device is obsolete.”
The common capacitor has always been known in electronics to store energy so it can be used like a temporary battery. The Battercapacitor has a double layer and has a much larger capacitance for its size then than a standard capacitor. Battercapacitor’s capacity to store electricity is typically on the order of thousands of times greater than a capacitor.
Advantages of the Battercapacitor is that they have very high rates of charge and discharge, improved safety, no corrosive electrolyte and low toxicity of materials, and have simple charge methods—no full-charge detection is needed; no danger of overcharging. The downside of the Battercapacitor, is in a power tool, it could run for only about 1/15 as long as it would on a normal battery and the costs.
The Lithium Ion Battercapacitor would be a hybrid version and would have the best of both worlds. It would have a quick charge rate and a longer draw down under a load than the Battercapacitor. This is exciting news for the future since, the one complaint of the professional battery operated tool users is that the existing batteries have a long recharge time. The concept of lithium-ion ultracapacitors has been around for 20 years, and it’s about time for the tool industry to introduce these into professional power tools.
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