An electric car powered by its own batteries could someday be cruising down our roads

A team of nanotechnology scientists at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is researching ways to build a car that’s powered by its own body panels. If the scientists are on the right track, vehicles equipped with lightweight “supercapacitors” combined with regular batteries may someday be cruising down our roads.

The supercapacitors, which have already been developed by the team, are a “sandwich” of electrolytes between two all-carbon electrodes, which were made into a thin, strong film with a high power density. This film could be embedded in a car’s body panels, roof, doors, bonnet, and floor, to store enough energy to turbocharge an electric car’s battery in just a matter of minutes.

Published in the Journal of Power Sources and the Nanotechnology journal, these findings mean that a car partly powered by its own body panels could be a reality within the next five years.

According to Ph.D. researcher Marco Notarianni from QUT’s Science and Engineering Faculty — Institute for Future Environments, vehicles need an extra energy spurt for acceleration, and this is where supercapacitors come in handy. “They hold a limited amount of charge, but they are able to deliver it very quickly, making them the perfect complement to mass-storage batteries,” Notarianni said of the supercapacitors.

In the future, researchers are looking to have supercapacitors developed to store more energy than a Li-Ion battery while retaining the ability to release their energy up to 10 times faster, making the car entirely powered by the supercapacitors in its body panels. The technology would also potentially be used for rapid charges of other battery-powered devices.

Story via Gizmag.