This not a disertation on all of Science, but only a small area that I feel will hold sway in the future. It is not what you might think. It has to do with energy, but it does not create any "new" energy. If you are any kind of scientist, you already know that there is no such thing as "new" energy. It is all here and it has been here since the "big bang". No new energy has been created since.
Here is what I think. We have to find a better "dielectric". Sounds technical doesn't it? Believe it or not, a dielectric is a some thing that does not conduct electricity. Much of the work so far has been on better conductors, like superconductors, but I feel that it is "dielectrics" that will carry the day. There are only a few ways that energy can be economically stored. Oil and coal are a couple of the best, but they have their problems. Along with the storeage of energy comes the need to be able to transport it to where it can be used from where it has be "gathered". With me so far? Now there are different forms of energy and some are heavier than others. Some are more complext to utilize than others. To my knowledge, electricity is the lightest and the easierst to transport, but it is difficult to store. Most electricity now is stored in chemical batteries and a small amount in capacitors. This last one is the one that I am interested in.
Now, how do capacitors work. They are simple devices with no moving parts. The electicity is stored in the form of a charge on oposing surfaces. It is like you walking across a dry carpet in the winter time and getting a shock when you touch the door knob. You are one of the plates and the door knob is the other. Electric power is virtually weightless and that is one of the big advantages. It can be drawn out at a very high rate. This is equivalent to having a very high horsepower motor at your disposal, that you don't have to start or rev up. The concept of the capacitor is very simple. The amount of charge it can hold is a function of the space between the opposing surfaces and the voltage between them. Like most things that sound so good, there are some draw backs. The most important is the space between the two surfaces. Noticee when you approached to door knob, the spark jumped between your hand and the knob before you actually touched the door knob. If we had a better insulator between your hand and the door knob, no spark would jumb when you were very much closer to the door knob and you could also carry a much higher voltage charge. I used to work a a company that made special high performance capacitors. Some were rated as high as 250,000 volts. We used vacuum as the dielectric insulator between the charged surfaces. That meant there was nothing between the surfaces except a few gas molecules, but these were enough to degrade performance. We had a lot of problems with the quality of the surfaces too. If there was the smallest defect on one of the surfaces, a spark could jump across between them and cancel the charge. Science has tried all kinds of methods to get the surfaces closer togeter and to prevent sparks jumping between them. If we could crack this basic problem with a much better mechanical dielectric, it would have a major impact on how we produce, store and transport energy.
Because many of our systems generate electicity at low voltages, like photo cells, we need a much more economical way to raise the voltage so more energy can be stored in higher voltage capacitors. Think about a capcitor that can only handle a 250 volt charge compared to one that can handle a 250,000 volt charge. We are talking about a device that could store 1000 times more energy. Further, if we could also get the plates closer together, it would make the device smaller and able to store even more energy. We are talking about instant on and off energy here. Chemcial batteries are now at their limit. Science can squeeze out a little more, but not much. The Lithimum-Ion battery was invented in 1906, over a hundred years ago, so I would not expect any thing revolutionary in the way of improvements.
Next time you hear someone who seems to understand science and technology talking about the future of energy, as them about the future of "dielectrics".
