ken white wrote:
While batteries are moving forward in technology, so are capacitors, and energy stored in a dielectric field makes more sense to me than energy stored in a chemical process.
The problem with capacitive energy storage is that it's too easy to release the stored energy. I once worked with high energy capacitors - the size of a small suitcase. We had to use/store them in a steel lined room with a steel door "airlock" that wouldn't let you through the inner steel door into the room until the outer steel door was closed. There was a 1" dent in the 1/4" steel lining of the room where one of the 30+ capacitors had detonated when it failed. The bang it made during detonation was quite memorable. (The purpose of the capacitors was to turn a 4" by 1/4" aluminum rod into aluminum vapor that tagged a supersonic flow through a supersonic wind tunnel so that a laser doppler velocimeter could read the flow speeds around the test reentry vehicle model.)
