A supercapacitor – a device that can unleash large amounts of charge very quickly – has been created using printing technology for the first time. The advance will pave the way for “printed” power supplies that could be useful as gadgets become thinner, lighter and even flexible.

The problems with batteries are that they are very heavy, they don’t last very long, they are slow to charge, and they don’t give out the power fast enough for the very high power need to drive propellers for instance. These factors have always been a big problem especially with electric cars. There are already commercially available super efficient, high power / high speed electric motors capable of amazing performance, but the batteries available will not take nearly enough power to go any length of journey.

Advances in electronics mean portable gadgets are shrinking in size but growing in their energy demands, and conventional batteries are struggling to cope. The supercapacitor has a power density of 70 kilowatts per kilogram to allow rapid charging and discharging. The energy density is 9 watt hours per kilogram, meaning 1 kilogram holds around 32 kilojoules.

Recent work at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) offers the most economically viable alternative to conventional batteries in more than 200 years. 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have hundreds of thousands of charge/discharge cycles and could still be going strong long after the device is obsolete.