2019 Cade Prize runner-ups Joe Sleppy and Isaiah Oladeji have invented a wire-shaped supercapacitor. Unlike batteries, capacitors are not used to store energy, but to deliver it quickly and in dense amounts. Using wires instead of plates or boxes greatly reduces the space needed on things like circuit boards. Isaiah, raised in Nigeria, said he was “a very bad student.” His parents received no schooling at all, but Isaiah eventually got a PhD in the U.S. Joe progressively lost his hearing by third grade and had to get cochlear impacts to hear again. At age 16, he won a $10,000 business plan competition and started his own company.

TRANSCRIPT:

Intro: 0:01

Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade and podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.

Richard Miles: 0:39

According to philosophers, we're all hungry for power. That may be debatable, but what's not in question, is it the machines we build are hungry for power of the ACDC variety. I'm your host Richard Miles. My guests today are Joe Sleppy, and Isaiah Oladeji of CapaciTech, which has a wire-shaped supercapacitor. Joe and Isaiah welcome to Radio Cade.

Joe Sleppy: 0:58

Thanks for having us.

Richard Miles: 0:59

I'm deficient in actually many things, but probably a more so in anything to do with electricity. So the first thing let's start out, walk me through and our listeners, what is a capacitor and what is a supercapacitor.

Isaiah Oladeji: 1:10

Capacitors and supercapacitors actually doing the same things, storing energy. You can store energy in them fast and you can get those energy out faster. So supercapacitor probably has a more storing capacity than the actual capacitor.

Richard Miles: 1:27

Got it.

Isaiah Oladeji: 1:27

And that's the simple difference between the capacitor and the supercapacitor. At the end of the day, they store less energy compared to standard battery .

Richard Miles: 1:36

Got it. Okay. And capacitors have been around in one form or another for a while . I mean the ability to store energy, right?

Isaiah Oladeji: 1:43

Yes.

Joe Sleppy: 1:43

Right. Well, the one thing I want to point out the difference between s uper apacitors and a normal capacitor is in a normal capacitor. You have two electric plates, there's an electric field between them. And that's what storing the energy wi th t h e s upercapacitor. You add an energy storage material between those electric plates to further enhance that energy storage ability. So it's not a battery, st ores, less energy than a battery, but it can deliver that energy really, really quickly, which means it has a high power density, which is what makes it the difference between a capacitor, a su percapacitor a nd a battery.

Richard Miles: 2:10

Okay. So what you have is a wire shaped supercapacitor and again, for listeners who are not familiar with, at all with any of this, what is the current standard configuration of capacitors and why is a wire supercapac