Patent ID: 8922315

Claim:
A flexible ultracapacitor, comprising: a flexible cloth made with nanoporous carbon electrodes impregnated by an electrolyte, wherein the flexible cloth is a wearable vest of an operator of a portable electronic device, wherein a pore size and a shape of the nanoporous carbon electrodes in the flexible cloth are based on pre-selected modeling computations, wherein design parameters of the nanoporous carbon electrodes are selected from the group consisting of an energy density requirement, a volume needed to support required peak power, an average power consumption, a cloth size based on an area and a thickness of the nanoporous carbon electrodes, and wherein each of the nanoporous carbon electrodes are configured to have a circuit which comprises: an autotransformer comprising: a first inductor coupled to a second inductor, wherein the first inductor and the second inductor each having a first terminal and a second terminal, wherein the second terminal of the first inductor is directly coupled to the first terminal of the second inductor; and a semiconductor-based open and shut control electrode switch directly coupled between the first terminal of the first inductor and the second terminal of the second inductor, wherein a ratio of resulting inductance and a resulting resistance after switching are given by the equations: L max /L min =2/(1 −k ), wherein k is a coupling coefficient between the first inductor and the second inductor, L max /L min is the ratio of resulting inductance L max is inductance before switching and L min is the inductance after switching; and R res ≈R/ 2, wherein R res is the resulting resistance and R is a resistance of the first inductor.