Further Experimental Evidence of the Dead Matter Has Memory Conjecture in Capacitive Devices

Abstract

This study provides new sets of experimental results supporting Westerlund’s conjecture that Dead Matter Has Memory westerlund1991dead. Memory effects in the dynamic response of electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs) that integrate its prior history of stimulation and state have been experimentally observed and reported in a few recent studies. The different excitation signals used to quantify such effects in these studies aimed at charging a device to the same voltage value and the exact same accumulated charge level but in different manners. Having reached the same unique voltage-charge point, it was observed that different yet repeatable discharge patterns occur, proving the existence of memory. The aim of this work is to provide further experimental evidence of the inherent memory effect in EDLCs in response to time-varying stationary input excitations with different statistical properties. In particular, different sets of charging voltage waveforms composed of fixed dc values with superimposed uniformly-distributed random fluctuations of different amplitudes were created and used to charge the same EDLC device to a unique voltage-charge point. The duration of these signals was the same but with different values of variance around the mean value. We observed different time-charge responses depending on the extent of the noise level in these charging waveforms. This is interpreted and discussed in the context of inherent memory using fractional-order voltage-charge equations of non-ideal capacitors.