Supercapacitor technology is advancing rapidly and may replace Ni-MH battery packs

　　So far, the industry agrees that Ni-MH battery packs are still the main energy storage method for electric vehicles, but now several companies have begun to consider using ultracapacitor products as a good supplementary device for Ni-MH battery packs. Neescap, a South Korean electronics company, announced on Tuesday that it would invest US$9 million to expand its production capacity of ultracapacitor products for transportation, power systems and consumer electronics.

　　In the United States, there are three companies capable of designing and manufacturing materials and electrolytes required for supercapacitor products: Graphene Energy, EnerG2 and Ioxus. Another company, EEStor, is backed by venture capital firm Kleinerperkins Caufield & Byers. This company has signed a supercapacitor supply agreement with electric vehicle company Zenn.

　　Compared with traditional battery products, supercapacitors cannot store much power. Therefore, in plug-in electric vehicles at home, this capacitor cannot be used alone as a power supply device, but needs to be used in conjunction with a fuel cell. On the other hand, supercapacitors have the ability to quickly discharge stored electrical energy. In addition, the charging time of this kind of capacitor is also very short. It only takes a few seconds or minutes to complete the charging, and the performance will not be reduced after multiple charges.

　　At present, this kind of capacitor has been used in consumer electronics products such as digital cameras to provide energy supply for devices such as flashlights that require instantaneous large energy input. According to relevant experts, the main issue facing supercapacitors in the future is how to increase the working voltage of this capacitor so that it can work in a high-voltage environment.

　　According to Ioxus engineers, supercapacitors are a good complement to environmentally friendly energy sources and can make power supply methods such as batteries, fuel cells, solar or wind power more perfect. At the same time, the materials used in this capacitor are also quite environmentally friendly, and the price is also relatively easy to accept.

　　The future development direction of supercapacitor technology:

　　Joel Schindall, a computer electronics engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that in the next few years, there will be a qualitative leap in the energy storage capacity of supercapacitors. The current discharge rate of supercapacitor products is 10 times that of traditional batteries, while the energy storage capacity is only 5% of the latter under the same volume.

　　He said: "Supercapacitors are very useful in certain situations where charging and discharging operations are often performed, such as in braking energy recovery braking systems (the Coles system that the host of CCAV's five F1 programs talks about all day long) , this kind of capacitor is very useful. Of course, this kind of product cannot replace batteries on a large scale at present. "

　　In the past five years, the research team led by Schindall has been studying the replacement of the energy storage element in the supercapacitor, the porous activated carbon material, with another energy storage element of carbon nanotube material + conductive matrix. Earlier this year, they established FastCap Company to commercialize relevant research results.

　　Schindall said the energy storage capacity of supercapacitor products will eventually reach about 25% of batteries. The energy storage capacity of nanomaterials currently developed by MIT has reached twice the level of activated carbon materials. In the next few months, the research team he leads will also demonstrate a product with an energy storage capacity five times that of activated carbon.

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