Supercapacitors…the Electronic Flywheel.
Supercapacitor
Imagine a battery that you could charge instantaneously. What applications might that suggest to you?
How about the electronic equivalent of the centuries old flywheel? The basic principle of the flywheel is to store energy, for instance in a tramcar when it is braking, rather than waste energy as heat in a crude braking mechanism, a flywheel is employed to take the otherwise wasted energy (normally wasted as heat) and store it in a flywheel.
As beautiful as some of these mechanical systems are, they are bulky, need to be well balanced and maintained.
Enter the Super Capacitor!.
Those of you familiar with your average electrolytic capacitor know that they have a relatively low internal impedance meaning that you can store energy in them very quickly, far more quickly than readily available battery technology.
Their major drawback however in the past is very limited capacity. In the order of 10’s of thousands of micro farads.
Energy stored in a capacitor in joules is determined by the formula E = CV2/2 E is in Joules.
For example a 100,000uF capacitor rated at 50VDC can store 125 Joules.
I have in my hand here what looks like a D Cell, one of Maxwell’s BOOSTCAP®’s which has a capacitance of 350 FARADS!. That said, it is only rated at 2.5VDC but stores a whopping 1100 Joules. (Compare that with the above 100,000uF rated at 2.5VDC = ~ 300mJoules!)
Supercapacitors are making big inroads in the hybrid vehicle market and yes, the tramcar market. But just let your minf think oustide the square a little and think of all the lower power applications that could benefit from it.
Today there is a proliferation of RF based devices which all need their own battery supply. The batteries are great once charged, but they are far to slow to take advantage of say “energy harvesting” devices that rely on motion to generate energy.
I have plenty of ideas for the application of these devices, How about you?
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