So far, the industry has agreed that lithium-ion batteries are still the main energy storage method for electric vehicles, but now several companies have begun to consider using supercapacitor batteries as a good supplementary device for lithium-ion batteries.

Super capacitor battery

A South Korean electronics company claims to invest US$9 million to expand the production capacity of its supercapacitor battery products for transportation, power systems and consumer electronics. In the United States, there are three companies capable of designing and manufacturing materials and electrolytes for supercapacitor battery products.

Compared with traditional battery products, supercapacitor batteries can store less power. Therefore, in plug-in electric vehicles at home, this type of capacitor cannot be used as a power supply device alone, but needs to be used in conjunction with fuel cells. Use. On the other hand, supercapacitor batteries have the ability to quickly discharge the 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 after multiple charging will not be reduced.

At present, this kind of supercapacitor battery has been used in consumer electronics products in digital cameras and other occasions to provide energy supply for flashlights that require instantaneous large energy input. According to relevant experts, what are the main issues facing supercapacitors in the future? Increasing the operating voltage of this capacitor allows it to work in a high-voltage environment.

According to Ioxus engineers, supercapacitors are a good supplement to environmentally friendly energy, which can make power supply methods such as batteries, fuel cells, solar or wind power generation more perfect. At the same time, the materials used in this type of capacitor are also quite environmentally friendly, and the price is partly It is also easier to accept.

The future development direction of supercapacitor battery technology:

Joel Schindall, a computer electronics engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that in the next few years, the energy storage capacity of supercapacitors will have a qualitative leap. The current discharge speed of supercapacitors is 10 times that of traditional batteries, and the energy storage capacity is the same in volume. Under the conditions, it is only 5% of the latter.

He said: “Supercapacitors are very useful in certain occasions where charging and discharging operations are frequently performed, such as in the braking energy recovery brake system (which is the Coles system that the host is nagging all day in the five sets of CCAV F1 programs). , This kind of capacitor is very useful. Of course, this kind of product cannot replace the battery on a large scale.

In the past five years, the research team led by Schindall has been studying the replacement of the energy storage element in supercapacitors-porous activated carbon material with another carbon nanotube material + conductive matrix energy storage element. They also established this early this year. FastCap company in order to commercialize the relevant research results.

Schindall said that the energy storage capacity of supercapacitor products will eventually reach about 25% of the battery. At present, the energy storage capacity of nanomaterials developed by MIT has reached twice the level of activated carbon materials. And in the next few months, his institute The leading research team will also demonstrate a product with 5 times the energy storage capacity of activated carbon.