All eyes on supercapacitors

Supercapacitors (ultracapacitors) are now centre stage for designers of electronics and particularly power circuits. This is because they are improving faster than the batteries and electrolytic capacitors they increasingly replace.

More subtly, they reduce the need for and danger from lithium-ion batteries. For example, when placed across a rechargeable battery, they protect it from fast charging and discharging and allow more of the energy in the battery to be used. The result is that less battery is needed, life and safety are improved and maintenance is reduced.

As a result of this and the increasing use of supercapacitors where they do not replace batteries, the growth of the leading suppliers in aggregate has increased from 25% yearly to a blistering 30% yearly rising to over $11 billion within 10 years.

Of the eighty or so companies making or about to make supercapacitors and their variants such as supercabatteries (‘assymetrical electrochemical double layer capacitors’ such as ‘lithium capacitors’), only 6% are in Europe. It may therefore seem to be a strange location for the Supercapacitors Europe 2013 event. However, 25% of supercapacitor demand is in Europe, from Bombardier using large banks of them to recapture braking energy of trains to Riversimple putting them across the fuel cell in a car and extensive use by others as backup in wind turbine blade control, bus door opening, hybrid car, crane and elevator braking and many stand-by power supplies for electronics. The MAN hybrid bus in Germany is a success with the lithium-ion battery completely replaced by a supercapacitor.

Mainly, these large and rapidly growing applications in Europe leverage the high power density and above all fit-and-forget benefits of supercapacitors which last the life of the equipment in which they are installed. With the Boeing Dreamliner grounded because of its lithium-ion battery system, in future supercapacitors will partly or wholly replace such batteries in aircraft wherever possible, mimicking what has already happened on the ground. Indeed, supercapacitors can be fully discharged for transport and the majority of them will soon have no flammable toxic electrolyte, unlike the batteries they replace. By contrast, air regulations concerning transport and use of lithium-ion batteries may tighten.

Supercapacitors Europe 2013, forming part of IDTechEx’s premier technology events, is alongside many very relevant sessions such as ones on graphene which may permit supercapacitors to exceed the energy density of even lithium-ion batteries.

Other co-located events concern the printed electronics and energy harvesting that is used respectively to improve the price and performance of supercapacitors and to interface them with systems enjoying considerable market growth. There is even the prospect of thin film supercapacitors over a car or on the back of flexible solar photovoltaics. Others in Europe work on structural, load-bearing supercapacitors, part of the trend to integrate components and make them vanish.

The event presents the huge effort in Europe to leapfrog existing supercapacitor technology and its applications. It emerges that the west coast Normandy region of France is becoming a centre of excellence in supercapacitors. There, companies such as Armor Group, Batscap and its parent company Bollore, and the Hutchinson Group, subsidiary of the TOTAL energy group, are interesting examples of an emerging supercapacitor technology cluster in the region. Among them you find technological capabilities for different key stages of the supercapacitor value chain, from key supercapacitor components manufacturing to the supercapacitor-equipped electric vehicle BlueCar.

IDTechEx’s supercapacitor event is this year based in Berlin on 17-18 April. German progress will be represented by Fraunhofer IPA, which is leading the Electrograph European project focused on production of graphene through electrochemical exfoliation for supercapacitors and Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, speaking about hierarchical graphene-based materials for high-performance supercapacitors.

On behalf of the UK, the University of Manchester - part of the British consortia focused on the ‘manufacturability’ of graphene - will talk of topics such as porous graphene for flexible supercapacitors and VTT in Finland on supercapacitors versions with aqueous electrolytes printed on paperboard. LAAS-CNRS, from France, will present the use of supercapacitors - battery-free wireless sensor networks deployed in airliners. Companies such as Graphene Frontiers will speak about their chemical vapour deposition process for implementation of graphene/nanotube to electrode materials. Imperial College will cover smart skin supercapacitors.

Supercapacitors Europe 2013; 17-18 April; Berlin, Germany; www.IDTechEx.com/scEurope.