ULTRACAPACITOR

TECHNICAL DETAILS & APPLICATIONS

Guide by: Report by:

Dr. Pushpendra Singh Ajay kumar Gautam
HOD(EE) 1673420001
Electrical Engg.(3rd year)
Table of contents
 1.Introduction.
 2.Attractive Features.
 3.Advantages to conventional Energy
Storing Devices.
 4.Inside a Supercapacitor/Ultracapacitor.
 5.Working.
 6.Applications.
 7.Drawbacks.
Introduction
 What is a Ultracapacitor?
 A charge storing device(Capacitor) .
 Differ in constructional features with respect
to simple capacitors.
 Has ability to store tremendous charge.
 Capacitance ranges up to 5000F!
 Also called Super capacitor or Double-
layered capacitor.
 Invented by Engineers at Standard Oil,1966.
Attractive Features
 Capacitance ranges to 5000 F.
 No chemical reaction involved.
 Much more effective at rapid, regenerative energy
storage than chemical batteries .
 Works even at low temperatures -40 degrees Celsius.
 Ultracapacitors can store 5 percent as much energy as a
modern lithium-ion battery.
 5000 farads measure about 5 centimeters by 5 cm by 15 cm,
which is an amazingly high capacitance relative to its volume.
 Can effectively fulfill the requirement of High current pulses
that can kill a battery if used instead.
Advantages to conventional energy storing
devices.
 Batteries:
 Degrade within a few thousand charge-discharge cycles. Ulracapacitors can have more
than 300 000 charging cycles, which is far more than a battery can handle.
 Ultra capacitor charges within seconds whereas batteries takes hrs.
 Because no chemical reaction is involved, ultracapacitors--also known as supercapacitors
and double-layer capacitors--are much more effective at rapid, regenerative energy
storage than chemical batteries are.
 Batteries fail where high charging discharging takes place whereas ultracapacitor fares
extremely well.

 Ordinary Capacitors:
 Higher capacitance.

 Put two ordinary capacitors the size of a D-cell battery in your flashlight, each
charged to 1.5 volts, and the bulb will go out in less than a second, if it lights at all.
An ultracapacitor of the same size, however, has a capacitance of about 350 farads
and could light the bulb for about 2 minutes.
 Ultra Capacitors are Expensive.
 Inside a Super Capacitor

 Two Electrodes coated with sponge like activated carbon.

 Electrolyte :Contains free mobile ions.
 Porous Seprator-:Prevents electrodes from shoritng out.
•The combination of
enormous surface area
and extremely small
charge separation gives
the ultracapacitor its
outstanding capacitance
relative to conventional
capacitors.
Constructional Features
 Originally electrodes were made of aluminum.
 Standard Oil engineers coated these aluminum with 100-micrometer-thick layer of
carbon.
 The carbon was first chemically etched to produce many holes that extended
through the material, as in a sponge, so that the interior surface area was about 100
000 times as large as the outside. (This process is said to ”activate” the carbon.)
 They filled the interior with an electrolyte and used a porous insulator, one similar
to paper, to keep the electrodes from shorting out.
 carbon is inert and does not react chemically with the ions attached to it. Nor do
the ions become oxidized or reduced, as they do at the higher voltages used in an
electrolytic cell.
Working
 When a voltage is applied, the ions are attracted to the electrode
with the opposite charge, where they cling electrostatically to the
pores in the carbon.
 At the low voltages used in ultracapacitors, carbon is inert and
does not react chemically with the ions attached to it. Nor do the
ions become oxidized or reduced, as they do at the higher voltages
used in an electrolytic cell.
 As the effective area where ions are stuck is much larger,
appreciably high value of capacitance is obtained.
Modern Ultracapacitors
 Nanotechnology is being employed in the
design.
 The active carbon is replaced by a thin
 layer of billions of Nanotubes .
 Each Nanotube is like a uniform
 hollow cylinder with 5nm and 100 μm
long.
 These Nanotubes are verically grown
over the conducting electrode
NANOTUBES STRUCTURES
 Benefits of Nanotubes
 Several Advantages over Activated carbon.
 Limitations of Actiavated carbon are
The high porosity means there isn't much carbon material to
carry current.
 The material must be ”glued” to the aluminum current
collector using a binder, which exhibits a somewhat high
resistance.
 Carbon Nanotubes Depending on their geometry, can be
excellent conductors .Thus they can supply more power than
ultracapacitors outfitted with activated carbon.
 Their structure makes them less chemically reactive, so
they can operate at a higher voltage.
 Applications
 Military projects — for example, starting the engines of battle tanks and
submarines or replacing batteries in missiles.
 Common applications today include starting diesel trucks and railroad
locomotives, actuators, and in electric/hybrid-electric vehicles for
transient load leveling and regenerating the energy of braking.
 A bank of ultracapacitors releases a burst of energy to help a crane heave
its load aloft; they then capture energy released during the descent to
recharge.
 They're being explored as replacements for the batteries in hybrid cars.
 In ordinary cars, they could help level the load on the battery by
powering acceleration and recovering energy during braking.
 Delivering or accepting power during short-duration events is the
ultracapacitor's strongest suit.
 ultracapacitors function well in temperatures as low as –40 C, they can
give electric cars a boost in cold weather, when batteries are at their
worst.
Drawbacks of Ultracapacitors
 Linear discharge voltage prevents use of the full
energy spectrum
 Low energy density - typically holds one-fifth to
one-tenth the energy of an electrochemical battery
 Cells have low voltages - serial connections are
needed to obtain higher voltages.Voltage balancing
is required if more than three capacitors are
connected in series
 High self-discharge - the rate is considerably higher
than that of an electrochemical battery.
 Requires sophisticated electronic control and
switching equipment
REFERENCES
 www.accessify.com
 http://www.oavco.com
 wikipedia.org