Supercapacitors based on nanotechnology

A meeting of the Scientific and Technical Council, devoted to prospects of developing new generation supercapacitors, was held in RosNOU. Doctor of Engineering Konstantin K. Denshchikov, the senior researcher of the Joint Institute of High Temperature the RAS (IHTAS), spoke to the audience.

“A 150 ton underground train expends 40% of acceleration energy when braking. Nowadays all these 40% convert into heating, but the use of supercapacitors will help recover three-forth of the energy needed for take-off run. As a result about 60% of the energy is saved. And if an underground train gets stuck in a tunnel (now people have to walk through the tunnel under the circumstances), so the charge of a supercapacitor will be used to draw such train to the station”, said Konstantin Denshchikov. “The use of the supercapacitors will allow avoiding voltage dips in hospitals and factories and help save energy, because the supercapacitor is being charged when braking, so the energy does not convert into heating. Using new supercapacitors will help to lower several times the damage caused by exhaust gases emissions. They can be charged through an ordinary socket and their service life is 15 years compared to 2 or 3 years of a standard battery. They endure both very low and extremely high temperature and there are actually no limiting the number of capacitors charging and discharging, and full charging takes no more than 5 to10 seconds.

Our supercapacitors make it possible to diminish significantly the size of a vehicle battery: the supercapacitors will reaccumulate energy, expended when braking and will return it to the battery. Nowadays porous carbon material (activated carbon) is used to produce supercapacitors, which allows reducing the space of covers up to 2,500 square meters per a gram. Thus the permittance of a capacitor could increase up to 250 farads per a gram. With nanotubes it could increase significantly. Mileage of a car with an electric motor could also increase significantly - from 50 to 500 kilometers -, with its battery being charged just one time.

Supercapacitors have not yet gained major ground, because they are too expensive as there is no industrial production of these items. Unfortunately it is extremely hard to find financial support for supercapacitors - as well as other environment friendly technologies and equipment - as there is no “individual beneficiary”. That is the major difficulty. Everybody needs sound environment, but nobody is ready to pay for it.

The RosNOU Scientific and Technical Council acknowledged that supercapacitors are of great importance. It considered their prospects as very positive, taking into account their promising consumer attributes. Nanomodified materials make the basis for industrial production of these products. Their use will provide for reducing weight, increasing service life and power intensity, and decreasing production prices.

Translated by students of Humanities and Foreign Languages Department
Mary Babanova and Viktoria Kozai under supervision of
Head of Theory and Practice of Translation Chair
E.P. Trofimova