High Power Supercapacitor Carbon from Industrial Waste Material

In many situations there is a requirement to store electrical energy at extreme powers. Both kinetic energy recuperation for vehicle hybrid systems and peak-shaving in grid-storage applications require a product capable of handling 'pulse-energy' conditions. However, due to their high cost per kW, current lithium ion batteries represent too great an investment to justify some applications, particularly in situations where the power is high, but the energy to be stored is low. In these applications, the more aligned power-to-energy ratio of the supercapacitors presents a far greater applicability. Unfortunately, the currently high cost-per-energy of the supercapacitors again renders them economically unviable. Now, MAST Carbon has identified a new route to decrease a major contributor to this cost, which can work independently or in addition with ongoing research, to allow the development of a new form of low-cost, high-power energy storage device and will give the UK an exclusive role in a rapidly expanding market.