Fields of application of supercapacitors

After understanding some overviews of supercapacitors, let's take a look at the fields it is currently used in. First of all, the emergence and development of any new technology is often first applied in the military field. Whether the original intention of supercapacitor research and development is the same, we don’t know much about it, but in complex battlefield environments, supercapacitors do have special advantages. The wide temperature range and high power density mentioned above can ensure the smooth start of high-horsepower military vehicles such as tanks and armored vehicles, especially in cold winter, and its high power density can also be used as a laser weapon Pulse energy.

Because supercapacitors can perform high-power charging and discharging, supercapacitors can be applied to some vehicles to store the braking energy of trains or large passenger cars, and provide peak power output during acceleration. Due to the fast charging and discharging speed, the supercapacitor can be fully charged in an instant during the short time when the vehicle enters and unloads people, and it is enough to run to the next station. In this way, the vehicle does not need to carry a pantograph, and it is no longer necessary to erect high-voltage lines along the way, which undoubtedly reduces the construction cost.

In the civilian field, supercapacitors also play a huge role. For example, it can be used for the power supply of camera flash, which can make the flash achieve the performance of continuous use, thereby improving the continuous shooting ability of the camera. At the same time, the super capacitor can also be used to control the camera shutter. In addition, with the development of electronics and energy industries, supercapacitors play an irreplaceable role in maintenance-free systems such as short-term UPS systems and solar power systems.

Since the energy density of supercapacitors is much lower than that of lithium-ion batteries, it is difficult to use them as energy storage devices alone in passenger vehicles, but it can form a hybrid system with a traditional internal combustion engine. Toyota has applied supercapacitor technology to its Le Mans racing car. Since the energy of the racing car at the moment of braking is very large, the high power density of the supercapacitor can recover and store energy more efficiently. At the same time, when the car needs to overtake, etc. In the case of instantaneous high power, supercapacitors can also meet such requirements.

Especially in the case of large passenger cars, since the moment of braking will have greater energy than that of small cars, the super capacitor can absorb this part of energy well, and when the vehicle starts or accelerates rapidly, the super capacitor can use this energy again. Part of the energy is released quickly, and lithium-ion batteries can be used to complete low-power energy conversion. Therefore, this "mix-and-match" battery technology breaks through the technical bottleneck of a certain type of battery at this stage.

Although supercapacitors have various advantages, their low energy density still limits their use in the field of new energy vehicles. According to the current level of technological development, the combination of supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries can be described as complementing each other, which basically meets people's needs for high energy density and high power density of batteries. I personally feel that based on the basic physical structure of the capacitor, it is difficult for it to make a breakthrough in energy density, but this does not prevent it from forming a hybrid system with an internal combustion engine and exerting its own advantages and expertise in other fields.