Supercapacitors better than batteries – report

New materials comprising melon rinds, fish scales, graphene and more could soon allow supercapacitors to compete with lithium-ion batteries.

So says a new IDTechEx report Supercapacitor Materials and Formats 2020-2040 which explains why supercapacitors and their variants still only constitute a modest business.

It is largely because the lithium-ion battery has improved so rapidly and plummeted in cost, keeping supercapacitors in niches such as best reliability, longest life and fastest charge-discharge, but only where poor energy storage and self-leakage are tolerable, the report says.

However, it shows that this is starting to change mainly thanks to totally new materials and formats, attracting the contribution of far more researchers and the world’s largest companies.

Soon supercapacitors will compete head-on with batteries in many more applications but also “redefine the battlefield” to such things as edible and textile forms.

The newly intense interest in faster charging and acceleration with EVs and with creating bionic man and woman reads to the strengths of the new supercapacitors, leaving batteries “on the low ground”, the report adds.

Toyota, Volkswagen, the US$100 billion CRRC in China and other giants now see supercapacitors as a potentially large market and key enabling technology in their cars, buses and so on.

“Supercapacitors will have physical capabilities such as stretchable, biocompatible and biodegradable, where batteries struggle,” IDTechEx chief executive Raghu Das says.

“Imagine a supercapacitor bus that only needs to charge at the depot and does it in seconds,” he suggests.

“Indeed, some fit-and-forget supercapacitor buses in China are promoted as having no recycling or reuse issues from the supercapacitors at end of life – no valuable materials and no poisons.

“They do not yet have sufficiently long range for mainstream use, but several research programs are getting them there.”

The trick is pivoting of supercapacitor research from flammable carcinogenic liquids touching burnt coconut shells, to such things as solid ionogels matched to graphene and carbon nanotube composites, Das adds.

That takes life beyond the current three times that of a lithium-ion battery to much more.

An EV will have energy storage taking no weight or space because it has supercapacitor smart vehicle bodywork by Lamborghini, Geely, MIT, Imperial College London, a Japanese electronics giant and others optimising, integrating and shaping the new materials.

Increasing energy density involves maximising useful electrode areas. Here the new choice is hierarchical or exohedral.

Hierarchical refers to a monolithic material with a hierarchy of pore sizes as seen by the electrolyte. These electrode materials are currently made by pyrolysis of coconuts, melon rinds, wood, pine needles or fish scales to achieve various cost-performance compromises.

Exohedral refers to microscopic arrays of materials with wide-area surfaces, notably carbon allotropes like graphene and carbon nanotubes and recently other 2D materials such as metalorganic frameworks MOF in research.