Supercapacitors Technical Requirements for New Applications

The supercapacitors (SCs), also called ultracapacitors or electrochemical capacitors, are devices with a very high specific power and high capacitance, available for a long period of time with negligible deterioration, that have been historically proposed in small applications (memory back-up in consumer electronics and storage systems for microsolar power generators) and now are proposed for high power/energy applications, such as hybrid and electric vehicles, power quality systems and smart grids. The advancements in new materials and the rapid growth of more demanding storage systems in a variety of applications have created a lack of universally accepted definitions of these devices and, consequently, a real difficulty in describing developments and progress in the SC field. This paper contains a brief survey of the history of the SC development, which is strongly related to the evolution of the SC technologies, tentatively classified in symmetric, asymmetric and hybrid. A short presentation of key parameters has been given to introduce the description of new applications with large SC devices, covering transport, industrial and electric utility sectors, with some reflections about the foreseen impacts on the future market more than quadrupled in 5 years up to almost $877 million worldwide.