Engineering Development of Cryogenic Hypercapacitors for Energy Storage

Compact, cost-effective energy storage is important for defense installations, critical facilities, and industry in order to have assured, uninterruptible power sources. Power quality and power conditioning systems play a vital role in enhancing productivity in an era where microprocessor-controlled systems are vulnerable to momentary power outages. Capacitive energy storage systems offer an attractive means for enhanced energy storage capability. Hybrid systems using capacitive energy storage to supplement batteries provide significant improvements by providing peak power needs, fast recharge, extending battery lifetimes, and reducing overall system size and weight.The proposed program is aimed at developing second-generation ceramic hypercapacitors for energy storage. Hypercapacitors are manufacturable using the techniques of multi-layer ceramic chip capacitors (MLCCs) and have exceptionally high useable energy and cycle efficiency. In addition, hypercapacitors have very low electrode resistance, high reliability, virtually unlimited lifetimes, and high packing densities for use in large arrays. Systems considerations show that withdrawing power at higher voltages than possible with ultra-capacitors leads to significant overall performance gains. The work is thus focused on enhancing the properties of hypercapacitors to achieve energy densities of >25 J/cm3 and demonstrate volume manufacturability.