Electrostatic Supercapacitor

Power electronic and pulse power applications for land based and airborne systems require capacitors with increasingly higher energy and power density that can withstand higher operating and process tempertures. Electrochemical double layer and metal oxide capacitors can satisfy many of the energy density speccifications but due to high ESRs their power density is 100-1000 times lowe than required. In this work a new electrostatic capacitor desing is proposed that is composed of thusands of nanosize polymer dielectric layers separated with ultrathin, self healing, aluminum electrodes. single layer capacitors have exhibited energy densities up to 20 J/cc and multilayer parts have been produced with energy densitites as high as 4 J/cc and power densities higher than 5MW/kg. This program proposes to produce full size polymer mulitlayer (PML) capacitors and explore the energy density, power density and temperature limits of the new technology. Polymer chemistry that dictates the dielectric constant and layer thickness will be varied to establish voltage ratings for different materials. The termiantion process will be optimmized to accommodate the high currents that these capacitors can deliver when discharged into a low resistance load. In the phase II work capacitors and/or capacitor banks will be produced and tested for specific DoD applications.