Supercapacitors

Get in touch with www.farnell.co.uk Ask their technical dept or look up on their data sheets.

drill here

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=supercapacitor+%2Bcharging&btnG=Google+Search

For what applications? Pls. be specific or else you may land up at the wrong type ones.

Ashok Toshniwal, Bangalore, India

I see that supercapacitors are now being developed for use in micro hybrid cars. I think there is a great deal of potential in having enough stored energy to help with overtaking and allow a smaller engine for general duties - very green.

Hugh Mattos

Chartered engineer

supercapacitors are the analog of a spring, fast but not much energy stored and you can use them over and over again.

Batteries have a far higher energy density, since they change the electron state of a bulk of material and a capacitor is just a surface charge on a very large surface area so it has the abiity to feed a large current as long as the charge lasts, as someone suggests, for an electric car to use in passing or overtaking as we from the UK say.

As for being specific, the people who drill will select and add/subtract search terms to drill to their specifics

Contact Sencore Inc.who make test equipment for analyzing capacitors....

Jim at testlab@rogers.com

In low power-low voltage applications like camcorders, supercaps are used in parallel with batteries. In this configuration, the battery is protected against surge currents (zoom motors) and a charge lasts longer than using a battery alone.

For high-power-high voltage, check www.tavrima.com - especially for automotive applications like braking energy recovery.

Great...

I like the site and I like to see that supercapacitors are already being put into prototype cars for performance boost and for regenerative braking

Hugh Mattos

Chartered Engineer

You can charge any capacitor - including supercapactors - with a current source. A current source can operate indefinitely under short-circuit conditions; the type of load a discharged capacitor presents. A wide variety of IC current sources are available, and you can also build your own current source using an LM317 3-terminal voltage regulator and a resistor.

Depending on your application, required charge time, and maximum capacitor voltage, you may need to scale the source to meet your particular requirements. LM317s, for example, are good for sources less than one amp and a score or so of volts as long as you keep its max power dissipation within spec.

-e

hi,

i think that u mean double layer lytic, they are the most dense caps. i know, to charge them LM338, good for 5amps 40volts, if ur gonna deal with caps i suggest u get a sencore, best tester for caps of all kind, a cap can be deffective on 4 parts; value, dielectric absortion, equivalent serial resistor, leakage.

if u want to deal with these caps this mean u want juice, homopolar generator would be a good thing for u to look at, u would have to build one, u give it a boost and it will stop when the bearing are gone bad, its old technology, patented in the 1900's by Nicola Tesla.

once in wikipedia, type homopolar, or in goolgle

have fun...

Simon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

Further to my last comment, these exotic types are usualy only available in low voltages max volt 5.5 V dc often 2.5 V dc. They require plenty of care and are quite fragile due to their being very small for their energy storage. You can't charge or discharge then like a normal electrolytic cap. They heat up rather quickly. Never short cicuit one the like to explode.

I have used supercapacitors purchased from Mouser -- very happy with their performance. They have supercaps rated from microfarads all the way up to thousands of farads.

http://www.mouser.com

Zenn Cars...good feeling cars are presently waiting for their first delivery of ultracapacitors to replace their currrent battery bank. They've been waiting for a while

Maybe paper supercaps are the way to go....

http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/9595