Electrical Performance of Current Commercial Supercapacitors and Their Future Applications

From the first patent of supercapacitors, the industry has experienced the commercialization of supercapacitors happening rapidly after the year 2000. Within the last 5 years, the electronics industry has gained access to at least four different types of commercially available supercapacitor families, namely, electrochemical double layer capacitors (EDLCs), hybrid supercapacitors, battery capacitors and pseudo capacitors. Over the same period after year 2000, there has been huge developments in the electrochemistry of supercapacitors based on new materials such as graphene and mechanisms such as tailoring pore sizes for electrolyte ion exchange to increase volumetric energy density. This paper compares the characteristics of three different types of supercapacitors for large energy applications and how supercapacitors can be useful in future DC-DC converters in renewable and micro-grid applications.