Are lithium batteries old hat? Supercapacitors?

there has been talk and research on capacitors as storage devices even back when I was at college Battacitors I think was the name being used then. Because the power was stored by distorting the orbit of electrons the power available per cubic inch was colossal and there was a major problem of ensuring that discharge was limited to a safe level (discharging a capacitor is very fast) if you discharge 100Ah capacitor in a millisecond ....... bye bye Vienna it's like a small nuclear bomb.

(small ones with a built in high resistance to limit discharge have been used as long term back up for memory for years)

Well obviously they have finally started to roll out items reverse engineered from captured UFO's.

Supercapacitors look like a good replacement for Li's and LA's in some applications but apparently they are physically larger than Li's per ah and lose much of their charge after a few days. They have many more life cycles though.

It may well be a good solution for off line liveaboards as they will probably get charged up each day. Yes, looks good to use as a hybrid with LA's too. It comes down to price again.

It looks like many of the packs from China are hybrids with Li. Maybe we'll see more pure supercapacitors roll out soon.


I wonder whether Nick thought about going down that route? It doesn't look like they will be readily available yet.

So looking at something like this..

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-Set-6pcs-Farad-Capacitor-2-7V-500F-35-60MM-Super-Capacitor-EDLC-DB-Bundle-/123277388550

So is the description suggesting connecting the 6 x 500F caps in series to give about 16.2v volts (If my calculation is right that would give about 2ah storage at 16.2v) Then connect them in parallel with a LA battery?

Then when the engine is no longer charging the LA via the alternator, the caps would gradualy discharge into the LA's so as to trickle charge them?

I'm sure there must be some safety implications here and I see some capacitor packs do come with a protection board. The other problem is cost. £45 x 5 to make a 10ah pack makes it more expensive than Li .

I agree, and not a cheap solution. Maybe thats why they seem to be making them hybrid with Li's? So I could end up with a LA, Li, SC hybrid for my experiment! 😂

I think the units I linked to in my OP are probably lithium batteries with some sort of capacitors as an additional feature.



And a lot of electronics (Arduino apparently).

The bit which interested me was the rapid take-up of charge and the claim that they will do a million cycles...

Seems scammy but they appear to actually do something according to some tests on YouTube videos.