What's a Super Capacitor?

Super capacitors, which are mainly used for high-power power sources and large industrial and consumer power supplies, are now finding opportunities to use their talents in products of all sizes, especially portable devices. Super capacitors are well known for their capacitance values and rapid charge-discharge rates as high as thousands of farraps.

Because of their ability to store large amounts of electricity for long periods of time, supercapacitors behave more like batteries than as standard capacitors. In fact, as technology advances, they will replace rechargeable batteries in many products, from computers to digital cameras to mobile phones to other handheld devices.

What's a super capacitor?

Simply put, a super capacitor is a very large polarized electrolyte capacitor. "Big" here refers to capacity, not their physical size.

Indeed, for ordinary electrolytic capacitors, the larger the capacitance value and / or voltage value is, the larger the package is. Electrolytic capacitors typically provide capacitance values on the order of microfarads, from about 0.1uF to about 1F, with voltage ratings up to 1kVdc. In general, the higher the rated voltage, the smaller the capacitance, and the larger the capacitance, the larger the package is , and the lower the working voltage will be.

These rules also can apply essentially to supercapacitors. The capacity of the super capacitor is above 1F, and the working voltage range is from 1.5V to 160V or higher. As the capacitance and voltage increase, their volume increases.

Early super capacitors with capacitance values of around dozens of faras are large and are mainly used in large power supply devices. Small super capacitors with low voltage capacity are often used as short-term backup power in consumer electronics.

Although supercapacitors and electrolytic capacitors have great similarities, there are also great differences in electrical performance and physical size. For example, the capacitance of an ordinary 10uF, 25Vdc rated voltage electrolytic capacitor may be slightly smaller than or even equal to that of a 1F to 10F, 2.7Vdc super capacitors. With recent advances in technology, the size of the supercapacitor is less than doubled when the operating voltage is raised to 25Vdc, and the volume change may not be significant depending on the application situation.