Supercapacitors also known as ultracapacitors are used as additional energy storage devices in electric vehicles in order to store energy from regenerative break. In today's video let us understand what is a supercapacitor and its working principle. Supercapacitor is a specially designed capacitor.
which is capable of storing large electrical charge which can be recharged very quickly and releases large amount of power. Let us see what is inside a supercapacitor. Supercapacitor consists of current collectors made up of aluminium. The electrodes are made from activated aluminium.
carbon material. The separator made from captain. and the electrolyte solution made from potassium hydroxide or sulfuric acid.
Let us understand the working. During charging of supercapacitor, as you can see a charger is connected across the electrodes and current starts to flow inside the supercapacitor. There are positive and negative ions.
present inside the electrolyte distributed randomly across it. So when the charger starts to charge the positive electrode with a positive charge, it starts to attract the negative ions from the electrolyte forming a layer across it. Similarly, the negative electrode is charged with a negative charge and this starts to attract the positive ions from the electrolyte forming another layer across it. The forces of attraction between the electrode and electrolyte is electrostatic forces. So the alignment of positive and negative charges across the boundaries of electrodes and electrolytic solution cause electric double layer and this is response to the electric for storage of electrical charges and hence the capacitor is known as electrical double layer capacitor EDLC.
The capacitor C1 is formed along with that there is another capacitor C2 which act as as they are connected in series so capacitor c1 is proportional to the area and inversely proportional to the distance between them similarly c2 so a is the high surface area of the electrode so as you can see the highlighted area is the surface area similarly d is the small distance between the plates as you can see the distance is small so the total capacitance is c1 into c2 as capacitors are connected in series. During discharging, as you can see, a load is connected across the electrodes and the electrodes start to lose the charge and the charge flows through the external circuit and then it lights up the load to complete the circuit so both the electrodes positive and negative lose charges and hence they cannot attract the ions anymore and the ions start to distribute across the electrolyte as it was before it being charged. So super capacitor is used as an additional power source in regenerative braking.
Also it is used where lot of power is needed in less time like in quick accelerations. Thank you for watching. If you like the video, do like, share and subscribe to Owlways. Also press bell icon to get notified.