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Saft signs up for supercapacitors

A Saft Industrial Batteries product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 13, 2009

Saft has signed an agreement with ESMA to cooperate in the development, production and commercialisation of supercapacitors based on ESMA's technology.

The agreement enables Saft to add new supercapacitor technology to its portfolio of battery technologies.

The first results will be seen later in 2009, when Saft's US manufacturing facility in Valdosta will commence production of a new generation of asymmetric nickel supercapacitors that will work in combination with batteries on heavy vehicles in a large variety of markets including industry or public transportation.

By providing effective and reliable starting power for large diesel engines at low temperatures or in frequent stop-start usage, the supercapacitors will allow the vehicle battery to be optimised for the application.

In addition to the main cooperative agreement with ESMA, Saft has also signed a distribution agreement for the supercapacitors with KBI (Kold Ban International), a US company specialising in diesel engine starting systems that is already an established ESMA distributor for North America.

ESMA's asymmetric nickel capacitors feature one battery electrode mated with a double layer charge storage (capacitor) electrode.

This combination offers a number of advantages over the standard, more common, symmetric design including: improved safety; higher specific energy; more stable operating voltage; lower materials and manufacturing costs; and voltage self-balancing in high-voltage strings of capacitor cells.

The design has an important synergy with Saft's manufacturing capabilities since the construction is similar to that used in nickel-cadmium (Ni-Cd) cells, so ESMA's supercapacitors can be manufactured on existing Saft production lines.

Since a supercapacitor stores energy electrostatically, with no physical changes taking place, it can have a service life of a million or more charge/discharge cycles, with no maintenance required.

Furthermore, the performance of a supercapacitor remains stable over a very wide temperature range (typically -40C to +70C).

This makes them suitable for providing cranking power for starting the engines of heavy vehicles at very low temperatures, especially when fitted to vehicle fleets that need to start and stop their engines many times during a shift.

Supercapacitors can also be applied in numerous other applications for peak power and energy storage.

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