Virtually unknown in the West, Shenzhen-based Chinese company Toomen New Energy has managed to develop a technology for the production of power capacitors, which can be a compromise between supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries. The development turned out to be unexpectedly unique even for sophisticated European engineers and scientists.
In Europe, a partner of Toomen New Energy Kurt Energy. Startup CEO Eric Verhulst discovered Toomen New Energy's small booth at Hannover Messe in Germany back in 2018 when he was eyeing promising battery technologies for EV propulsion. The sampled Toomen power capacitors exceeded all the engineer's wildest dreams. According to the characteristics at that time, they were 20 times superior to the capabilities of similar products from Maxwell. There was something to be surprised!
Structurally, Toomen power capacitors are an electric charge storage element without a chemical reaction, as is approximately the case in a supercapacitor. One "activated carbon" electrode is made of graphene, and the other "is based on a lithium compound, but compared to lithium-ion batteries, there is no active lithium."
When manufactured, such energy storage sources are more expensive than classic lithium-ion ones, but in terms of dollar per kilowatt per cycle (charge), they are cheaper. Also, due to the high power output, power capacitors can be used in hybrid power plants of cars as a buffer solution that will save fuel and charge very quickly - in a matter of minutes.
Toomen power capacitors do not have an electrolyte. Instead, the elements contain some filler for charge transfer. This design does not threaten environmental pollution in the event of a rupture of the shell and is not flammable.
Toomen currently produces two types of power capacitors. One of them is focused on the highest stored energy density, and the other provides maximum power. Toomen High Density Cells currently offer energy densities in the range of 200-260 Wh/kg with power densities in the range of 300-500 W/kg. High output power elements are represented by samples with an energy density of 80–100 Wh/kg at a power density of about 1500 W/kg and peak up to 5000 W/kg.
By comparison, Maxwell's current DuraBlue supercapacitors offer much lower energy densities of 8–10 Wh/kg, but very high power densities of around 12–000 W/kg. On the other hand, a good lithium-ion battery offers an energy storage density of 14–000 Wh/kg, and a power density in the region of 150–250 W/kg. It is easy to see that Toomen power capacitors provide the highest energy storage density at a moderate power density for supercapacitors and the highest power density when reaching the limit of energy storage density in lithium-ion batteries.
In addition, Toomen power capacitors can operate from -50 ºC to 45 ºC without heating or cooling protection. For car batteries, this is an important advantage, because they do not require any thermal protection or control electronics, which means they will save a little more on the cost and weight of the power subsystem.
Source: 3dnews.ru