‘Game-changing’ supercapacitor wins ICAP backing

‘Supercapacitor’ is not a word in every car buyer’s vocabulary yet but, like the catalytic convertor before it, that may soon change. Michael Spencer, the billionaire founder of electronics market operator ICAP appears to think so at any rate.

Over the weekend, news came through that Spencer was injecting a rumoured $8 million into Superdielectrics, a start-up that is developing the technology to build a high-capacity supercapacitor which is expected to lower the cost of electric vehicles (EVs) by helping them charge in seconds. Supercapacitors can also store more energy than conventional electrolytic capacitors and have a longer lifespan than rechargeable batteries

“I started this about 40 years ago with materials that went on to form the basis of extended wear contact lenses,” Highgate told The Engineer earlier this year, “but we [he and his research partners at the Universities of Bristol and Surrey ] then wondered whether we could use this material as the basis for membranes in fuel cells. The next step was to determine if we could make the material electronically active, and we found that we could.” More

Tipped to play a leading role in the future of electric cars, Superdielectrics already has