How are Supercapacitors different from Normal Capacitors?

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Editorial Team - everything PE

Aug 25, 2022

Electrode plates of supercapacitors have a much bigger area as they are coated with porous substances such as activated charcoal which acts as electricity sponges. Supercapacitors have carbon-coated plates that substantially enhance the surface area for storing charge by up to 100,000 times. That is a lot more energy than a typical capacitor has available for usage. 

Supercapacitors don’t use a dielectric for charge storage and have a thin separator between the two electrodes, which is an ion-permeable membrane and only allows ions to pass through it. The ions accumulate on both sides of the insulator(separator) when the current is applied, forming a double layer of charge.

The distance between the metal plates is what genuinely distinguishes a supercapacitor from a typical capacitor or even a battery in certain circumstances. The distance in a typical capacitor is approximately 10–100 microns (a micron is one-thousandth of a millimeter). However, this distance is reduced to one-thousandth of a micron in a supercapacitor, and this smaller distance results in a bigger electric field and more energy storage.

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