High power supercapacitors. Review

One of the main advantage of electrochemical supercapacitors (ECSCs) over batteries are sufficiently higher values of specific power. These values for batteries are from several tens to ∼200–300 W kg−1. Earlier it was found that the specific power of ECSCs is up to 2 kW kg−1 under sufficiently high values of the specific energy. However, recently the supercapacitors, specific power of which reaches up to 500–700 kW kg−1, were reported. These ECSCs can be called as supercapacitors of ultra-high power. This review is devoted namely to these ECSCs. Here the main factors that provide the achievement of these very high values of specific power are described. These factors include: the optimized porous structure of the electrodes, the use of carbon nanotubes, graphenes, and their combination as electrode materials.