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April 6, 2008

Capacitor circuits for energy storage?

Filed under: Basic Electronics — Administrator @ 7:50 pm

If you have an Ultracapacitor with the below specs…

Boostcap® Ultracapacitor
3000.0 Farad ± 20%; 2.7V
How many would you need to store 1KWH of energy? ( 1,000 watts for an hour)

The energy in Joules stored in a capacitor can be calculated with the following formula

E=(1/2) C V^2

for C=3000F V=2.7 Volts

E=10935 Joules

1Kwh = 3,600,000 Joules

Therefore you would need

3600000/10935 = 329.2 or rounding up

330 capacitors to supply 1Kwh of energy

Modern ultracapacitors are now approaching the energy density of the best batteries and have the advantage of very rapid charge and discharge currents

The device shown at the following link is very similar to the calculated result shown above
Capacitor Bank

These links are very useful for these sorts of calculations:
Energy storage in a capacitor

Energy equivalents

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