Super Capacitors to extend range......

[vironika]

There are some very smart people that way in on "V". I am very interested to see what you think of this.

Why can't super capacitors like the ones sold my maxwell Technologies be used to increase the range of an electric Scooter.

http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/modules/bpak0058-15v.asp

You can buy these cap banks up to 56 Farad values at 15 volts. You could use these capbanks combined with a DC-DC converter to change the voltage from say 15 volts to 48, 60 or 72 volts.

You would charge the capacitors before you leave so you would be carrying more energy with you. As your batteries decrease in value from say 66.5 for a 60 volts system the DC-DC converter could be tuned to say 63 volts. When the voltage dips to 63 volts the batteries and the Capbank now would be supplying power to the controller.

Also, caps are more efficent at storing energy than battiers which could be good for any on board solar applications that people may have on their scooters.

Why won't this work?
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electronic cigarette

[qbjorn]

Simple math:
The energy in a supercap of 56F/15V = C*U^2/2 or 6.3kJ

The energy in an ordinary car battery is 12V 60Ah = 720Wh = 2592kWs or kJ i.e. 411 times more.
How far can you drive an ordinary car on the battery alone? 1km?

LiIon batteries are much better than Lead Acid batteries but also far more expensive.
A laptop battery normally has 6 or 8 18650 cells connected in series & parallel.
A single cell has max 4.2V with a capacity of up to 5Ah, that's 75.6kJ or 12 times better than the supercap.

Counting backwards:
A small car has perhaps a 50hp engine = 36.8kW
running it for an hour requires 132480kJ which would mean a 12V battery of 3000Ah (=50 normal car batteries) or a 15V capacitor of 1.18MF.
That's MegaFarad, not milliFarad!
Or in simple terms 21028 pcs of the 56F cap.

And btw, you don't get that far in an hours drive...