Maxwell Expands Power and Energy Ultracap Offering
Maxwell Technologies Inc. will be introducing more than 30 new BOOSTCAP® ultracapacitor products over the next several months as part of a product family strategy featuring new "Power" and "Energy" product types to better meet the diverse requirements of the automotive, transportation, industrial and consumer electronics markets.
Dr. Richard Balanson, Maxwell's president and chief executive officer, said that the company is moving aggressively to extend its global leadership as a provider of innovative, high-performance, low-cost energy storage and power delivery solutions.
"The worldwide ultracapacitor market is real, and we continue to strengthen Maxwell's capabilities and global reach to serve that market," Balanson said. "This means new and more technologically advanced products, stronger internal and external production and distribution capabilities and a wider network of partnerships and alliances. This product family strategy enables us to further reduce product development and manufacturing costs and give our customers a much wider range of product choices to meet their energy storage and power delivery requirements."
Michael Everett, Maxwell's vice president and chief technical officer, said that the company is leveraging its versatile cell architecture and electrode technology to expand its MC and BC ultracapacitor product families with multiple new cell sizes ranging in capacitance from 140 to 3,000 farads, each available in both Power and Energy cell types and in corresponding fully-integrated multi-cell modules. He said that all of the cells with a capacitance of 500 farads or greater operate at 2.7 volts, enabling them to store more energy and deliver more power per unit volume than any other commercially available ultracapacitor products.
Everett noted that the expanded MC and BC families will offer customers cells and modules specifically engineered to provide more economical Energy versions for light duty industrial, UPS, telecommunications and consumer electronics applications, and Power versions for hybrid vehicle drive trains, automotive subsystems and other applications that require the lowest equivalent series resistance (ESR) and highest efficiency available with current ultracapacitor technology.
"In addition to meeting or exceeding demanding transportation and industrial application requirements for both watt-hours of energy storage and watts of power delivery per kilogram, all of these products will perform reliably for more than one million discharge-recharge cycles," Everett said. "The proprietary architecture and material science on which these product families are based also significantly reduce manufacturing cost, positioning Maxwell to achieve our stated goal of pricing large cell ultracapacitors at one cent per farad in multi-million-cell annual volumes."
