Clean Air Policies promoted by governments worldwide aim at supporting emergent technologies enabling society to overcome the threat caused by escalating levels of air pollution and greenhouse effect. It is commonly agreed that the solution to such a major environmental problem relies heavily on a widespread deployment of Renewable Energy Sources and Electric Vehicles. While it has been a long time coming, wide penetration of those technologies has not materialized quite yet. One major reason for it being the lack of cost-effective Energy Storage Systems (ESS) to deal with the problem of energy "logistics".
Current State-of-Art of ESS based on chemical energy storage (e.g. Li-ion batteries) faces the major drawback of a limited service life, leading in most cases to negative cost-benefit scenarios. Interestingly, an emergent device called Supercapacitor (aka Ultracapacitor) based on electrostatic energy storage in microporous materials (mostly Activated Carbon) has been gaining momentum over the last decade. Supercapacitors show a set of strengths almost ideally complementary to batteries . The resulting Hybrid Energy Storage Systems (batteries + supercapacitors banks) have repeatedly demonstrated an extended service life vs battery banks alone, becoming the most promising alternative for cost-efficient Energy Storage at large scale in the near future. It is generally accepted that the current Supercapacitor price is already at tantalizing distance of making large-scale Energy Storage affordable. However, further R&D effort is still required to cut down the costs since the current approach seems to have hit a deadend.
CareSTOR tackles the problem of Supercapacitor cost reduction through the development of a new generation of Activated Carbons (aka Activated Hydro-Chars, AHC), pioneering the scale-up of a groundbreaking production strategy. The innovative Carbons in CareSTOR provide about 50% increase in gravimetric Energy Storage per gram of materal with respect to the most widely used commercial counterparts. This breakthrough leads to a direct reduction cost related to the lower amount of Carbon used per Farad stored in a device, plus an indirect reduction via the shrinkage of the dimensions of the cell, enabling a relevant econmization in electrolyte and other materials such as collectors, separators, packaging.
The overall objectives include:
1. Resource-efficient production of AHC leading to elaboration of Standard Operation Procedure (SOP), datasheet of product and Pre-industrial Plant for AHC production reaching output capacity of 10-100Ton per year
2. Industrial validation of cost-competitive production of AHC increasing electric storage capacity by 50% vs current competitors.
3. Design and manufacture of Supercapacitors cells (and modules) implementing CareSTOR technology (CareCAP) including 2 sizes of o-CareCAP (350 and 3,000 F in organic electrolytec) and one size of a-CareCAP (450 F in aqueous electrolyte), plus proof-of-concept for High-voltate version i-CareCAP (ionic liquid electrolyte)
4. Cutting down technology cost by 40% and 30% for CareCAP in its organic and aqueous versions with validation stages including: production of prototypes, DEMOs or test-bench using realistic operation conditions relevant to 4 different applications.
5. Automated manufacturing of o-CareCAP organic and its homologation with 4 pre-commercial agreements for commercialization with Stakeholders (end-users) by the end of the project
6. Start mass production and exploitation of innovative AHCs exploring the option of a Joint Venture
