Carbon electrodes for ultracapacitors are focus of very intense research worldwide. There was a Science paper a couple of years ago that demonstrated an unexpected increase in specific capacitance at pore size of around 1nm. It was a group from Philadelhpia and they have a spinoff company that should be watched with great interest in this field (it’s called Y-something, if interested, drop me an e-mail and I will find it for you). Another interesting approach is with the carbon “aerogels”…

The UW research (EnerG2) is very solid, they used sol-gel methods, which give you exquisite control on pore/particle size. The knock on these liquid-based methods have been productivity/throughput; you can make a lot more material via pyrolysis/flame, however people are still working hard on achieving structure uniformity there. If they have showed 1,500lbs scale, though, this is impressive.

In any case, though, it WILL be incremental. there is a fundamental limitation with these double-layer capacitors in that the permittivity is too low, so the only progress is being made by increasing the specific surface. (The potential is only a few volts).

Being incremental is not necessarily bad; if you are looking for breakthroughs, though, you have to watch the barrium titaneate dielectrics. I commented on this at Chris Rhodes blog a couple of months ago, but there are many others who are staring intensely into this development. I would even say that these are achieving “cult-like” status. The material has monstrous permittivity and would allow capacitors with potential in the hundreds, even thousands of volts. The company that is working extremely quietly in this space is EEstor. If they can pull it off, it will be a real game-changer.
Cheers,