When specialty capacitor manufacturer KEMET Corporation (Other OTC: KEME) recently announced it has successfully developed a 35V rated polymer tantalum capacitor, it was promptly picked up by Renewableenergyworld.com, a major campaigner for renewable energy. Likewise, the 2009 Advanced Capacitors World Summit 2009 to be held on March 31 to April 2, 2009 at La Jolla, California, merited attention from renewable energy practitioners.
What's the importance of a capacitor--that passive electronic component normally protruding in many printed circuit boards--in energy?
It turns out that capacitors; specifically, tantalum capacitors, could make or unmake the renewable energy industry.
Capacitors used to be bulky electronic components which occupy so much space and have limited range of operating conditions to be effective in modern circuits. However, tantalum capacitors which are characterized by high reliability, low equivalent series resistance (ESR), high volumetric efficiency (high efficiency for a small size) and benign failure modes, among others, have appeared in the 1990s which allows electronic devices to shrink in size. Tantalum capacitors are found in DVD players, cellular phones, game consoles, flat-panel TV displays, laptop computers, MP3 players and virtually in any modern gadget.
There are competing technologies of course like the niobium capacitors, the multi-layer ceramic capacitors (MLCC) and the aluminum-polymer capacitors, but by far, the tantalum capacitors have stood their ground.
The tantalum (and the recent variant the tantalum-polymer) capacitor is robust and can operate at temperatures above 100 degrees centigrade. But until very recently, its maximum voltage rating is around 14V. It was only less than a year ago that the 20V rating barrier was broken. And now, the 35V rating.
Such high voltage rated capacitors could find their way under the hood of hybrid, flex-fuel or electric vehicles; in power supply or filtering circuits in storage systems for intermittent energy sources like wind and solar; in instruments used in drilling for oil and geothermal--just to name a few potential uses.
Their potential applications are only limited by one's imagination and creativity.
This breakthrough in capacitor technology is but a relevant example of a major technical barrier being broken by a development in an unrelated field.
For all we know, the technological barrier to low solar energy efficiency for example, could be solved by developments in nanotechnology or novel synthetic schemes in carbon chemistry.
Breakthroughs, like love, could come from unexpected places.
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