Enable IPC makes progress with its ultracapacitor nanotechnology

Enable IPC (Intellectual Property Commercialization) Corp. is gearing up for the first commercial use of its ultracapacitor nanotechnology.

The company has partnered with Spain’s IMDEA Energy Institute to jointly develop ultracapacitors based on Enable IPC’s patent-pending energy technology.

The initial project for this venture will be related to incorporation of Enable IPC’s ultracapacitor into the SA2VE clean energy innovation programme.

Under the new partnership, IMDEA Energy will work directly with Spanish company Green Power and a national lab in Spain known as CEDEX, while Enable IPC will provide enhanced ultracapacitor electrodes to the organisation for integration into a new power conditioning unit.

Manuel Romero, deputy director of IMDEA Energy Institute, which focuses on energy-related R&D, said the decision to go ahead with such partnership is based on numerous improvements that Enable IPC’s process produced over today’s current market-ready ultracapacitors.

For its part, Enable IPC claims that its ultracapacitor technology has already matched or exceeded the cycle life of commercially-available devices.

“As a point of reference, many rechargeable batteries have a useful life in the 1000s of cycles. That is, you can charge and discharge them at most a few thousand times before they are no longer useful,” according to researcher Kevin Leonard, one of the inventors of the Enable IPC ultracapacitor. “Ultracapacitors, on the other hand, can generally be charged and discharged hundreds of thousands of times.”

In its laboratory testing in December last year, Enable IPC’s ultracapacitor had surpassed one million cycles while still maintaining over 80 percent of its initial capacity, which according to Leonard, matches some of the best performance reports the company has seen in ultracapacitor life cycle testing.