The Supercapacitor That Makes Batteries Look Lazy

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:03]I'm Adam from Arfoxia from our real lab.

[00:00:05]Today we're answering why a super capacitor charges in 5 minutes when a battery doing the same work takes 4 hours and why the answer has nothing to do with the charger. Enjoy our new soundtrack at the end of the video. When most people say a super capacitor charges faster than a battery, they treat it as a product claim, something marketing put on a data sheet. It is not. It is a direct consequence of physics. And once you understand the mechanism, the five-minute number stops being surprising and starts being obvious. Let us start with the battery because most builders have a working mental model of it that is slightly wrong in a way that matters. A lithium ion battery stores energy through electrochemical reactions. When you charge it, lithium ions migrate from the cathode through an electrolyte and intercolate, physically embed themselves into the crystalline structure of the anode material, which is typically graphite. This process is not instantaneous. The ions have to move through a liquid electrolyte. They have to find vacant sightes in the crystal latice. The reaction has to proceed without generating heat fast enough to cause thermal runaway, which is the polite term for the battery deciding it no longer wants to be a battery. This chemistry imposes hard physical limits on charge rate. You can push more current into a lithium cell, but past a threshold, you plate metallic lithium on the anode instead of intercolating it cleanly, and that degrades the cell permanently. Fast charging in the commercial sense means carefully managed multi-stage current profiles that approach but never exceed what the chemistry tolerates. 4 hours is not a design failure. It is the chemistry telling you what it is willing to do.

[00:01:41]Now, the super capacitor, the mechanism is entirely different at the fundamental level. A super capacitor, technically an electrochemical double layer capacitor, stores charge electrostatically at the interface between an electrode and an electrolyte. No chemical reaction occurs. No ions embed into anything.

[00:02:00]Charge accumulates as a physical layer of ions at the surface of the electrode material and that surface is engineered to be enormous. The electrodes are typically made from activated carbon which has a fractal labyrinthine surface structure. 1 g of activated carbon can have a surface area of over 1,000 square m. That is not a typo. 1 g, 1,000 m. The available surface area is why super capacitors can store as much charge as they do despite operating on a mechanism that seems at first like it should be trivial. Capacitance measured in farads is the quantity that describes how much charge a capacitor stores per volt applied. The formula is Q= C * 5. Charge in kums equals capacitance in farads times voltage in volts. In conventional circuit board capacitors, you encounter values in microfarads, tenth of microfarads. The ceramic capacitors on your PCB that filter power supply noise are doing their job with 100 nanofharads or 10 microfarads. The electrolytic caps holding up a voltage rail during transients might reach a few thousand microfarads in bulk. The super capacitor in the multiav pro plus power program kit is rated at 1100 farads not microfarads farads that is approximately 11 million times the capacitance of a 100 microfarad electrolytic capacitor.

[00:03:20]The number is not a typo and it is not relative to a different definition of farad. It is the same unit. The mechanism that allows it to exist is purely the engineered surface area of the electrode material combined with the extremely thin separation distance of the double layer interface which is measured in nanome. Now the energy stored energy in a capacitor is 1/2 CV ^ 2 1/2 * capacitance * voltage squared with 1100 farads and an operating voltage of 4 V. The stored energy is 1/2* 1100* 16 which is 8,800 Jew. That is a real number enough to power the full Multinav Pro Plus module stack for a working day as the specifications state. Here is where the physics of fast charging becomes clear. Because charging a super capacitor involves no chemical reaction, only the accumulation of charge on a surface. The rate at which you can add charge is limited only by two things. the resistance of the charging path and the current capacity of the charging source. There is no chemistry that objects. There is no ion migration that saturates. There is no intercolation reaction that damages the electrode at high current. You're moving electrons and repositioning ions at a surface. And both of those processes can happen very quickly. The charging adapter in this kit delivers 12 volts at 5 amps, which is 60 W of input power.

[00:04:45]The super capacitor system accepts charge at 4 volt and 10 amps 40 W into the capacitor bank. From that you can calculate the charge time directly.

[00:04:54]8,800 JW / 40 W equals 220 seconds under 4 minutes in theory under 5 minutes in practice accounting for the voltage curve and charger conversion losses.

[00:05:06]This is not an approximation. It is arithmetic. Now consider what else distinguishes a super capacitor from a battery during discharge. Because for RF hardware this matters. A lithium battery under load exhibits voltage sag. As the state of charge decreases the terminal voltage drops and that drop is nonlinear and dependent on the discharge rate. For RF circuitry which is sensitive to supply voltage stability because the local oscillator frequency, the PA bias point and the receiver noise floor all have voltage dependencies. A sagging supply rail is a source of performance degradation that is sometimes mistaken for antenna or propagation problems. You chase an RF issue for 2 hours and discover the battery was at 60%. A super capacitor also has a voltage that decreases with charge. V= Q / C. Voltage is proportional to charge remaining. But the relationship is linear, predictable, and the discharge rate does not cause additional sag beyond that linear relationship. More importantly, the equivalent series resistance of a quality super capacitor is extremely low, often below a milliohm for larger cells. ESR is the internal resistance that causes the terminal voltage to drop under transient current demand. Lower ESR means the output voltage holds more steadily when the load pulls a burst of current. For a BLE module executing a high power transmission burst, the supply stability during that burst directly affects the RF output quality.

[00:06:33]A super capacitor with low ESR delivers cleaner transient response than a battery with its internal impedance and electrochemical kinetics combined. The last point worth understanding is cycle life. A lithium ion battery degrades with each charge cycle because the electrochemical reactions are not perfectly reversible. The electrode materials expand and contract. Capacity fades. After 500 to 1,000 full cycles, the cell has measurably less capacity than it started with. and at some point it becomes a consumable item that has to be replaced. This is not a design flaw.

[00:07:08]It is the chemistry. A super capacitor stores charge by surface ion accumulation which is nearly perfectly reversible. There is no structural change to the electrode. Super capacitors are commonly rated for 500,000 to 1 million charge discharge cycles before measurable degradation. If you that is the physics electrochemistry versus electrostatic surface storage and why the difference produces a 5minut charge time. Now let me show you the actual hardware that implements it. This is the super capacitor battery system itself. 1100 farads of electrochemical double layer storage delivering 8,800 JW of usable energy. There is no chemical reaction happening inside it. charge accumulates at an engineered surface, which is why it accepts current fast enough to reach full capacity in under 5 minutes. The same mechanism that makes charging fast also makes the discharge voltage cleaner and the cycle life effectively unlimited compared to any lithium cell at this price point. This is the 12V 5 amp charging adapter included with the kit. At 60 W input, it drives the super capacitor bank at 4 volts and 10 amps. 40 W directly into the capacitor system. That is why the charge time is under 5 minutes rather than a theoretical number. The adapter is sized specifically for this charging rate. It is not a generic wall brick repurposed for the job. The current delivery is matched to what the super capacitor bank accepts without thermal stress or voltage overshoot. The kit is designed to power the full Multinav Pro Plus module stack, B module, GNSS module, and sensors module simultaneously for a complete working day on a single 5minute charge. That runtime is a direct function of 8,800 JW divided by the combined current draw of the stack. The super capacitor's linear discharge curve means the supply voltage to your modules remains predictable and stable from the first minute of a session to the last with no chemistry related sag as the system depletes. The Estlink programmer is integrated into the kit because power and programming belong in the same workflow. When you are iterating firmware on the BLE module, which runs on an STM32 WB07, you need consistent stable power during flash operations, not a battery guessing its own state of charge. The super capacitor system provides a clean low ESR supply rail during programming, which eliminates the category of firmware flash failures that are actually power transient failures wearing a different label. Everything needed to connect the stack is included.

[00:09:34]Flat ribbon cables that run from the power module to the BLE module and from the programmer to the BLE module. Flat ribbon geometry is the correct choice here because it keeps impedance consistent, minimizes the loop area that would otherwise act as an antenna and couple switching noise into the RF circuitry and roots cleanly in a development enclosure without the mechanical stress points of round cables. The kit is complete. There is nothing missing when it arrives.

[00:10:00]The practical service life is effectively the mechanical life of the device. This makes it infrastructure, not a consumable. The Multinef Pro Plus power program kit replaces the unpredictable chemistry dependent weight of traditional batteries with a super capacitor system that charges in 5 minutes and powers your entire development session without interruption, complaint, or negotiation.

[00:10:21]5 minutes is not a feature. It is what the physics produces when you stop using chemistry to store energy and start using surface area instead.

[00:10:35][music] >> Capacitors hold the line while batteries fall behind. Feel ready every [music] time. No waiting, no decline. Plug it in, fire it up. One connection, that's enough. Never stop, never drain. [music] 5 minutes and I'm back again.

[00:10:54]Charge a full run all day. [music] SWD lights the way.

[00:11:02]Connect the at the [music] SW pins. The programming begins. Flash the firm on clean. The sharpest stack you've seen. BL breathing live. [music] All sensors locked and primed from bench to open sky. Nothing slows this [music] drive.

[00:11:19]Super capacitor surge. Instant energy in reserve. No cell degradation. Every charge is full and pure. ST link ready.

[00:11:28]Write the code and push to hardware.

[00:11:30]Field deployment. No excuses. Always there. Never [music] stop, never train.

[00:11:37]5 minutes and I'm [music] back again.

[00:11:41]Charge the full run all day.

[00:11:44]And stop beauty lights [music] the way.

[00:11:48]Never stop. Never train.

[00:11:52]5 minutes [music] and I'm back again.

[00:11:55]Charge the full run all day.

[00:11:59]SW [music] the way.

[00:12:02]This circuit was designed to shine.

[00:12:06]SWD full power.