Development of a marine-certified ultracapacitor modules

About this project

<p><span style="font-size: medium">Skeleton Technologies OÜ is an Estonian company that develops and manufactures supercapacitors. Project focuses on developing and certifying ultracapacitor modules suitable for marine environment. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium">Marine industry uses wave compensation systems to hold cranes and other devices level against any ship movement in waves. Power is needed when the ship moves down, and power can be recuperated into energy storage when the ship moves up. Usually this energy is not recuperated and is turned into heat instead, or batteries are used for storage, with considerably lower efficiency and lifetime than ultracapacitors. Currently there are no marine certified ultracapacitors in the market as the development cost and certification costs are relatively high compared to market potential, showing weaker risk/reward ratio compared to other ultracapacitor application domains such as automotive, public transport, warehouse logistics, etc. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium">Project focuses on itegrating up to 144 MW worth of wave energy recuperation systems by 2026 by customers such as Kongsberg Marine, Bosch Rexroth, Danfoss, Liebherr, Huisman. Ultracapacitors can recuperate wave energy at 97-98% efficiency saving up to 440 tonnes of CO</span><span style="font-size: x-small">2 </span><span style="font-size: medium">pear year for each megawatt of system power installed. In this way, end customer would save on fuel costs of over 100% as a 150 k€ system can offset 220 k€ worth of fuel expenditure per year over the systems 15 year lifetime. At the society level the total CO</span><span style="font-size: x-small">2 </span><span style="font-size: medium">savings are 6000 tons per MW installed, amounting to ~2.5 million tons for systems expected to be installed 2022-2026. </span></p> <p><span style="font-size: medium">Project is implemented with Norwegian partner NX Tech, who has a dual role of testing (environmental and electronics) and mapping the needs of the Norwegian maritime industry for ultracapacitor applications, including, but not limited to, active wave heave compensation. This includes specific evaluation through simulations. </span></p>

Bilateral cooperation results

NXTech provided valuable input on customer requirements in the marine sector, which would otherwise have been inaccessible for Skeleton Technologies. The collaboration between the project partners was fruitful and successful and might lead to future collaboration. The collaboration was important for Skeleton Technologies to access a new market segment, namely ultracapacitors for marine applications, which would have been postponed for much longer without a potential accessible customer, such as NXTech. NXTech was a strong partner in the grant project for establishing customer requirements and constraints specific to active wave heave compensation systems.

Project partners

• NXTech AS Donor project partner· Norway