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Description
Skeleton Technologies OÜ is an Estonian company that develops and manufactures supercapacitors. Project focuses on developing and certifying ultracapacitor modules suitable for marine environment.
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.
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 CO2 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 CO2 savings are 6000 tons per MW installed, amounting to ~2.5 million tons for systems expected to be installed 2022-2026.
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.
Summary of project results
Project addressed the challenge of the equation of compensating for wave movements to stabilise the load in marine environments. A typical wave heave compensation system operates 4 hours a day, seeing a wave every 6 seconds per wave, more than 800 000 waves per year. Every year more than 1 GW worth of Active Wave Heave Compensation Systems are installed emitting nearly half a million tons of CO2. That is, unless the energy used to lift the crane is recuperated with the opposite side of the wave - when the ship is lifted and crane can drop. Theoretically such a system could recuperate all energy if the waves were identical, but for the inefficiencies of electric motors or losses in energy storage.
Up to date, there are a handful of experimental ultracapacitor-based wave heave compensation systems launched. While these “pilots” have proven successful, two issues remain:
1. there are no marine-certified ultracapacitors or capacitor modules while regulation updates demand ultracapacitors to be specifically certified for marine use, and
2. the lifetime of the ultracapacitors currently in use is not satisfactory due to overheating issues related to high internal resistance of the products used.
The project addresses these issues by developing, certifying, and launching a marine-industry specific ultracapacitor module based on ultracapacitors.
Supercapacitor for marine environment was developed. Project tasks included mapping the requirements and a gap analysis for marine certification, that enabled further simulations in cooperation with different companies (e.g., Kongsberg AHC) to show how Skeleton Technologies'' products would perform in this context. Also, different mechanical, electrical and thermal designs were derived with an initial sophisticated and robust accelerated lifetime module was developed that was important for the onboard energy management system and quality activities. Product development resulted with pre-production prototypes to determine the best practices and mitigate risks towards production quality has been carried out and the certified product is set to be scaled up in production.
Project activities successfully completed and the certification of the 51V module for marine applications has been achieved. This opens new business oppurtunities for Skeleton Technologies and a new technology as a part of an onboard energy storage system for ship builders and integrators to achieve significant emission reductions. Before the implementation of the project plan, the 51V module previously developed by Skeleton Technologies had only been rail-certified. After technological modifications including the development of the state of health functionality, which is unprecedented in supercapacitor devices, and an innovative cooling concept, the 51V module could be marine-certified.
Summary of bilateral 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.