florrent | Technology

florrent applications

The high energy density of florrent supercapacitors unlocks new applications that industry-standard systems are too expensive to address.

Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS)

When the power goes out, your business can lose time, product, and revenue. Even 1 second of power outage can lead to significant losses in productivity. When you need reliable power fast, supercapacitors are the answer—they can deliver truly uninterrupted power to critical loads until long-term backup power generation can kick in.

Grid Modernization

Applications like voltage support, frequency response, and black start all deal with extreme power fluctuations as grid infrastructure matches electrical supply and demand at the speed of light. The high power and long cycle life of supercapacitors are ideally suited to these critical grid ancillary services, which are coming under more strain as electrification and renewables penetration increase.

Hybrid Energy Storage Systems (HESS)

Batteries and supercapacitors are a great complement for each other. One has energy, the other has power. Hybridizing BESS systems with supercapacitors to create a HESS can lower battery footprint, increase battery lifetime, and improve safety by insulating batteries from power fluctuations and high ramp rates, as well as bring down initial and lifetime system ownership costs.

Power Quality & Reliability

florrent supercapacitors are ideally suited for solving high-power instability problems on the sub-minute time scale. florrent's supercapacitor systems have higher energy, so they can deliver the same duration of power stability coverage in a smaller footprint, or longer coverage in the same footprint. This means greater flexibility to right-size power and energy requirements for your system, made easy by the modular form factor of florrent's floMOD™ supercapacitor module. To learn more about how florrent can deliver winning unit economics in short-duration PQ&R applications, download our concept paper that takes a deep dive into the UPS use case.

Learn more by downloading our UPS Competitive Analysis concept paper

Read our concept paper

UNIT

The floCAP™

florrent's signature supercapacitor cell, in a standard 60138 form factor. Reach out to learn more about the available options and customizations.

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The floMOD™

florrent's signature supercapacitor module, rack-mount compatible with real-time conditions-reporting over CAN. Reach out to learn more.

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Contoured Carbon™

florrent’s core technical innovation is our supercapacitor active material, Contoured Carbon™—a patented pure-carbon electrode material designed to bring exceptional performance to electric double layer capacitors. Contoured Carbon™ unlocks unparalleled energy, but is drop-in-ready to an industry-standard supercapacitor stack, meaning that florrent doesn't sacrifice key performance characteristics like power, leakage current, ESR, or temperature window for higher energy in our cells, modules, or systems.

Learn more by downloading our Contoured Carbon™️ concept paper

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Domestically Sourced Feedstock

While most supercapacitor active materials are derived from synthetic petroleum-derivatives, or south Pacific coconut shells, florrent starts with waste biomass grown locally in the United States.

florrent works with our network of Black and Indigenous farmers to source this waste, bringing wealth back to partner communities, and sequestering carbon away in a solid mineral form that serves as the active energy storage material for our supercapacitors.

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FAQs

What are the differences between a supercapacitor and a battery?

While both technologies store electrical energy, supercapacitors (also known as ultracapacitors or EDLCs) and batteries use fundamentally different charge storage mechanisms. The end result of this difference is that batteries store about 100x the energy of supercapacitors, while supercapacitors can deliver about 100x as much power as batteries, and pay out that power over millions of cycles compared to thousands for batteries.

But why the difference? Batteries store charge “Faradaically”, meaning that when batteries charge or discharge, positively charged ions need to be physically shuttled from one side of the battery to the other, balancing the external flow of electricity. Physically shuttling matter from one side of the cell to another makes batteries slow compared to supercapacitors, but also means that they have higher energy density and can hold a charge for longer. Supercapacitors store charge electrostatically using a phenomenon called an “electric double layer” (or EDL). This EDL discharges energy without any ion shuttling, meaning that it can provide almost instantaneous power!

Why does florrent use biomass to make their active material?

Today’s supercapacitor industry relies heavily on active material derived from coconuts grown in the south Pacific. Supercapacitor active materials not made from coconut shells are instead derived from petroleum byproducts.

Using waste biomass, florrent can localize production of supercapacitor active material to where it’s needed, and use feedstocks that sequester atmospheric CO₂ without embedding significant emissions in their value chain. florrent’s supercapacitors can lock the carbon from biomass away in a solid mineral form, while not using a feedstock like coconut that is climate-change vulnerable and bakes significant emissions into its supply chain.

Innovation at every scale