Capture
A further important application for supercapacitors is in energy harvesting. The potential for this exists in any industrial process that entails repetitive motion and dissipation of energy in the form of heat, provided that the heat generated can be recovered as electrical energy. The captured electrical energy can be stored for future use or fed straight back into the power system.
This is known as a kinetic energy recovery system (or KERS for short), utilised for example by some of the Formula 1 teams in their racing cars and increasingly applied in electrical/hybrid electrical vehicles. In battery electric and hybrid electric vehicles the energy is stored in a battery or bank of capacitors for later use.
Energy harvesting through regenerative braking is not only relevant to electric road vehicles but also to electric trains and to vehicles used for heavy lifting such as cranes, fork-lift trucks and elevators. In electric railway vehicles the generated electricity is fed back into the supply system. With cranes and forklift trucks, the electrical energy used to lift loads can be partially regained when the loads are lowered. The same principle applies to elevators.