Cost analysis of supercapacitor cell production

A life cycle costing (LCC) is to be performed complementary to the ongoing research on an enhanced supercapacitor pouch cell, in order to provide additional decision support on the best cell chemistry from the economic point of view. Due to the early stage of the project so far merely the production phase is considered. The detailed cost calculation method was chosen and complemented with a scale up using dimension analysis and analogy analysis, in order to be able to utilize this method since available data is either scarce or refers to laboratory scale. It was found that the researched cells are within the lower margin of costs reported in literature. Also the relative contribution of material and production costs as well as energy consumption was in the same range as stated in literature. Although these comparisons should be handled with care as they do not always refer to the exact same item. Further, we concluded that the developed approach provides a sound basis for a reproducible calculation of production costs for technologies at an early research stage.