Hmm. Silicon oil?
I think I still have a gallon or two of that around anyway. If not I know where I can get it cheap! (and legal)

Any idea what capacitance something the size of a 5 gallon bucket would have at 250 volts or less?

What type of insulator material do they use thats not hard to find?
I can get many different plastics and types of paper easily enough.

I can get the poly sheet stuff like sceadwain mentioned. But I have seen many capacitors that have different types of paper like material saturated with oil in them as well.

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I would think you're missing a really big section there Boncuk =)
I would say a cap is generally in the range of nf to maybe 100u
I would say a large cap is generally 100u to 10000u
very large to super cap would be up to the 1F range to perhaps 50F. Anything larger than that I would call a large supercap, or an ultracap. There really is no set range or language definition. But think you're short changing what should be called a super cap because it's not so much about the farrad rating of hte cap but the overall energy density. I have 1F 5V supercaps that are smaller than 6 volts 10,000u caps.

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"As far as super caps go the only thing that makes them different is the surface area per unit volume. You can make a 'super cap' out of 'normal' materials... you just gotta make it bigger =)"

-> So you dont think theres a difference in technology then between Panasonic which are "organic" supercaps and Cooper which are "aerogel" supercaps.

OK I'm talking about 50 - 100 F range, you dont seem to consider that as "supercaps"

About voltage ratings, pay strict attention to them. For my application I need 3V, so that would be 2 x 2.3 V rated capacitors in series. That halves the capacitance, doubles the ESR value. AND you have to pay strict attention to balancing: what would happen if one cap in series is at one extreme of the cap rating, say +20%, and the other is -20%, would they still be within tolerable limits then...

WIMA seems to make interesting products, too bad the voltage rating is always so low...

 

I suppose a voltage rating of 14 is sufficient for many applications unless you want to use them with a 24V truck battery.

If you want higher capacitance you might connect them in parallel.

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