Supercapacitor Enhanced Battery Traction Systems – Concept Evaluation

Abstract

This review paper gives an overview of state-of-the-art technology regarding supercapacitors, briefly discusses the aspect of supercapacitor balancing and compares and assesses two system designs incorporating supercapacitors, batteries and in one case with an interconnected converter. Supercapacitors offer a high power density and long life cycle and could improve a battery-only setup subjected to peak loads. An electric kart test setup will be used to evaluate a simple direct parallel connection between the batteries and the supercapacitor bank. Measurements on a more advanced setup, incorporating an interconnected converter between the batteries and supercapacitors, will illustrate the effect of such an implementation compared to a plain parallel connected setup.

An approach to recover braking energy of a tram

“…A solution to overcome this issue is obviously to store this energy in capacitors, or¸ as stated in this work, in ultracapacitors [1], being the main goal of the proposed solution, to improve the efficiency of this type of system by avoiding to dissipate the braking energy in the vehicles resistors. Under this context, the capacitors bank design is a compromise between the number of cells, energy availability and dynamics performance.…”