Supercapacitor Applications: Solving Energy Storage Challenges and Beyond
Prof. Nihal Kularana
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
With renewable energy systems proliferating on a worldwide basis, their intermittent nature requires them to be linked with energy storge devices. Rechargeable battery systems are the de facto solution for this issue. However, it comes with the well-known issues of short life cycles and environmental issues at disposal. During the last quarter century, commercial supercapacitor manufacturers have developed several different families such as symmetrical double layer devices, hybrids and battery-capacitors, with single cell capacitance values from fractional farads to over 100,000 F. Supercapacitors have the well-known advantages of (i) long life cycles (ii) high power density (iii) lower toxicity and (iv) much wider operating temperature range. The price of commercial devices is on a gradual decline, and the new research indicates the potential to reach energy densities of li based rechargeable battery chemistries.
Given that the supercapacitors are fit-and-forget devices in power electronic building blocks, their adaptation in renewable energy systems keep growing rapidly. Traditional applications include automotive applications, wind energy systems, uninterruptible power supply systems, portable electronics and cold-season truck starters.
Another rapidly growing non-traditional application area of supercapacitors is to use them as long-time constant circuits in power converters and protection systems. Some examples are the supercapacitor assisted (SCA) techniques such as supercapacitor assisted low dropout (SCALDO) regulators and the supercapacitor assisted surge absorber (SCASA) techniques.
This special issue, will entertain submissions related to supercapacitor applications including, but not limited to:
Supercapacitors for renewable energy systems
Supercapacitor-battery hybrids
Automotive applications
UPS and wind energy systems
Portable electronics
Powering of server farms and large computing resources
Device modeling
Device characterization and measurements
DC home applications and DC microgrids
Smart energy systems and smart buildings
Future directions of applications
Supercapacitor test systems
Potentail authors are welcome to submit papers realted to research and devlopment as well as review topics.