A stand alone super capacitor charging system using a feed forward boost converter

The paper presents a standalone super capacitor charging system. It contains a self starting, self powering circuit and a feed forward boost converter. The system does not use batteries or have a connection to a main utility power. It constitutes a true standalone low maintenance and pollution free system. The system contains a main storage device and a secondary energy storage device, both of which connect to an ambient energy source such as solar, wind power or vibration power etc. directly. The secondary storage device is used to power the system electronics (i.e. the charger), and the main storage is only used to supply energy to the external applications which are powered by the main storage device. During the starting phase, the secondary storage device is charged to the system operating voltage, at which point, the self powering circuit starts and the charging process begins. Additionally, a feed forward boost converter charging scheme is presented in this paper. This proposed methodology eliminates the need to use voltage feedback, or current feedback, resulting a simpler design compared with a traditional feedback scheme.