Active power sharing in hybrid battery/capacitor power sources

The objective of this work is to determine to what extent the performance of a battery/capacitor hybrid power source can be improved by isolating the battery through a power converter. The performance of an active hybrid power source (battery/capacitor/converter) is compared to that of a passive hybrid (battery/capacitor) using both simulation and experiment. Particularly in this paper, two cells of Sony US18650 lithium-ion battery and two cells of Maxwell PC 100 supercapacitor are used as the energy storage components in the power source construction. Both the experimental data and the simulation results show that the active hybrid power source achieved greater mass and volume densities of power without drawing excessive currents from the battery. The active hybrid yielded a peak power of 130 W with terminal voltage variation (1.31 V), compared to a maximum of 42 W for the passive hybrid with voltage variation 1.7 V.