Study on the effect of supercapacitors in solar PV system for rural application in Malaysia

This paper presents the investigation on the effect of supercapacitor in a standalone off-grid solar photovoltaic (PV) system. The supercapacitor is introduced in this paper to extend battery lifetime and reduce maintenance cost. The supercapacitor is integrated with the battery and tested by using a programmable load in a solar PV system located at University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus (UNMC). The programmable load was used to apply various load values to the system to simulate real usage in a rural household. The results are tested and analyzed for a battery system with and without supercapacitors integrated. The results are extremely promising and show that the addition of supercapacitors significantly improves a battery based solar PV system.