Review of Ultracapacitor Technology and its Applications

Abstract

An efficient electrical energy storage media are essential and are considered as a short term and an enabling infrastructure power technology. Energy storage technologies do not represent energy sources but they provide value added benefits to improve system stability, power quality and reliability of supply. As batteries technologies are low cost ,well established and widely used technology offer disadvantages like volume, weight, poor power density, high internal resistance, poor transient response, they are not suitable for some transient application or where volume and size are an important issue. On the other hand due to advancement in the material and other technology, Ultracapacitors offers high power density, fast transient response, low Wight, low volume and low internal resistance which make them suitable for pulsed load application. In this paper we will review some of the present application of the Ultracapacitor(UC) in the field of low power and high power applications like telecommunication devices, automatic meter reading system, load leveling on the electrical power system, maintaining continuity of power during outages, improving profitability in high energy system, enhance transmission capacity of the transmission grid in high power application, various power quality and backup related uses such as UPS system and power stabilization, to improve reliability of wind turbine pitch system. Simple ultracapcitor and battery model with pulse load is simulated in MATLAB-SIMULINK without and with DC to DC buck boost converter to prove ultracapacitor as a peak power supply device. Index Terms—Equivalent series resistance (ESR), Ultracapacitor (UC), UPS.