Performance and Stability of Supercapacitor Modules based on Porous Carbon Electrodes in Hybrid Powertrain

Hybrid power sources have attracted much attention in the electric vehicle area. Particularly, electric-electric hybrid powertrain system consisting of supercapacitor modules and lithium-ion batteries has been widely applied because of the high power density of supercapacitors. In this study, we design a hybrid powertrain system containing two porous carbon electrode-based supercapacitor modules in parallel and one lithium ion battery pack. With the construction of the testing station, the performance and stability of the used supercapacitor modules are investigated in correlation with the structure of the supercapacitor and the nature of the electrode materials applied. It has been shown that the responding time for voltage vibration from 20 V to 48.5 V during charging or discharging process decreases from about 490 s to 94 s with the increase in applied current from 20 A to 100 A. The capacitance of the capacitor modules is nearly independent on the applied current. With the designed setup, the energy efficiency can reach as high as 0.99. The results described here provide a guidance for material selection of supercapacitors and optimized controlling strategy for hybrid power system applied in electric vehicles.