Development of a Smart Supercapacitor Energy Storage System for Aircraft Electric Power Systems

This paper presents the development of a supercapacitor energy storage system (ESS) aimed to minimize weight, which is very important for aerospace applications, whilst integrating smart functionalities like voltage monitoring, equalization, and overvoltage protection for the cells. The methodology for selecting the supercapacitor cells type/size is detailed to achieve the safest and most energy-dense ESS. Additionally, the development of the interface electronics for cells' voltage monitoring and overvoltage protection is presented. The proposed design implements a modular distributed architecture coordinated using communication buses to minimize the wirings and associated complexity and to enable system reconfiguration and expansions, as well as fault diagnoses. Validating the proposed ESS functionalities has been done via experimental testing and the results are presented and discussed.