Power conditioning supercapacitors in combination with batteries for stand-alone power systems

Stand-alone power systems are a challenging option to supply remote equipments in many applications. They include renewable energy generators whose intermittent power supply requires an appropriate energy storage component to balance the power mismatch between the generation and the demand. Batteries are the obvious choice for this purpose. However, the irregular fluctuations and hard transients would fast degrade their performance. Many solutions based on the combination of supercapacitors and batteries have been presented in literature, so that the hard transients are supplied or absorbed by the supercapacitors. This paper intends to study some of these systems topologies and control strategies, presenting simulation results of their performance in a stand-alone power system. © 2012 IEEE.