• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-10
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• 2014

This paper proposes a high-efficiency supercapacitor charger. Conventional two-switch forward converter can be used for charging supercapacitors. However, the efficiency of conventional converters is low because of their switching losses. This study presents a high-efficiency two-switch forward converter for supercapacitor chargers. The proposed converter improves power efficiency by 4 %, from 89 % to 93 %. The proposed converter has the advantages of reduced switch voltage stresses and minimized circulating current when compared to other converter topologies. The performance of the proposed converter is evaluated by experimental results using a 300 W prototype circuit for a 54-V, 35-F supercapacitor bank.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.265-272
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• 2016

A SCALDO(Supercapacitor Assisted LDO) regulator is a newly studied regulator to improve the efficiency of a LDO regulator. Commonly a LDO regulator has very low efficiency and a SCALDO regulator can improve it considerably because this regulator can reuse meaninglessly wasted energy at the LDO regulator by a supercapacitor witch is attached between input and a LDO regulator. However this regulator has several challenges because it is a being studied regulator. One of them is an overvoltage issue. At initial operating of this regulator, a supercapacior is totally discharged and input is connected with a supercapacitor and a LDO regulator in series. Thus, input voltage is enabled to a LDO regulator and this input voltage is a significant value to a LDO regulator because commonly input voltage is bigger than twice output voltage. In this paper, to solve this overvoltage issue, we proposed a new SCALDO regulator that has a pre-charger for charging a supercapacitor before starting operation. And we found that a proposed SCALDO regulator can properly reduce overvoltage of a LDO regulator through experiments.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.46 no.1
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• pp.94-98
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• 2008

In order to improve the specific capacitance of amorphous hydrous manganese oxide ($MnO_2$) for supercapacitors, it is made into composites with vapour-grown carbon nanofibers (VGCF) having the VGCF ratio as 40 wt% in the composites. The electrochemical properties of these composites are investigated in 1.0 M $Na_2SO_4$ by cyclic voltammetry (CV), impedance measurements and chronopotentiometric charger/discharger. The composite with 40 wt% VGCF shows the superior electrochemical performance, whose specific capacitance (based on the mass of $MnO_2$, $0.8mg/cm^2$) is 380 F/g at 20 mV/s and 230 F/g at 500 mV/s. Also, the cycle-life testing of this electrode carried out for 3,000 charge/discharge cycles at $2.0mA/cm^2$ shows 97% capacitance retention.