"The new energy landscape has the potental for m any new innovations for powering the future. With the proliferation of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, fuel cells, and geothermal, there is increasing research and development of technologies expected to support the power grid of the future. Currently, many proposed power networks require some form of energy storage to moderate the intermittent nature of these renewable energy sources. Two such energy storage devices, that the authors are convinced will play a critical role in future power distribution systems, are batteries and supercapacitors." --IEEE: Electrical Insulation Magazine
1. Energy storage devices - a general overview 2. Rechargeable battery technologies: an electronic engineer's view point 3. Dynamics, models, and management of rechargeable batteries 4. Capacitors as energy storage devices - simple basics to current commercial families 5. Electrical double-layer capacitors: Fundamentals, characteristics, and equivalent circuits 6. Supercapacitor as a lossless dropper in DC-DC converters 7. Supercapacitors for surge absorption 8. Supercapacitors in a rapid heat transfer application
Appendix A. Capacitors and AC line filtering
Nihal Kularatna is an Associate Professor in the School of Engineering at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. He won the New Zealand Innovator of the Year Award (2013). His electronic engineering career spans 45 years and he is currently active in research in supercapacitor applications, power converter topologies, and power conditioning. He has contributed to over 160 papers and authored nine books. Multiple patents were granted for his supercapacitor assisted (SCA) circuit topologies. Before migrating to New Zealand in 2002, he was the CEO of the Arthur C Clarke Institute in Sri Lanka.
Kosala Gunawardane is currently a senior lecturer in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her research interests are analog circuit design, power electronic converters, supercapacitor-based, non-traditional applications and renewable energy and DC-microgrids. Gunawardane received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Electronics and Telecommunication engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, in 2005. She completed her PhD degree at the University of Waikato, New Zealand in 2014 in Electronics Engineering.