Modeling and state-of-charge estimation of supercapacitor considering leakage effect

Supercapacitors are receiving significant interest in wireless sensor network applications due to their high power density and longer lifespan. In such applications, consideration of the leakage effect is crucial for online control and management of supercapacitors. Motivated by this fact, in this paper we propose an online scheme to estimate the state-of-charge (SOC) of supercapacitors, taking the leakage effect into account. First, we propose a completely observable equivalent circuit model (ECM) of a supercapacitor, which captures the leakage effect. Then, we design an unscented-Kalman-filter-based SOC estimator on the proposed ECM. To illustrate the proposed scheme, we consider a commercially available 5 F supercapacitor (Maxwell BCAP0005) and conduct experimental studies to identify the ECM parameters. We also perform simulation and experimental studies to test the effectiveness of the proposed estimation scheme, in this paper. Finally, we evaluate the robustness of the proposed scheme under parametric and measurement uncertainties.