Hybrid battery/supercapacitor energy storage system for the electric vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) have recently attracted considerable attention and so did the development of the battery technologies. Although the battery technology has been significantly advanced, the available batteries do not entirely meet the energy demands of the EV power consumption. One of the key issues is non-monotonic consumption of energy accompanied by frequent changes during the battery discharging process. This is very harmful to the electrochemical process of the battery. A practical solution is to couple the battery with a supercapacitor, which is basically an electrochemical cell with a similar architecture, but with a higher rate capability and better cyclability. In this design, the supercapacitor can provide the excess energy required while the battery fails to do so. In addition to the battery and supercapacitor as the individual units, designing the architecture of the corresponding hybrid system from an electrical engineering point of view is of utmost importance. The present manuscript reviews the recent works devoted to the application of various battery/supercapacitor hybrid systems in EVs.