Modelling of degradation and a soft failure moment during the operation of a supercapacitor applying selected diffusion processes

Abstract

Abstract An important requirement imposed on storage batteries nowadays is to have sufficient capacity. At the same time a high level of availability, reliability and safety is required as well. Our intention is to determine a capacity degradation threshold and the moment the soft failure of a graphite supercapacitor (SC) occurs. If we do not take into account the idle state, the functioning of the supercapacitor might be expressed by charging and discharging processes under different operating conditions given by the allowed extent of SC design. When looking for the degradation threshold and the moment of soft failure occurrence we performed the experimental part of measuring in the climatic chamber. We performed and recorded the processes of SC charges and discharges at different temperatures: 40 °C, 25 °C and −42 °C and at different charging and discharging currents: 2A, 4A, 6A and 8A. The experimental results were used to model mathematically the SC discharge process. Appropriate tools used for SC discharge are diffusion processes. In this case we apply a Wiener process with drift and an Ito process.