Analysis of recovery effect in supercapacitors for wearable devices

Supercapacitors are likely to be adopted as power sources for wearable sensors; in particular where the sensor mechanism relies on energy harvesting. A specific advantage of supercapacitors over traditional batteries is their performance over large numbers of discharge cycles. Likewise, in the case of wearable devices, it is essential to efficiently manage the available power. Supercapacitors exhibit a small recovery effect, in part due to ion diffusion. Modelling this effect allows an increase in available energy to be realized following the sleep times during a discharge cycle thus increasing the time between charging for wearables. This paper presents the increase in useful lifetime that can be achieved via the recovery effect in a typical wearable device.