Degradation aware energy storage using hybrid capacitors

Efficient and reliable storage of electrical energy evolves to one of the most critical challenges from today's perspective. On the one hand we see electrical based transport systems requiring light weights and high capacities, and on the other hand we are just at the starting point of a new computing class where we strive for self-sufficient sensors and actors following “The Internet of Things” trend. Lately, quite a few novel capacitor elements have been become available with several hundreds of Farad. Anyhow, the aging behavior, the lifetime, and reliability of these new devices have not been analyzed and modeled thoroughly. Therefore, we present and analyze in this paper the lifetime and reliability of hybrid capacitors using a dedicated test bench. Temperature, voltage, current, and power cycling are used as acceleration and stress parameters.