Cascaded switched capacitor converters with selectable intermediate taps for supercapacitor discharger

Supercapacitors (SCs), as alternatives to conventional secondary batteries, need to be discharged as efficiently and deeply as possible to utilize precious stored energy. This paper proposes a novel SC discharger using cascaded switched capacitor converters (SCCs) and selectable intermediate taps. The proposed discharger roughly regulates the output voltage within a particular voltage range by selecting an intermediate tap, while high efficiency power conversion is achieved by the SCCs. The operating principle and conditions are presented in detail, and an experimental discharge test was carried out to demonstrate its performance.