Compact Power Supply With Integrated Energy Storage and Recovery Capabilities for Arbitrary Currents up to 2 kA

In many relevant cases requiring a net energy comparable with that of a household appliance, the power supplies (PSs) and the electrical systems must be oversized to sustain short peak demands. The same equivalent energy could be achieved by storing and distributing the power over the time. These considerations lead to a new PS concept based on the exploitation of the energy stored between the actual operations. The new compact (60 cm×120 cm×190 cm) PS is able to generate arbitrary currents up to 2 kA by an integrated energy storage system based on supercapacitors. The delivered output power (approximately 200 kW) is obtained from a very low and tunable input power (<;1 kW). Furthermore, a portion of the injected power can be recovered in the storage system. Even though the system was designed for a specific project (the PROTO-SPHERA spherical tokamak), the presented approach can be applied to general-purpose PSs, and there are encouraging prospects to extend it to large facilities with higher currents and voltages.