Super Cap That

Hybrid Battery

 

Member profile details

Membership level
2011-2012 Team
Team Name
Super Cap That
Project Title
Hybrid Battery
Design Challenge
Our project aims to create a device that can increase the battery life of a smartphone by at least 25%. To do so, we will incorporate supercapacitors into our device to provide a quick and convenient way of storing charge. Our device will then slowly trickle charge the smartphone battery with the charge stored in the supercapacitors.
Design Summary
Our main design goals are to build a device which: holds at least four Maxwell BoostCaps in a space efficient manner, charges the supercapacitors to full voltage in less than five minutes, and can interface with an iPhone to trickle charge its battery. To charge the supercapacitors quickly while keeping their voltages balanced, we will use a supercapacitor managing chip that is sold in the market. Currently, we have a plug-and-use evaluation board that serves this purpose. This board also lets all the current go through an external FET, so we can charge the supercapacitors with as much current as we want. We, therefore, will going to use power source, which can support 20V and 10A, to operate our device system. This will ensure that we can charge the device within 5 minutes. To interface with an iPhone, we need to lower the voltage of the supercapacitor stack to 5 volts, because that is the standard voltage for USB chargers. Currently, we are using a buck converter evaluation board to accomplish this goal for our prototype system. We are in process of designing our own PCBs with the chips we have selected with the best geometry possible. As soon as the PCB design is complete, we will make a CAD drawing that has the most space saving geometry for the device.

Updated: 2/16/2012
Department(s)
  • Electrical and Computer Engineering
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Faculty Advisor 1 - Name
Gary Woods
Faculty Advisor 2 - Name
Farinaz Koushanfar

Contact us

Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen
Rice University

6100 Main Street MS 390 | Houston, Texas | 77005

Phone: 713.348.OEDK

Email: oedk@rice.edu

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