Copyright (c) 2011 IEEE. Personal use is permitted. For any other purposes, Permission must be obtained from the IEEE by emailing pubs-permissions@ieee.org. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Abstract—Supercapacitors are capable of storing energy in the range of fractional joules to several thousands of joules, despite their lower DC voltage ratings. Farad-order capacitances combined with milliohm order equivalent series resistances provide time constants ranging from fractional seconds to seconds. Given these time constants, compared to the time durations of power line transients in the range of few microseconds to several 100 microseconds, these devices may be able to withstand short duration surges with energy values specified in IEEE C62-XX series, IEC 61400-4-5 and similar standards. However there is little or no manufacturer data sheet information on these aspects. This paper provides details of an automatic tester interfaced with a lightning surge simulator, a test procedure and summarized test data on three different families of supercapacitors. The test data set provides some valuable insight in estimating the capabilities of these new supercapacitor families to withstand surges and transients, which in turn could lead to non-traditional applications. Index Terms—Supercapacitors, transient propagation, lightning surge simulator, power conditioning systems I. INTRODUCTION UPER capacitor families based on electric double layer effect have entered into a mature stage of usage in many application areas such as electric vehicles, renewable energy sources, UPS systems, battery-supercapacitor hybrids, cellular phones and back up/ride thorough requirements in electronic systems [1-14]. Different names, such as electric double layer capacitor, ultra-capacitor, or supercapacitor are used for these high capacity commercial devices, by various manufacturers. It is interesting to see from the websites of supercapacitor manufacturers that their suggested commercial uses of these are now in many consumer electronics and industrial applications. For example, the Australian manufacturer Cap- XX aims their thin profile supercapacitors ranging from 0.1F to over 1F in applications such as high brightness cellular phone or digital camera flash systems, instantaneous power Manuscript received July 9, 2010. Revised October 7, 2010 and accepted for publication November 25, 2010. Copyright ©2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org. N. Kularatna is with the University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand (Pho: +64 7 8585102, email: nihalkul@waikato.ac.nz). J. Fernando is with Arthur C Clarke Institute, Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (email: jayathufernando@gmail.com). A. Pandey is with University of Auckland, New Zealand (amitpandey.ent@gmail.com) and S. James is with the University of Waikato, New Zealand (sj74@waikato.ac.nz). requirements in GPRS, and transient power requirements in class D audio amps [15]. Maxwell Technologies (USA) who supplies single cell elements up to about 4000F (2.3V) and modules up to about 100F (voltage rated up to 125V) aim their products at uninterruptible power supplies, telecom network systems, wind turbine pitch systems, peak power for drive systems and actuators, peak shaving and graceful power-down of robotic systems, augmenting the primary energy source for portable devices such as power tools, renewable energy storage sources, and high power pulse forming in power generators[16]. Some special applications under development are improving the end to end efficiency of linear regulator techniques using low frequency supercapacitor circulation, and, the attempts to use supercapacitors in surge-free energy transfer in UPS systems [17-19]. During the last decade there have been many attempts to measure the commonly used technical parameters to characterize the supercapacitor behavior [20-28]. However none of these publications have attempted to characterize supercapacitors for their transient and surge voltage endurance, since continuous DC ratings of single cell supercapacitors are between 1 to 5V volts only. Figure 1:Terminal voltage development versus number of surges at different peak values of a combined waveform as per IEC61400-4-5 In a simple preliminary test conducted by the authors where several supercapacitors were subjected to a single-shot high voltage surge as well as multiple surges of identical shape from a lightning surge simulator indicated that these devices don’t get destroyed by a few 100 microsecond duration high voltage transient surges. The waveforms used were as prescribed in standards such as IEEE C62-41 and IEC 61400- 0 5 10 15 20 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Number of surges 0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20 Number of surges 0 5 10 15 20 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 Number of surges 6.5 kV 2.5 kV 1.5 kV 6.5 kV 2.5 kV 1.5 kV 1.5 kV 2.5 kV 6.5 kV 90 F capacitor 120F capacitor 0.4F capacitor Surge Capability Testing of Supercapacitor Families Using a Lightning Surge Simulator Nihal Kularatna, Senior Member, IEEE, Jayathu Fernando, Amit Pandey and Sisira James, Student Member, IEEE S