The modelling of carbon-based supercapacitors: Distributions of time constants and Pascal Equivalent Circuits

Supercapacitors are an emerging technology with applications in pulse power, motive power, and energy storage. However, their carbon electrodes show a variety of non-ideal behaviours that have so far eluded explanation. These include Voltage Decay after charging, Voltage Rebound after discharging, and Dispersed Kinetics at long times. In the present work, we establish that a vertical ladder network of RC components can reproduce all these puzzling phenomena. Both software and hardware realizations of the network are described.