Electronic – Internal Resistance of a Supercapacitor

capacitorinternal-resistancesupercapacitor

I am attempting to replace a wall plug power supply with a supercapacitor. From analysing the behaviour of the wall plug I can see that the current drawn is .25A with 800ms spikes of 1.5A (as determined by an arduino board).

However when I try to use the supercapacitor (15F, 7VDC), the voltage appears fine, but not enough current is being drawn. The highest current I have seen drawn on the multimeter is .11A, so the system in question does not work.

I think this may be down to the internal resistance of the supercapacitor. So the next step I will try is to increase the number of supercapacitors and place them in parallel, thereby decreasing the resistance.

However as supercapacitors are advertised to be capable of charging in a matter of seconds, surely this means they can handle a high current (at least 1.5A anyway). Or will supercapacitors draw more current during charging than they would be capable of supplying during discharge?

Any help here is greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

This makes little sense. A power supply plugged into wall power can supply 250 mA indefinitely. A capacitor has a fixed amount of charge, and a even smaller amount of charge it can deliver usefully. In addition, the voltage on the capacitor goes down over time, since it is proportional to the charge in the cap at any one time.

You can't just "replace" a power supply with a capacitor. The two do different things, and are not equivalent.