Analysis of the dynamic behavior changes of supercapacitors during calendar life test under several voltages and temperatures conditions

Supercapacitors, also known as ultracapacitors are based on porous activated carbon electrodes and on electrostatic charge storage mechanisms. Carbon electrodes are supposed to be chemically and electrochemically inert and the electrostatic nature of the charge storage mechanism is highly reversible. These properties should assure that supercapacitors have an infinite shelf life. But in practice, supercapacitor cells exhibit performances fading when they are used for months. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performances fading of supercapacitors during calendar life test which correspond to lower current solicitations than power cycling test. In case of hybrid electric vehicle, which is a key application of ultracapacitors, this ageing test is useful because long rest periods represent a significant time of the vehicle real use. The degradation method of calendar life tests consists in maintaining the cells at high voltage and temperature. A periodic characterization based on impedance spectroscopy is done in order to quantify impedance changes. The obtained results confirm that impedance real part is increasing and the capacitance is decreasing.     

Specification and use of pulsed current profiles for ultracapacitors power cycling

In this study, pulsed current profiles are specified and used for ultracapacitors power cycling. First, a characterization procedure has been developed to follow the ultracapacitors electric and thermal parameters during the power cycling tests. The whole experiments can be realized on the same test bench specially designed. The current profiles take into account at the same time the ultracapacitors features and their use as peak power source in HEV applications. Thanks to a convenient electro-thermal modelling, a 400 Amps profile has been specified. Experimentally, a thermal steady state has been properly obtained with this current profile. During the power cycling, ultracapacitor parameters changes, especially impedance real part, are periodically quantified, after a representative number of cycles. The cheering presented results validate the profile specification methodology. So, the study on the effect of the current profiles discontinuity can be continued.     

Comparison between changes of ultracapacitors model parameters during calendar life and power cycling ageing tests

This paper deals with the performances fading of ultracapacitors under calendar life and power cycling tests. The used impedance model is analytical and based on physical quantities as double layer capacitance, specific area and electrolyte conductivity but also on elementary electrodes dispersion. This model is validated in frequency domain using the initial state of the tested ultracapacitor. Then, the two types of tests are presented and specified. A periodic characterization based on impedance spectroscopy is done in order to quantify the impedance changes during ageing tests. The obtained results confirm that impedance real part is increasing and the capacitance is decreasing during the two ageing tests, nevertheless the way they change is different. Indeed the impedance real part increase is independent of the frequency in calendar life test while, in power cycling test, this increase is accentuated at low frequencies. This difference will be explained thanks to impedance model parameters evolution. This study confirms that the two ageing tests affect differently the ultracapacitor performances.     

Monitoring fading rate of ultracapacitors using online characterization during power cycling

This paper deals with the ageing quantification of ultracapacitors in cycle-life tests. Typical micro- and mild-hybrid applications have been used to specify the test profiles in agreement with power requirements. Since ultracapacitors lifetime depends on the temperature, these profiles are adjusted to induce a given self-heating at the beginning of the power cycling tests. Ageing is evaluated thanks to the measurements of the electrical parameters changes. The good reproducibility of the characterization methods has allowed us to monitor the fading rate of ultracapacitors, from two manufacturers, with the proposed current profiles.     

Development of the large neutron imaging system for inertial confinement fusion experiments

Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) requires a high resolution (~10 μm) neutron imaging system to observe deuterium and tritium (DT) core implosion asymmetries. A new large (150 mm entrance diameter: scaled for Laser Me?gaJoule [P. A. Holstein, F. Chaland, C. Charpin, J. M. Dufour, H. Dumont, J. Giorla, L. Hallo, S. Laffite, G. Malinie, Y. Saillard, G. Schurtz, M. Vandenboomgaerde, and F. Wagon, Laser and Particle Beams 17, 403 (1999)]) neutron imaging detector has been developed for such ICF experiments. The detector has been fully characterized using a linear accelerator and a (60)Co γ-ray source. A penumbral aperture was used to observe DT-gas-filled target implosions performed on the OMEGA laser facility. [T. R. Boehly, D. L. Brown, R. S. Craxton, R. L. Keck, J. P. Knauer, J. H. Kelly, T. J. Kessler, S. A. Kumpan, S. J. Loucks, S. A. Letzring, F. J. Marshall, R. L. McCrory, S. F. B. Morse, W. Seka, J. M. Soures, and C. P. Verdon, Opt. Commun. 133, 495 (1997)] Neutron core images of 14 MeV with a resolution of 15 μm were obtained and are compared to x-ray images of comparable resolution.     

Correlated fluorescence lifetime and spectral measurements in living cells

Studies of proteins' interaction in cells by FRET can take benefit from two important photo-physical properties describing fluorescent proteins: fluorescence emission spectrum and fluorescence lifetime. These properties provide specific and complementary information about the tagged proteins and their environment. However, none of them taken individually can completely quantify the involved fluorophore characteristics due to their multiparametric dependency with molecular environment, experimental conditions, and interpretation complexity. A solution to get a better understanding of the biological process implied at the cellular level is to combine the spectral and temporal fluorescence data acquired simultaneously at every cell region under investigation. We present the SLiM-SPRC160, an original temporal/spectral acquisition system for simultaneous lifetime measurements in 16 spectral channels directly attached to the descanned port of a confocal microscope with two-photon excitation. It features improved light throughput, enabling low-level excitation and minimum invasivity in living cells studies. To guarantee a fairly good level of accuracy and reproducibility in the measurements of fluorescence lifetime and spectra on living cells, we propose a rigorous protocol for running experiments with this new equipment that preserves cell viability. The usefulness of SLiM approach for the precise determination of overlapping fluorophores is illustrated with the study of known solutions of rhodamine. Then, we describe reliable FRET experiments in imaging mode realized in living cells using this protocol. We also demonstrate the benefit of localized fluorescence spectrum-lifetime acquisitions for the dynamic study of fluorescent proteins. proteins.     

Quantification of ageing of ultracapacitors during cycling tests with current profile characteristics of hybrid and electric vehicles applications

The ageing quantification of ultracapacitors in cycle-life tests has been studied. Current profiles and the characteristics of the ultracapacitors used in hybrid and electric vehicle applications are specified and validated. With these profiles, significant self-heating occurs but without exceeding the manufacturers' limits. Thus, ultracapacitors are aged in a short time with the same degradation mechanisms observed in normal use. Ageing evaluation is based on the measurement of the electrical parameter changes. A particular phenomenon is performance recovery during rest periods when power-cycling is interrupted for electrical characterisation. Therefore, an online characterisation procedure was added for more accurate evaluation of the ultracapacitors' ageing. A number of devices from two manufacturers are cycled with different current profiles. The obtained results are presented and discussed.     

On the necessity of looped-functionals arising in the analysis of pseudo-periodic,sampled-data and hybrid systems

Looped-functionals have been shown to be relevant for the analysis of a wide variety of systems. However, the conditions obtained in previous papers on the analysis of sampled-data, impulsive and switched systems have only been shown to be sufficient for the characterisation of their associated discrete-time stability conditions. We prove here that these conditions are also necessary. This result is derived for a wider class of linear systems, referred to as impulsive pseudo-periodic systems, that encompass periodic, impulsive, sampled-data and switched systems as special cases.     

Locality and checkability in wait-free computing

This paper studies notions of locality that are inherent to the specification of distributed tasks by identifying fundamental relationships between the various scales of computation, from the individual process to the whole system. A locality property called projection-closed is identified. This property completely characterizes tasks that are wait-free checkable, where a task $T =(\mathcal{I },\mathcal{O },\varDelta )$ T = ( I , O , Δ ) is said to be checkable if there exists a distributed algorithm that, given $s\in \mathcal{I }$ s ∈ I and $t\in \mathcal{O }$ t ∈ O , determines whether $t\in \varDelta {(s)}$ t ∈ Δ ( s ) , i.e., whether $t$ t is a valid output for $s$ s according to the specification of $T$ T . Projection-closed tasks are proved to form a rich class of tasks. In particular, determining whether a projection-closed task is wait-free solvable is shown to be undecidable. A stronger notion of locality is identified by considering tasks whose outputs “look identical” to the inputs at every process: a task $T= (\mathcal{I },\mathcal{O },\varDelta )$ T = ( I , O , Δ ) is said to be locality-preserving if $\mathcal{O }$ O is a covering complex of $\mathcal{I }$ I . We show that this topological property yields obstacles for wait-free solvability different in nature from the classical impossibility results. On the other hand, locality-preserving tasks are projection-closed, and thus they are wait-free checkable. A classification of locality-preserving tasks in term of their relative computational power is provided. This is achieved by defining a correspondence between subgroups of the edgepath group of an input complex and locality-preserving tasks. This correspondence enables to demonstrate the existence of hierarchies of locality-preserving tasks, each one containing, at the top, the universal task (induced by the universal covering complex), and, at the bottom, the trivial identity task.