Results in Physics 7 (2017) 2976–2978

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Results in Physics
journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/results-in-physics

An adiabatic charging reversible circuit with stepwise voltage control

method using a microprocessor
Shunji Nakata
Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Faculty of Engineering, Kindai University, Takaya, Higashi-hiroshima 739-2116, Japan

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: An adiabatic circuit was designed for dissipationless charging of a capacitor. The duty ratio of the switch-
Received 25 April 2017 ing transistors is changed stepwise and controlled by a microprocessor. The charging efficiency, that is
Received in revised form 25 July 2017 the ratio between the work done by the power supply and electrostatic energy of the capacitor, is calcu-
Accepted 9 August 2017
lated from experimental results. The efficiency is 94% when the number of stepwise voltage is 32, which
Available online 13 August 2017
is consistent with the theoretical value.
Ó 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
Keywords:
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Adiabatic
Reversible circuit
Energy recovery
Stepwise charging

Reversible circuit, in other words, energy recovery circuit, is
attracting much attention in physics because it has characteristic
of dissipationless operation in electromagnetism. The main con-
cept for realizing dissipationless operation is adiabatic process.
Therefore, the circuit is also called as adiabatic circuit [1–11]. In
conventional constant-voltage charging, an energy of CV2/2 is dis-
sipated due to resistance, where C is load capacitance and V is
power supply voltage. This value is the same as the electrostatic
energy of the capacitor. In contrast, adiabatic charging shows no
energy dissipation at all when electrostatic energy is stored. This
is the reason why adiabatic circuits are very promising. The adia-
batic charging circuit is promising for energy storage in superca-
pacitor due to the dissipationless operation. The circuit is useful
for power leveling of renewable energy sources such as wind
power and solar power in a smart grid.
The adiabatic-charging circuit with eight step voltages was pre-
viously developed and found that energy dissipation is one-eighth
that of non-adiabatic circuit [7,8]. However, energy efficiency, that
is the ratio between the injected energy from the power supply and
the stored energy in the capacitor, is not discussed in the detail yet.
In this study, the energy efficiency for charging the capacitor was
investigated.
Fig. 1(a) shows adiabatic circuit. A CMOS inverter is used as
charging and discharging circuit, which is composed of power
MOSFETs (2SJ438, 2SK2231). A microprocessor (PIC16F627A) is
used to output the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signal. The sig-
E-mail address: nakata@hiro.kindai.ac.jp
nal is input to the gate of power MOSFETs. The duty ratio d of PWM
is changed stepwise from d = 0 to 1. Then, during charging and dis-
charging, output voltage from power MOSFETs increases and
decreases. An electric double-layer capacitor (EDLC), supercapaci-
tor, is used for a load capacitor. The capacitance value is 5.70 F.
Power supply voltage is 5.00 V. The 4049B is an IC consisting of
inverter gates, which can allow the large flow of current and can
charge the gate of power MOSFETs fast. Fig. 1(b) shows the mea-
surement system. Three physical values were measured. One is
the capacitor voltage, VC, another is the current from the inductor
to the capacitor, IC, and the other is the current from the power
supply to the inductor, IP. These were measured with three digital
multimeters.
Fig. 2 shows the timewise change in VC. Here, the number of
voltage steps N is set to 32, 8, and 2. When N = 32, VC is almost lin-
ear. In this situation, d is changed from 0, 1/32, 2/32, . . ., 1, 31/32,
. . ., 1/32, 0. Fig. 3 shows the timewise change in IC. During charging
(0  t  1440 s), IC is positive, while it is negative during discharg-
ing (1440  t  2880 s). This means the current direction is oppo-
site. The inset is magnification of IC when N = 32. The absolute
value of IC becomes large when VC changes largely. The peak value
of IC is proportional to 1/N. Fig. 4 shows the timewise change in IP.
The inset is magnification of IP when N = 32. During charging, the
peak value of IP is proportional to d. During discharging, the peak
absolute value of IP is also proportional to d [5]. When the capacitor
is discharged, IP is negative. This means the current flows from the
capacitor to the power supply through the inductor.
For estimating energy efficiency g, charge amount from power
R
supply Q is calculated. Q is written as Q = IP dt. Then, Q can be cal-

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rinp.2017.08.024
2211-3797/Ó 2017 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
 S. Nakata / Results in Physics 7 (2017) 2976–2978 2977

0.8

Power supply current (A)

0.4

60

IP (mA)
–0.4 0
Fig. 1. Experimental circuit. (a) Circuit controlled by microprocessor. (b) Measure-
ment system. –60
0 1000 2000 3000
Time (s)
–0.8
0 2000 4000 6000 8000
6
Time (s)

Fig. 4. Power supply current as a function of time.

4 40 100
Theory
Voltage (V)

Charge amount (C)

Charging efficiency (%)

80 Experiment
30
60
20
2 40

10 20

0 0
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 32 8 2
0 Time (s) Number of steps
0 2000 4000 6000 8000 (a) (b)
Time (s)
Fig. 5. Analysis of experimental results. (a) Charge amount from power supply. (b)
Fig. 2. Capacitor voltage as a function of time. Charging efficiency.

0.8 The experimental value is almost consistent with the theoretical

one. Fig. 5(b) shows g as a function of N. Experimental value is
almost consistent with the theoretical one. The large value of g
when N = 32 shows that the proposed circuit is useful for charging
0.4
a supercapacitor.
Capacitor current (A)

From 8 to 32 step, g increases by 5%. The number of steps can be

easily changed by digital control with the microprocessor. Even if
0 the difference in energy efficiency is only 1%, it has a large meaning
in energy storage for smart grids. Therefore, in this experiment, the
60
32-step charging method is studied.
IC (mA)

–0.4 0
–60 0
1000 2000
Time (s)
–0.8
0 2000 4000
Time (s)
Fig. 3. Capacitor charging current as a function of time.
culated with Fig. 4. The result is shown in Fig. 5(a). When N = 32, Q
is 14.84 C. The work done by power supply W is written as QV. The
V is 5.0 V, so W is calculated to be 74.18 J. On the other hand, elec-
trostatic energy E is written as E = CVM2/2, where VM is the maxi-
mum capacitor voltage. The VM is 4.95 V and C is 5.70 F. Using
these values, E is calculated to be 69.72 J. The g, defined as E/W,
is calculated to be 94.0%. Theoretically, in the N-step charging,
energy dissipation is CV2/(2N) [8]. The W is the sum of electrostatic
energy and energy dissipation. Therefore, we have W = CV2/2 + CV2/
(2N). Then, theoretical energy efficiency gth is written as gth = 1/2-

CV2/W = N/(N + 1). The gth is calculated to be 97.0% when N = 32.
While adiabatic charging is energy efficient, the weak point is
that it needs longer time than the constant voltage charging due
to the gradual charging characteristic. However, when the energy
3000
efficiency is most important point, the adiabatic charging should
be applied in the circuit.
6000 8000
In [8], it is only clarified that IC decreased to 1/8 when the 8-step
charging is used. The work done by the power supply is not calcu-
lated from experimental data and, therefore, g is not calculated at
R
all. In this article, W is first calculated from the value of Q = IP dt.
Then, g is first estimated as a function of the number of steps, and
it is confirmed that g is consistent with the theoretical values.
Moreover, another different point from the result in [8] is the elec-
trostatic energy value, which is eight times larger. This is due to the
fact that the power supply voltage and capacitance in this article
are two times larger than those in [8]. Even if the electrostatic
energy is almost one digit larger than the previous, high energy
efficiency in adiabatic process can be confirmed with the discussed
g calculation.
This circuit does not need the constant current charging method
using the shunt resistor, so the circuit design with operational
amplifier is not necessary. Moreover, energy dissipation due to
2978 S. Nakata / Results in Physics 7 (2017) 2976–2978
the shunt resistor can be removed, so the circuit is suitable for high
power application.
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number
15K05964.
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