An Adiabatic Circuit with Consecutive Changes of the Duty Ratio of the Switching Transistor Using a Microprocessor

Abstract

A circuit for adiabatically charging and discharging a supercapacitor was designed. A microprocessor sets the duty ratio of the switching transistors that control the inductor current. Changing the duty ratio in a stepwise fashion causes the output voltage to change in a similar fashion. Stepwise voltage changes enable adiabatic charging and discharging. Current measurements showed that the eight-step charging and discharging of a supercapacitor reduced the energy dissipation to one-eighth of that for a constant-voltage process. The circuit enables precise voltage control in small steps.