NZ electronics researcher nominated for KuDos Award

University of Waikato electronics lecturer and researcher Nihal Kularatna has been nominated in the 2013 KuDos Science Excellence Awards in the Hill Laboratories Science Entrepreneur category.

Reliable power supply is a must when we depend so heavily on electronics - everything from mobile phones to whitegoods - to get us through the day. Kularatna is investigating new techniques to enhance and protect electronic systems by preventing power supply interruption through battery-like devices called supercapacitors.

Power interruption is not just frustrating for the consumer, surges caused by lightning strikes and other weather events can damage sophisticated electronic componentry.

Kularatna’s work on novel applications of supercapacitors has seen him nominated in the awards.

Supercapacitors have long been used in the electric vehicle and renewable energy industries to improve battery performance. They may look like a regular battery, but they charge much faster and deliver that charge far more rapidly. They also have an almost limitless life cycle with high power density and fast power delivery capability. On the downside, they hold much less energy than a battery of similar size.

“They have traditionally been used in large-scale applications to improve the performance of conventional batteries but I am looking at using them in more unconventional ways,” Kularatna says.

Those potential new applications include surge protection technologies that are being commercially developed by Nihal’s research team and for which patents are pending. The general areas of the research include supercapacitor-assisted low drop-out regulators, supercapacitor-assisted surge arrestors and surge-resistant UPSs.

The 2013 KuDos Science Excellence Awards winners will be announced on 26 September.