Regenerative braking control strategy for a hybrid electric vehicle with rear axle electric drive

Regenerative braking is an effective method for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) to extend their driving range. This paper proposes a method to recover more energy in the process of braking for hybrid electric vehicle using rear motor control. Firstly, a novel control strategy of braking force distribution of the front and rear wheels is proposed. Then, a fuzzy control strategy is designed to determine the distribution between hydraulic braking force and regenerative braking force for the rear wheels braking force. The Mamdani's fuzzy logic controller has three-inputs including the brake strength, vehicle speed and batteries' state of charge (SOC) and one-output which is the coefficient of regenerative braking force. The proposed strategy has been verified by the NYCC driving cycle under the MATLAB/Simulink software environment. In addition, the other two typical driving cycles are adopted to evaluate the generalization ability of the proposed strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed regenerative braking control strategy can achieve recovery energy up to 28.29%.