Multilevel DC Link Inverter Fed BLDC Motor Drive with Modular Battery/Supercapacitor HESS for Electric Vehicle

Modular approach to the configuration of powertrain systems of electric vehicles (EV) is a promising area of development of EVs in recent years. The modularity can apply to on-board power supply systems, power semiconductor converters and even traction electric machines. This paper uses one of the modularity options in the construction of a hybrid energy storage system (HESS) which consists of five identical modules, each of which includes a battery and a supercapacitor (SC) module, interconnected through bidirectional DC-DC converter. A multilevel cascaded converter (MCC) connects the power supply modules and controls the DC bus voltage, which feeds the inverter of the BLDC motor of the EV drive. A simple energy management system (EMS) strategy is proposed for this case of the HESS modular structure. Another EMS function is the battery state-of-charge balancing which performs by the MCC. Conducted simulation in Matlab/Simulink software showed the efficiency of the studied EV electric drive system and the effectiveness of the developed EMS.