Voltage Oriented Control for Electric Vehicle Regenerative Power Regulation

Electric Vehicles have been designed to address the increased carbon emissions made by fossil fuel-powered vehicles. On the other hand, electric vehicles have a longer battery charging time and shorter driving range. The use of regenerative braking systems (RBS) can help solve these problems. To ensure effective regenerative energy storage, it is crucial to regulate the regenerative power using a power electronic system. This paper proposes the use of a three-phase voltage source converter (VSC) and controller. Mathematical model of the plant system is analyzed and used to synthesize the controller for the VSC. Voltage oriented control (VOC) method is used. It consists of two loops: the outer voltage and the inner current loop. Initially, the conventional VOC method was used, however, it was found to perform poorly due to high overshoot and instability; thus, an improved version of the controller is presented to overcome the issues. Feedback to the voltage loop PI controller and a different set of PI controller parameters were formed. The system was simulated in MATLAB/Simulink environment to evaluate the performance. The proposed VSC shows improved overshoot by 70% and steady-state time by 55%, leading to a more efficient regenerative braking system. With this, the driving range and life-time of an EV can be increased by achieving a greater amount of recovered kinetic energy from the RBS.