High-Performance Control Design of Automotive Power Generation System with Claw-Pole Synchronous Generator and PWM Rectifier

In recent years, many electronic control systems and electrical driven units are introduced in vehicles and result in steadily increasing electrical loads. A new high-power, high-efficiency alternator system is needed to meet these requirements. Today's 14-V claw-pole synchronous generator is not able to meet the future power requirements due to its inherent design limitations. For this purpose, a claw-pole synchronous generator with pulse-width-modulation (PWM) rectifier regulated at 42-V is proposed in this paper. The ac voltage of the generator is controlled with excitation currents for achieving controllable condition of boost rectifier during varying speed. To improve the suppression of dynamic voltage during load-dump and jump-start charging, the dc output voltage of rectifier is regulated with stator current matching to load based on field-oriented control principle. A load current prediction feed-forward control approach is proposed in order to minimize the dc-link capacitance for compaction of the system. The proposed approaches are evaluated by the real-time simulation experimental results.