Model predictive control of a battery emulator for testing of hybrid and electric powertrains

Thorough testing of the powertrain is a key aspect for the development of reliable hybrid and electric vehicles. Instead of a real traction battery, a battery emulator is used to supply the electric motor inverters of hybrid powertrains on a testbed. This approach avoids time-consuming preconditioning of batteries and allows automated testing of hybrid powertrains. An electric motor inverter acts as a constant power load towards the battery emulator. This degrades the dynamic performance and can even destabilize a supply with a conventional controller. The contributions are a model predictive controller design approach that includes a model of the system and the constant power load. A robustness concept is utilized in order to achieve stable operation. An algorithm for real-time execution of constrained model predictive control is proposed as well. Simulation results and experimental results are presented.