Backstepping Sliding Mode Control of FC-UC Based Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Abstract

Depleting fossil fuels, and subsequently, high environmental pollution has made hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), a vital replacement to its conventional counterpart. Electric and HEVs offer a compact, lightweight, and effective means of transportation that is economical and has sufficient life cycle. In this paper, the HEV under consideration uses two energy sources to operate its traction motor: a fuel cell works as the main source, whereas, an ultra-capacitor is used as an auxiliary source. Each source is connected to the DC bus via a power conditioning circuitry, which comprises electronic power converters. The power conditioning unit harnesses energy from the sources according to the load demand of the vehicle. A nonlinear control scheme, called Backstepping Sliding mode control, is employed on the power converters in the power conditioning unit. The reason for applying this nonlinear control scheme is due to the systems nonlinear nature, where this control law provides a robust and precise output in presence of these nonlinearities. Formal stability analysis of the proposed HEV system is provided in this paper, and the simulations are performed in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The simulation results show perfect regulation of the dc bus voltage with very fast convergence, low overshoots, and almost zero steady state error, which is our primary objective.