Design and analysis of reconfigurable sensorless brushless DC motor drive for regenerative braking and battery charging in electric vehicle

Abstract

SummaryThe expected depletion of fossil fuels has brought in an increased demand for electric vehicles with better performance in terms of easiness of control and reliability of operation and hence is a fertile area of research. In the present scenario, motoring, regenerative braking, and charging operations are performed in electric vehicles by separate converters. In this paper, an integrated scheme is developed, wherein the same voltage source inverter is employed to obtain all the three modes of operation, which in turn reduces the number of switching devices. Further, a sensorless control used in the proposed scheme improves the operational reliability. This novel approach adopts a simple switching scheme for voltage source inverter to operate as a dual‐boost DC‐DC converter during the regenerative braking period. This switching scheme enables reconfiguring voltage source inverter to a dual‐boost rectifier in conjunction with a LLC resonant converter in the charging mode. A comparison is also provided between the performance of single switch boost and dual‐boost converters used for braking operation. The performance of a prototype brushless DC (BLDC) motor drive with Li‐ion battery pack is evaluated in motoring, regenerative braking, and battery charging modes. This paper presents a detailed design of the scheme, the simulation of which is done on a MATLAB/SIMULINK platform and validated experimentally.