Real-time FPGA simulator for electric vehicle power supply systems

Abstract

The combination of Battery-Ultracapacitor, as a Hybrid Energy Storage System (HESS) controlled with a bidirectional buck-boost converter for light electric vehicles is presented in this paper. By combining these two energy storage elements an efficient supply system can be obtained. A bidirectional Buck-Boost converter is used to control the energy transfer between the elements of the HESS and the load. From a predefined New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) the power needed from the energy storage of the electric vehicle is obtained. This needed power is used to simulate the load. The focus of this paper is to create a real-time model in the loop (RTMiL) simulator based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Hardware tools from National Instruments are engaged and the FPGA's are programmed using Lab VIEW FPGA graphical programming environment.