Modeling and Control of the Ultracapacitor-Based Regenerative Controlled Electric Drives

Two issues are still a great challenge in the design and application of advanced controlled electric drives, namely, recovery of the braking energy and ride-through capability of the drive system. Apart from the ordinary solutions, such as back-to-back and matrix converters, an approach based on the ordinary diode front-end-drive converter equipped with an energy-storage element is used in some applications, such as traction and lift drives. This approach has come into focus recently with the rapid development of electrochemical double layer capacitors, so-called ultracapacitors. To achieve system flexibility and better efficiency, the ultracapacitor is connected to the drive via a dc-dc converter. The converter is controlled in such a way as to fulfill the control objectives: the control of the dc-bus voltage, the ultracapacitor state of charge, and peak-power filtering. In this paper, we have discussed the modeling and control aspects of the regenerative controlled electric drive using the ultracapacitor as energy-storage and emergency power-supply device. The presented model and control scheme have been verified by simulation and a set of experiments on a 5.5-kW prototype. The results are presented and discussed in this paper.