Utilizing solar and wind energy in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

For the first time, this study has provided a renewable energy based replacement for the internal combustion engine of a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). A novel battery/PV/wind hybrid power source is proposed to replace the internal combustion engine with a small-size photovoltaic (PV) module positioned on the roof of the PHEV, and a micro wind turbine located in front of the PHEV, behind the condenser of the air conditioning system. The proposed power source equipped with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology is composed of a 19.2 kWh Lithium (Li)-ion battery used as the main energy storage device, and a PV module and a wind energy conversion system (WECS) including the micro wind turbine used as the clean and renewable energy based auxiliary power sources. A prototype of the battery/PV/wind hybrid power source has been constructed, and experimental verifications are presented that explicitly demonstrate utilizing the PV module and micro wind turbine adds 19.6 km to the cruising range of a PHEV with the weight of 1880 kg during two sunny days, and provides a higher power efficiency and speed of, respectively, 91.2% and 121 km/h compared to the normal operation of the PHEV. Highly accurate DC-link voltage regulation and producing an appropriate three-phase stator current for the traction motor by using pulse width modulation (PWM) technique are the other contributions of this work.