Neural Sliding Mode Control of a Buck-Boost Converter Applied to a Regenerative Braking System for Electric Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents the design and simulation of a neural sliding mode controller (NSMC) for a regenerative braking system in an electric vehicle (EV). The NSMC regulates the required current and voltage of the bidirectional DC-DC buck–boost converter, an element of the auxiliary energy system (AES), to improve the state of charge (SOC) of the battery of the EV. The controller is based on a recurrent high-order neural network (RHONN) trained using the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) as the tools to train the neural networks to obtain a higher SOC in the battery. The performance of the controller with the two training algorithms is compared with a proportional integral (PI) controller illustrating the differences and improvements obtained with the EKF and the UKF. Furthermore, robustness tests considering Gaussian noise and varying of parameters have demonstrated the outcome of the NSMC over a PI controller. The proposed controller is a new strategy with better results than the PI controller applied to the same buck–boost converter circuit, which can be used for the main energy system (MES) efficiency in an EV architecture.