Development of regenerative energy storage system for an electric vehicle using super-capacitors

Abstract

This paper presents the circuit arrangement and effective control method of regenerative energy storage system for an electric vehicle using super-capacitors as the braking energy storage element. A bi-directional controlled current flow of the DC-DC converters with the capacitor bank is connected in parallel with battery, and is controlled so that the whole of the braking energy is effectively absorbed into the capacitors and released back to the electric motor upon acceleration. The converter needs the series-parallel switching circuit for making the best use of the series capacitors and for limiting the step-up ratio of the boost converter. The proposed methods are verified by computer simulation and experimental set-up. They are usefully applied to the electric vehicles such as green cars, electric motorcycles, bike, etc which are power- supplied by the electric batteries.