Design and development of cost effective regenerative braking system for motor operated vehicle

Abstract

Nowadays, the electric vehicles are becoming very popular due to easy operation, no fuel usage and smoother function. Moreover, the fare it takes from the passenger is quiet reasonable. However, it requires huge electric power to recharge the battery, which is the main source of energy for the vehicle. In addition, the existing braking system of the conventional transport is wasting some of the energies in the form of heat during the braking periods. Particularly, a rickshaw driver needs to brake the vehicle for several cycles. Hence, the wastage is a matter of concern.

Regenerative braking is a process of harnessing the stored kinetic energy in the form of electric energy during the brake period, where the motor of the vehicle operates as a generator and charges the battery. In this research, a new technique of the regenerative system is proposed and developed. It only uses the rectifier unit that naturally exists at the opposite side of the inverter, which controls the BLDC motor used inside the electric vehicle. Necessary units such as PWM circuit, microcontroller, gate driver circuits are implemented to achieve the proposed method of regenerative braking. To simulate the load performance a flywheel is designed and attached to the motor set. The back emf at different speed is recorded to select the proper charging system. After that, using the proposed method the battery is charged and successful outcome is seen. Furthermore, different characteristics such as, speed and back emf performances with varying duty cycles are noted. The response of the back emf with time is also observed and linearity is found. Based on the gathered data the energy regeneration is calculated for several speeds. Finally, a cost analysis is given at the end to justify the effectiveness. Overall, the proposed system can explore the commercial sectors of the recent electric vehicles and effectively store the braking energy in the form of battery charging. Additionally, the savings will be around 17.87 %.