Design of an electric kinetic energy recovery system

Abstract

The drive towards reduction of harmful emissions has seen a surge in the development and improvement of electrical implementations and applications in many industries. The car industry, in particular, saw a huge shift towards this segment over recent years with electric cars and hybrids seeing a huge increase in market share. KERS - Kinetic Energy Recovery System is one such development that has been put in use effectively. The two types of KERS being electric and mechanical. The scope of this dissertation was the design, assembly and implementation of an electric KERS applied to a DC motor. This entailed the design of a switch-mode DC-DC converter that involved the use of various components including MOSFETs, gatedrivers, voltage regulators and current sensors. A DC-DC converter converts an input DC voltage to lower/higher output voltages and for the scope of the project it was integrated on the PCB. For the purpose of this project, a full-bridge converter was designed in order that this functioned in four quadrant configuration. Magnitude and angle criterion were used in the mathematical requirements to get to the equation - transfer function of the current controller.