Design and realization of hybrid drive with supercapacitor and power flow control

Hybrid electric vehicles are one of the most effective solutions to improve our environment, one of few such products that are available at the mass-market and also accepted by the customers. With the improved energy storage systems and control algorithms, hybrid vehicles can further gain on the applicability and consequently on the popularity. In this paper, a design and control of the elements of the hybrid vehicle propulsion system, with an emphasis on supercapacitor as the peak energy storage unit, is presented. The propulsion system is dimensioned for light delivery vehicle. In order to simplify design and testing, a laboratory test rig was built rather than using the complete vehicle. Trough simulations and experiments a significant improvement of the properties of energy storage system is confirmed after adding the supercapacitor to the battery. The experiments also confirm the advantages of energy flow management based on the stabilization of the common DC bus voltage.