A Supercapacitor-Based Interior Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor Drive Using Intelligent Control for Light Rail Vehicle

A supercapacitor (SC)-based interior permanent magnet synchronous motor (IPMSM) drive including the speed tracking of a specific velocity profile and the charging of the SC is developed in this study to emulate the operation of an urban light rail vehicle (LRV). In the SC-based IPMSM drive, the motoring mode to emulate the LRV speed tracking control and the charging mode for the charging of the SC are both designed. In the motoring mode, a field-oriented controlled (FOC) IPMSM drive system is developed to emulate the speed control of an LRV. In the charging mode, the constant current and constant voltage (CC–CV) charging strategy is developed for the charging of the SC. Moreover, the above two modes use the same inverter and coordinate transformations to reduce the design complexity. Furthermore, in order to test the performance of SC, the speed command of the emulated LRV is obtained using a specific testing driving cycle. The design objective is for fast charging of SC being able to provide enough energy for the emulated LRV to operate a full testing driving cycle. In addition, to improve the transient speed response of the emulated LRV, a Chebyshev fuzzy neural network (CheFNN) intelligent speed controller is proposed. Finally, the simulation and experimental results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed CC–CV charging strategy for the SC and the proposed CheFNN speed controller for the emulated LRV.