A power electronics assisted emergency vehicle starter

Abstract

This research touches a major problem in automobile industry. Which is that, the engine cranking fails when the battery is drained to a certain depth of discharge, though the battery has enough energy for cranking, due to the dynamic behaviour of the internal resistance upon the state of charge of a lead acid battery. Our work is focused on finding-out the capability of cranking an internal combustion engine using such a battery while utilizing the battery-energy with the use of a power electronics assisted methodology. This paper consists of the study on the requirements of a vehicle engine for a healthy start, the characteristics of a battery at both starting and non-starting conditions, and the power electronic assisted method of compensating the starting requirements of the vehicles' electrical system at a non-starting condition. In that direction, field tests were carried out and the results were analyzed. Finally the proposed electronic assisted vehicle starting method was simulated and proved as a concept to be implemented practically. Here we have used a memory Hicorder to record data in field tests and MATLAB Simulink tool as the simulation workbench.