Energy management and stabilization of a hybrid DC microgrid for transportation applications

Power electronics-based AC/DC microgrids are attractive for clean energy applications, and are the enabling technology for hybrid energy systems in the more electric transportation. In such hybrid energy systems, storage units like battery and supercapacitor (SC) are used to store the surplus energy and to regulate the DC bus voltage. In on-board electric power systems, the converter controlled loads act as constant power loads (CPLs), imposing fast dynamics to the system. In this paper, a simple power control approach is proposed to provide the energy management and to ensure the stable operation of the system in the presence of CPLs. Furthermore, a laboratory prototype is built in order to validate the performance of the controller and the energy management strategy. The control system is implemented on dSPACE real-time cards. The simulated control scenarios are then experimented with the hardware prototype.