A Flywheel-Based Regenerative Braking System for Railway Vehicles

Abstract Regenerative braking is a technique that employs electric motors to convert the dynamic mechanical energy from the motor’s spinning rotor and any attached loads into electricity. However, such a type of regenerative braking can only slow but not stop the vehicle because there is too little energy to excite the motor acting as a generator at low speeds. Therefore, this paper presents a unique flywheel-based regenerative braking system for railway vehicles. This system is supposed to meet high safety and comfort expectations in all operating conditions. The braking action control of this system should allow braking of empty or loaded vehicles according to load, the anti-blockage braking action of wheels and prevent wheel-slide during braking or wheel slip during acceleration. The new regenerative braking system under development, like any kinetic energy recovery system, requires the application of continuously variable transmission. The essence of the new solution is to design and build this type of variable transmission using only one planetary gear controlled through the powertrain control module for an electric motor cooperating concurrently. This paper describes complete modelling and simulation realisation on a closed-loop servomotor drive, which cooperates with the variable transmission of the regenerative braking system based on the Scilab/Xcos environment.