The Ultracapacitor-Based Regenerative Controlled Electric Drives With Power-Smoothing Capability

Modern controlled electric drive applications, such as lifts, port rubber tyred gantry cranes, and tooling machines, are characterized by high ratio of the peak to average power. Moreover, such applications have a need for braking at rated power. In ordinary drives, the braking energy, which represents 30%-40% of the consumed energy, is dissipated on a brake resistor. Apart from this “energetic” issue, the mains interruption, the input current quality, and the mains peak power are additional issues to be addressed. A novel ultracapacitor-based controlled regenerative electric drive with peak power-smoothing function is presented in this paper. The ultracapacitor with an interconnection dc-dc converter is used to store and recover the braking energy. In addition, the dc-dc converter controls and smooths the rectifier input power. In comparison to state-of-the-art solutions, the new solution has better performance regarding size, cost, and efficiency. The presented solution is theoretically analyzed and experimentally verified. The results are presented and discussed.