Harvesting solar and energy management system for Light Electric Vehicles (LEVs)

Abundance sunlight ray in Malaysia makes it perfect to be used with the current alternative green vehicle technology: the Light Electric Vehicles (LEVs). LEV is powered by battery packs, which can be rechargeable by any external source of electricity. Hence, it is one of the targets of this study to examine the reliability of such solar fuel station. As green alone is not enough to be the purchasing factor for the consumers, multiple sources of energy combinations and its control algorithm are studied and developed in order to provide vehicle with acceptable speed and power load capabilities. This study concentrated on a model to be used with LEV such as electric scooters. Multiple energy sources selected are battery, fuel cell (FC) and super-capacitor (SC). The complete vehicle system built of the energy management system (EMS), power controller, DC unit and vehicle dynamics are designed and modeled by using MATLAB/SIMULINK. The performance of the proposed system is analyzed and compared with the ECE-47 test drive cycle in terms of vehicle speed and load power.