Model Predictive Control for Tram Charging and Its Semi-Physical Experimental Platform Design

Modern trams with a super capacitor have gained a lot of attention in recent years due to its reliability, convenience, energy conservation and environmental friendliness. Because of its special charging characteristic, the traditional charging structure and control strategy cannot satisfy its charging requirements. This paper presents a new charging topology for fast charging modern trams with a super capacitor and it designs a controller using continuous control set model predictive control (CCS-MPC). There are three contributions in this paper. First, a new charging structure is designed and its mathematics model is derived. The cascade structure is adopted instead of the parallel structure to simplify the control process and to keep the rated power of the controllable part low. Second, a MPC control strategy is proposed to satisfy the charging characteristic. The optimal control signal can be obtained by solving the designed optimization problem. The optimal control signal is related to the discrete control action. In addition, mapping between the continuous control signal and the discrete control action is designed. Third, a semi-physical experimental platform is built to verify the proposed topology and control method. The simulation model and experiment platform are built to verify the correctness of the new structure and its control method. The results obtained show that the new topology can work effectively.