Applications of power electronics-based systems in vehicular technology: State-of-the-art and future trends

Power electronics-based systems and components have been increasingly used in land, air, and sea vehicles over the past decade. This has turned the vehicular products into a primary market for power electronics applications. Moreover, the existing trend in more electrification of the vehicles represents an even bigger potential for an increase in the existing demand. Although the primary incentive for introduction of multi-converter systems into vehicular technologies was to enhance fuel economy and environmental issues associated with vehicles; today, improvement of fault tolerance, cost, and compactness have boost the motivation for development of the more electric vehicles. The use of numerous converters has an impending impact on the overall system. The multi-converter system is highly prone to interaction within and between subsystems, varied source and load profiles, reduced power quality, degraded static and dynamic behavior of the system, and in some cases effect system stability. Traditionally, converters have been designed and analyzed on standalone basis using conservative approaches. However, in the context of multi-converter systems such approaches can lead to devastating consequences in terms of irreparable collapse of the entire system. Thus, it is inevitable to set new approaches that address issues of system dynamic and large signal perturbations. Existing work to address these issues is reviewed in this paper. In addition, a testbed is presented to provide a resource for the community to test design scenarios.