A new solution for increasing the efficiency of an electric scooter with supercapacitors through a novel, interleaved multi-channel DC/DC converter

Scooters are a well-established transport system for short distances – particularly within cities. Currently, the majority of scooters are petrol powered. Their engines typically exhibit bad efficiencies and thus contribute to global warming by CO2 production along with polluting city centers with exhaust gases. Electric scooters with batteries charged on the grid can be regarded as a solution to the problems above. The main advantages of such a vehicle are: no local pollutant and noise emissions, no CO2 production (for electricity generated from renewable or nuclear sources) and simple fill-ups at home. The main disadvantage is its limited range and battery lifetime. It’s therefore important to propose and develop new systems to address the current shortcomings, which is best achieved by focusing on the electrical storage system and power electronics. This paper presents a solution to a power assistance based on supercapacitors in order to improve the efficiency of the storage system. Additionally, a dedicated, interleaved multichannel DC/DC converter will be proposed. That converter uses 8 separated standard DC/DC converters in parallel that are used in a discontinuous mode.