A Cooperative Charging Protocol for Onboard Supercapacitors of Catenary-Free Trams

Catenary-free trams with an onboard supercapacitor have been an emerging and energy-efficient way for urban rail transportation. However, the high-power charging load from catenary-free trams brings a new challenge to the design of charging systems. The traditional single-module charging system typically suffers from a high power and thermal pressure, which reduces the reliability of the charging system. In this paper, we propose a multimodule charging system to improve the system reliability by decomposing power pressure to multiple charging modules. Specifically, a cooperative charging protocol is proposed to improve the dynamic performance of the charging system by suppressing the current imbalance and avoiding the current overshoot during the startup process. First, we mathematically model the multimodule charging system using the state-space averaging method and graph theory. Second, the cooperative charging protocol is designed using the leader–follower consensus algorithm, where the virtual leader represents the desired charging current for each module with a warm-start mechanism. Third, multiple-input multiple-output root locus technique is exploited to characterize the dynamic performance of the charging system. Both simulation and experiment results show that the proposed protocol effectively suppresses the imbalance and avoids the overshoot during the startup of the charging system.