• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.396-403
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• 2016

Usually, large-sized buses and trucks have a very high load. In addition, frequent braking during downhill or long-distance driving, causes the conventional method using the brake friction to have a problem in safety because of brake fade and brake burst phenomenon. Auxiliary brakes dividing the braking load is essential. Hence, environment-friendly auxiliary brakes, such as contactless brake rather than the engine auxiliary brake system are needed. A study aimed at improving the energy efficiency by recharging electric energy with changing mechanical to electrical energy that occurs when braking is actively in progress. In this paper, the voltage control method is utilized to recover the electric energy generated in the electromagnetic retarder instead of the eddy current. To regenerate the braking energy into the electrical energy, the resonant L-C circuit is configured in the retarder. The voltage generated in the retarder is simply modeled as a transformer. However, retarder voltage control in this paper is simulated by modeling the induction generator because this induction generator modeling is more practical than transformer modeling. The changes in the voltage of the resonance circuit, which depends on the switch pulse duration of the control device, were analyzed. A PI controller algorithm to control this voltage is proposed. The feasibility of modeling retarder and voltage controller are shown by using MATLAB Simulink in this paper.