A Novel Power Quality Improved Lead Acid Battery Charging System for the Electric Rickshaw

Several thousands of electric rickshaws have been deployed in many of the Indian cities and the number of electric rickshaws deployed in various cities is growing day by day.The electric rickshaws invariably use 2 numbers of 12 V lead acid batteries.Most of the electric rickshaws commonly called E Rickshaws use domestic charging arrangements for charging the batteries and a variety of battery chargers is available in the market.This scenario has caused a great concern for the grid side power quality due to the nonlinear nature of the commercially available battery chargers which use rectifiers and filter capacitors.In this work a power factor corrected battery charging rectifier conforming to the charging pattern requirements of the lead acid batteries is presented.The control scheme ensures that the source current is of sinusoidal waveform.The proposed system uses a hysteresis controller and a sliding mode controller combination.The mathematical overheads and memory requirements in digital implementation of controller are minimal.The results of simulations carried out in the MATLAB SIMULINK environment and the results of the experimental prototype confirm and validate the efficacy of the proposed idea.