Stop… start… stop… start. If you make a habit of driving in city traffic, you’ll know it can be a huge waste of time. What’s less obvious is that it’s also a waste of energy. Getting a car moving needs a big input of power, and every time you hit the brakes all the energy you’ve built up disappears again, wasted in the brake pads as heat. Wouldn’t it be good if you could store this energy somehow and reuse it next time you started to accelerate? That’s the basic concept of regenerative brakes, which are widely used in electric trains and the latest electric cars. Why did we mention this topic? It’s because we see our system usage as regenerative braking, why not!
We connected a second same asynchronous motor that could be generating power, it was connected to the Siemens Micromaster g440 frequency converter.
After that, we added a braking resistor to “move” generated energy to it and turned on Dynamic braking mode on the “generator” motor. We got not very good, but at least some results, we got +10 Volts of generated power.
We did not have enough additional engine power to rotate the generator to a higher speed, it reached a power limit at a speed of about 2000 rpm, then it was decided to use something faster and more powerful as a motor, for example, a synchronous motor!
The next step is – connect a synchronous motor to our system.