Regeneration and Regenerative Braking.

Full-bridge (H-bridge, 4 quadrant) and half-bridge (2 quadrant) circuits can operate in a regeneration
mode (regenerative braking) where energy can be recovered from the mechanical load of the motor and
fed back to the supply to charge batteries (or fed back to the grid via an inverter). Typical application is
in electric cars and bikes but any application requiring braking could use the technique.
Dynamic braking is a similar concept except that the energy is simply dissipated by a resistive element
and wasted rather than recovered.
The basic 2-quadrant or half-bridge circuit is shown below (with control and protection circuitry
omitted):

Note that the DC motor is being modeled as an inductor and a voltage source (winding resistance is
being ignored). When running as a motor (electrical energy in, mechanical energy out) the motor
produces a voltage at its terminals to counter the supply voltage. This is called the CEMF (Counter
Electromotove Force).
Operation of the circuit in each mode is now considered:
In motoring mode the circuit behaves just like a single quadrant drive (simple chopper circuit). The
active components are shown below:


Re-drawing the circuit we can see that it is the same in principle as a BUCK (step-down) converter.
Driving Q1 with a PWM signal allows the speed of the motor to be controlled by varying the average
motor voltage. D2 acts as the freewheel diode providing a path for the motor current when Q1 is off. It
is assumed that the motors rotational momentum is enough to smooth the on-off PWM drive signal so
no output capacitor is included.
When we want to brake the motor actively and recover some of the energy imparted to the load, Q2 will
be activated giving the active circuit configuration shown below. Re-drawing we can see that the circuit
is now equivalent to a BOOST (step-up) converter. The motor is now running as a generator (mechanical
energy in from the load momentum, electrical energy out) and its output voltage may be boosted to
cause current (energy) to flow back to the supply through D1. Q2 must be modulated with PWM to
allow current to flow in the motor winding periodically and to control the voltage fed back to the supply.
Each time Q2 is closed the current flow produced represents some energy extracted from the
mechanical load and converted to electrical energy (W = LI
2
)
Compare this circuit to the simplified BOOST converter shown (draw right-to-left instead of left-to-right)
considering the motor as the voltage source (generator mode) and the supply as the load (i.e. we are
supplying current to charge the batteries!). No smoothing capacitor is included as the batteries will hold
the output voltage steady.


In practice regeneration requires a control system, usually micro-controller or DSP based, and
monitoring of the various system voltages and currents to control the amount of braking and the voltage
of the DC bus (power supply) so that damage to the batteries does not occur through over-voltage.
Other schemes are possible utilizing ULTRACAPACITORS to store the recovered energy. This may be
more suitable when the energy from the load must be recovered quickly, exceeding the batteries
maximum charging rate. In other cases where multiple machines are connected to the same power bus
energy may simply be transferred from a braking (regenerating) machine to a machine in motoring
mode.


Diagram shows a regenerative braking
system in a hybrid vehicle. Note the
additional step of converting AC-DC
and DC-AC to accommodate the use of
an AC motor. The inverter is used in
both directions to do the conversion.