An optimal power management system for a regenerative auxiliary power system for delivery refrigerator trucks

Engine idling of refrigerator trucks during loading and unloading contributes to greenhouse gas emissions due to their increased fuel consumption. This paper proposes a new anti-idling system that uses two sources of power, battery and engine-driven generator, to run the compressor of the refrigeration system. Therefore, idling can be eliminated because the engine is turned OFF and the battery supplies auxiliary power when the vehicle is stopped for loading or unloading. This system also takes advantage of regenerative braking for increased fuel savings. The power management of this system needs to satisfy two requirements: it must minimize fuel consumption in the whole cycle and must ensure that the battery has enough energy for powering the refrigeration system when the engine is OFF. To meet these objectives, a two-level controller is proposed. In the higher level of this controller, a fast dynamic programming technique that utilizes extracted statistical features of drive and duty cycles of a refrigerator truck is used to find suboptimal values of the initial and final SOC of any two consecutive loading/unloading stops. The lower level of the controller employs an adaptive equivalent fuel consumption minimization (A-ECMS) to determine the split ratio of auxiliary power between the generator and battery for each segment with initial and final SOC obtained by the high-level controller. The simulation results confirm that this new system can eliminate idling of refrigerator trucks and reduce their fuel consumption noticeably such that the cost of replacing components is recouped in a short period of time.