A layered regenerative braking strategy for Formula SAE electric race cars considering stability and energy recovery

Abstract

A layered regenerative braking strategy is proposed for distributed four-wheel-drive Formula SAE (FSAE) electric race cars to improve energy recovery while maintaining braking stability. An AMESim–Simulink–CarSim co-simulation platform is established, including vehicle dynamics, battery/motor, and hydraulic actuator models. A controller consisting of upperlayer staged braking, lower-layer electro-hydraulic blended allocation, and fuzzy correction is developed for a racing vehicle with fixed hydraulic brake distribution. Under the 90 s track condition, the proposed strategy increases the final SOC from 0.684 to 0.691 and the recovered energy from 102.5 kJ to 110.94 kJ. Under split-μ conditions, the maximum yaw rate and maximum lateral deviation are reduced by 7.99% and 6.07%, respectively, relative to the non-regenerativebraking case. The results show that the proposed strategy improves energy recovery while maintaining braking stability, and preliminary real-vehicle tests confirm the on-vehicle executability of the control framework.