A capacitor-assisted buck converter enabling reduced duty cycle and improved efficiency for autonomous electric golf cart lighting systems

This paper presents a high-efficiency 12 V power supply and intelligent lighting system for an autonomous electric golf cart. With the increasing demand for lightweight and energy-efficient auxiliary power systems in electric vehicles, developing a compact, low-cost, and high-performance DC–DC converter has become an important research topic. To address the limitations of conventional and recently reported buck-type converters, this study proposes a capacitor-assisted buck converter featuring reduced duty-cycle operation through a flying-capacitor voltage-partition mechanism. Compared with several recently reported converter topologies, the proposed converter adopts a simpler non-isolated structure with lower component count, lower circuit complexity, and lower implementation cost, making it more suitable for lightweight electric-vehicle auxiliary applications. The operating principles and duty-cycle characteristics of the proposed converter were theoretically analyzed under both continuous conduction mode (CCM) and discontinuous conduction mode (DCM), followed by MATLAB simulation and hardware implementation. Experimental validation was conducted on a 36 V battery-powered autonomous electric golf cart with a regulated 12 V output. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed converter consistently requires smaller duty cycles than a conventional buck converter under both CCM and DCM operation. The measured conversion efficiencies reach 97% in CCM and 98% in DCM owing to reduced switching-related and conduction losses. In addition, the proposed converter was successfully integrated with an automatic light-sensor-based lighting system to improve vehicle visibility, camera perception stability, and energy utilization under low-light conditions. Overall, the proposed converter provides a lightweight, low-cost, analytically supported, and experimentally validated power-conversion solution for intelligent lighting and low-voltage auxiliary power applications in autonomous electric vehicles.