Development of the control system for an electric vehicle
Minas Roukas · Chalmers Publication Library (Chalmers University of Technology) · 2013
Development of the Control System for an Electric Vehicle by Minas RoukasIn Volvo Group Trucks Technology, an in-house project started in order to develop an electric one-seater demonstration vehicle.The final product, apart from demonstration reasons, will also be used as a testing platform.The present report is a part of this Volvos project.Its scope is first to structure the control system for the one-seater vehicle, then to implement a subset of the requested functionalities, to validate the designed control strategy and finally to document the design using the EAST-ADL architecture description language.The focused functionality for this thesis is the control of the propulsion system.For a road vehicle the three main motions, which have to be controlled, are the longitudinal and lateral speed as well as the yaw motion.Furthermore, the actuators, which can be controlled and contribute to the movement of the specific vehicle are two electric motors for the rear wheels and four brakes, one in each wheel.On the other hand, the steering actuation is not included in the control system and the driver can directly influence the front wheels' steering angle.Having more actuators, which act as controlled inputs of the system, than controlled motions, which are the control outputs, allows the writer to use a control method, which can be used for over-actuated systems, called control allocation.Moreover, a conceptual model, developed by Volvo, was used in order to structure the control architecture.The implementation of the control system was made in Matlab/Simulink and several simulation tests are made in order to validate the functionality of the designed system.An already made vehicle model was adjusted and used during the simulations.The results from the simulation tests validated that the designed control system could handle the propulsion of the vehicle.Thus, a first version of the control system is delivered and could be enriched with other functionalities in order to accomplish Volvo's project.