Abstract:

The development of electric motor technologies opened up new design possibilities of modern generation of EVs. The research in EV therefore leads to several new directions and possibilities. Unlike the conventional powertrains, the distributed powertrains becomes increasingly popular in recent years. In the distributed powertrain, the motors are coupled to each wheel independently. Therefore each driving wheel can be controlled independently. This offers better design flexibility, handling, responsiveness and provides new possibilities to develop the control methodologies. Therefore, an efficient torque allocation scheme for distributed drive EV is indispensable. In this research, the study develop an ED based TC system for the use in a NEV. The proposed system features design simplicity, response accuracy, energy efficient and cost effectiveness. In addition to that a passenger occupancy based torque distribution system is developed to broaden the area of applications. This dissertation makes important contributions to the design and development of a customized prototype NEV, modelling of ED based TC system and an energy efficient torque distribution strategy based on passenger occupancy. Contributions of this dissertation can be categorized to address four issues.