Acceleration slip regulation by electric motor torque of battery electric vehicle with nonlinear model predictive control approach

Abstract

Step increase of electric motor torque results in wheel slip during the acceleration of battery electric vehicle (BEV), making vehicle body instability paramount. This is particularly challenging for regulating the torque of electric motor to keep stability in the process of acceleration, for which regulating the wheel slip to an ideal set-point is difficult for the central driving powertrain that adopts one electric motor to drive both left and right wheels by a differential. While much of the research on acceleration slip regulation has focused on solving the wheel anti-slip of internal combustion powertrain by electronic stability programme, comparatively little is known about the wheel slip control by electric motor torque of the central driving powertrain that is the most common style of driveline in the market of BEV currently. Here we discuss a series of studies on the acceleration slip regulation by electric motor torque that, collectively, design an approach of how the nonlinear model predictive controller based on a novel driving dynamics model regulates the wheel slip to an ideal set-point from the ideal slip ratio curve. Testing and validating this approach embedded into vehicle control unit are carried out in a BEV to fully realise the wheel slip control by electric motor torque during the acceleration.

Keywords:

• Wheel slip control
• driving dynamics model
• ideal slip ratio curve
• wheel speed reciprocal
• vehicle control unit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by Key Research and Development Program of Jiangsu Province through grant BE2021006-2, Innovation Project of New Energy Vehicle and Intelligent Connected Vehicle of Anhui Province, The University Synergy Innovation Program of Anhui Province through grant GXXT-2020-076, and Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Automotive Simulation and Control (20201107).