Test bench setup for emulating electric vehicle on-road conditions

Abstract

This work provides an electric vehicle (EV) test bench with a motor/dynamometer setup with a battery and ultracapacitor (UC) hybrid energy storage. Extending the driving range and enhancing the battery life are the main concerns with EVs nowadays. The drive motor (DM) used is a three-phase induction motor (IM), which is controlled by the current sensorless indirect vector control method. This fault-tolerant method can be used in the case of current sensor failure. All the resistive forces acting on an EV are emulated based on the concept of vehicle equivalent rotational inertia for different real-life driving cycles, namely ECE R15 and NYCC. The battery alone is not capable of handling the surge current requirement during the acceleration period and is not able to capture the total power during regenerative breaking as it has a low power density. Hence, a high power density source like UC is a must to handle these conditions during frequent stop and go city traffic conditions as per ECE R15 and NYCC driving cycles. This EV emulation technique helps in getting the DC-link power profile for an EV for any driving scenario. Hence, it is possible to test the different powertrain components of an EV using this proposed technique.