Direct Electric Drive Control for Electric Vehicles

To advance a green, clean, and affordable energy and environment era, it is imperative to develop a direct electric drive control framework as a paradigm shift of the advanced electric drive control strategy to deliver promising properties like higher control bandwidth, lower current distortion, and lower device switching frequency for electric machines. With these achievable performance specifications, this new control algorithm used in vehicle electric motors will significantly improve the energy conversion efficiency, and provide much higher power/torque density and smoother speed/current/torque regulation performance, which will substantially increase battery life, enable wider range of driving scenarios, and enhance user comfort and vehicle durability by reducing unwanted noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) of electric vehicles.
The PhD student will develop and use this new design and synthesis framework to achieve many promising performance objectives of electric machines for electric vehicles including economic performance (e.g., the THD and the switching frequency), high control bandwidth, low computational burden, performance trustworthiness (e.g., stability, and qualitative robustness), and extended functionality (e.g., ability to handle state constraints, nonlinearities, and disturbances).