Power Electronic Control Design for Stable EV Motor and Battery Operation during a Route

Electric vehicles (EVs), during a route, should normally operate at the desired speed by effectively controlling the power that flows between their batteries and the electric motor/generator. To implement this task, in this paper, the voltage source AC/DC converter is considered as a controlled power interface between the electric machine and the output of the DC storage device; the DC/DC converter is used to automatically regulate the battery operating condition in accordance to the profile of the acting on the vehicle wheels, unknown external torque. Particularly, the speed is continuously regulated by the vehicle driver via the pedal while all other regulations for absorbing or regenerating energy are internally controlled. The driver command is acting as speed reference input on a PI outer-loop motor speed controller which, in its turn, drives a fast P inner-loop current controller operating in cascaded mode. In a similar manner, the machine and the battery performance are self-regulated by a pure PI current controller that achieves maximum electric torque per ampere operation of the motor and by a PI/P cascaded scheme for the DC-voltage/battery–current regulation, respectively. In order to exclude any possibility of instabilities and adverse impacts between the different parts, a rigorous analysis is deployed on the complete electromechanical system that involves the motor, the batteries, the converter dynamic models and the proposed controllers. Modeling the system in Euler–Lagrange nonlinear form and applying sequentially suitable Lyapunov techniques and the time-scale separation principle, a systematic method for tuning the gains of the inner- and outer-loop controllers is derived. Therefore, the proposed controller design procedure guarantees asymptotic stability by considering the accurate system model as a whole. Finally, the proposed approach is validated by simulating realistic route conditions, performed under unknown external torque variations.