Integrated Compact Drives for Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Abstract: To develop more competitive solutions, one of the trends in the development of drive systems for electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EVs/HEVs) is to integrate the power electronic converter and the electric motor. This thesis aims to investigate the performance and the operation of modular converters in integrated motor drive systems for EVs/HEVs.In the first part, the concept of integrated modular motor drive systems for EVs/HEVs is introduced. Three suitable modular converter topologies, namely, the stacked polyphase bridges (SPB) converter, the parallel-connected polyphase bridges (PPB) converter and the modular high frequency (MHF) converter, are evaluated and compared with conventional electric drives in terms of power losses, energy storage requirements, and semiconductor costs.In the second part of the thesis, the harmonic content of the dc-link current of the SPB converter is analyzed. By adopting an interleaving modulation the size of the dc-link capacitor can be reduced without increasing the switching frequency, which is beneficial for achieving a compact integrated system. This method allows for around 80% reduction of the dc-link capacitance for vehicle drives, resulting in a significant size reduction of the power converter and improved integration.Finally, a communication-based distributed control system for the SPB converter is presented. The communication delay arising from the serial communication is inevitable, thus a timing analysis is also presented. It has been found that stability is maintained even when the baud rate of the SPI communication is lower than 1 Mbps, indicating that other communication protocols with lower bandwidths can also be adopted for this topology.The analytical investigations provided in this thesis are validated by experiments on a four-submodule laboratory prototype. Experimental results verify the correctness of the theoretical analysis, as well as the dynamic performance of the distributed control system.