DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A DRIVETRAIN TEST BENCH FOR ELECTRIC AND HYBRID ELECTRIC VEHICLES

Due to continuously increasing price of petroleum and related environmental issues, the automotive industry is more focus on the fuel efficient and low energy consumption. Electric-Drive vehicles (EDV), such as Electric Vehicles (EV), Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles are expected to replace the regular energy consumption vehicles and be the next generation of regular means of transportation. Low emission is one feature that will have significant effect on environment issue and less regular energy consumption is another feature that will reduce the speed of the global depletion of the world’s oil. Furthermore EDVs have relatively higher efficiency because of lots of research on the topology exploration, fuel efficiency maximization strategies, power conversion technologies, and integration into the current power grid. EDVs have mechanical system and electrical system and both of them works concurrently. So the best way to test EDV is that design a detailed drivetrain test bench for performance evaluation EVs and HEVs. This emulation test bench can be a lab setup that researchers can do an EDV program testing and also can serve as an educational tool that will provide a real observation for engineering students to realize EVs and HEVs design and how it works. The test bench has two separate sections, one is for performance evaluation all-electric-vehicle and the other is for performance evaluation series hybrid electric vehicle. These two setups use same motors, servomotor and controllers. HEV drivetrain is consist of two 6 HP axial flux permanent magnet (AFPM) brushless machines and two servomotors (PMSM) made by Kollmorgen. EV drivetrain is consist of one 6 HP axial xii flux permanent magnet (AFPM) brushless machine and one permanent magnet servomotors made by Kollmorgen. The purpose of this work is to design and develop a detailed test bench for performance evaluation of both EVs and HEVs, especially for undergraduate students and graduate students understanding the structure and design of EDVs. Labview is used as the interface to monitor all the components of the whole system. Through the EV test bench, student can observe how the all-electric-vehicle works and compare with traditional vehicles. HEV test bench can give student a vision observation of series hybrid electric vehicle. From these two test benches, students can realize the different operation modes of EDVs and observe the direction of the power flow of EDVs. [1-2] Finally, student can program different drive cycles to the servomotor and then test the cycles by running the test bench.M.S. in Electrical Engineering, December 201