An Investigation of Electric Motor Drive Characteristics for EV and HEV Propulsion Systems

The recent growing interest in electric vehicle (EV) and hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) demands for an efficient, reliable and economical motor drive for electric propulsion. However, searching for a suitable traction motor becomes quite involved when vehicle dynamics and system architecture are considered. This paper makes an in-depth investigation on two highly important traction motor characteristics, extended speed range-ability and energy efficiency, from vehicular system perspective. The influences of these two motor drive features on a pure EV, a post-transmission, and two pre-transmission parallel HEV with 20% and 50% hybridization are studied in this paper. Two EV-HEV software packages V-ELPH developed by Texas A&M University and ADVISOR from NREL are used for simulation purposes. Based on the results in this paper, a systematic method is developed regarding the selection of traction drives for EV and HEV propulsion systems.

An Investigation of Electric Motor Drive Characteristics for EV and HEV Propulsion Systems Academic Article