Drive system control and energy management of a solar powered electric vehicle

Abstract

The paper describes an advanced drive system control for a solar powered vehicle. The drive system control extracts the maximum electrical power from a distributed solar array that covers the surface of the vehicle, with distributed RISC based peak power tracker controllers for each individual solar panel. The vehicle propulsion has two steering wheels and one propulsion wheel based on a brushless dc machine drive control. The system is capable to sequence from start-up to shutdown, is torque or speed controlled, has a on-board computer for system monitoring and communication for energy management in the race strategy which optimizes the energy management. The drive system has been fully implemented in a two seat carbon fiber prototype with satisfactory performance and can be easily translated to other types of electrical vehicles.same. Maximum vehicle dimensions were specified at 19.7 ft long, 6.6 ft wide, and 5.3 ft high. The solar cell arrangement was fit into a box having the dimensions of a two-seated car. The vehicle required the capability to pass an articulated truck traveling in the opposite direction at 50 mph, on a narrow two-lane highway, without losing control. To race in the WSC, a car was to be designed to optimize (1) aerodynamic performance, since the highway used as the course was straight with only small elevations, (2) the solar energy utilization, which must be the only source of electrical energy, and (3) the vehicle stability, to cross the 3,000 km from Darwin to Adelaide, with articulated trucks on both sides. The car was named Poli-Solar, shown in Fig. 1 with the characteristics given in Table 1.