The global shift towards electric vehicles (EVs) is approaching: at a local level, EVs are able to improve the urban air quality by reducing emissions of pollutants while mitigating the noise and at a global scale, EVs help reducing GHG emissions. In addition to these environmental aspects, the technical advances made on electric motors and components during the last years have fostered the economic competitiveness of EVs.
However, the deployment of EVs still needs to overcome several technological barriers that slow down the market uptake, including limited driving range and less smooth dynamics in more demanding braking/acceleration events compared to conventional ICE vehicles. These are influenced by the vehicle’s performance in terms of motion dynamics and braking strategy. Thus, regenerative braking is a key functionality in EVs with the capability to extend the travel range. Improving the regenerative brake towards a fully electric drive control is still a challenge. Its integration with active torque control vectored separately to each of the wheels enables enhanced motion dynamics that further increase the energy efficiency and reduce the weight. In addition, these improvements will enhance the driving experience, increasing the user comfort and safety, favouring the mainstream adoption of EVs for the consumer.
ACHILES focuses on developing a new E/E control system architecture that integrates the next generation of e-brake and e-drive functionalities and paving the way to finally integrate such functionality in a centralized domain energy control unit concept. The advances proposed will significantly reduce weight, system complexity and cost while increasing reliability, users comfort and safety/security aspects.
The goal of ACHILES is to design, model, manufacture and test a novel E/E architecture that will allow to:
• Reduce the total cost of ownership by 10%;
• Increase the driving range by at least 11%;
• Increase autonomy with respect the centralized computer driving unit and braking system; compared to a benchmark existing EV.
In particular, 4 new technological concepts are developed:
• A new wheel concept design will be equipped with full by-wire braking, including a new friction brake concept;
• A centralized computer platform to host the edrive functionalities and reduce the number of control units and networks while fulfilling safety & security requirements;
• An out of phase control that allows to intentionally operate the electric motor inefficiently to dissipate the excess of braking energy in case of fully charged batteries;
• A new torque vectoring algorithm to significantly improve the vehicle dynamics.
