Design and Experimental Evaluations on Energy-Efficient Control for 4WIMD-EVs Considering Tire Slip Energy

Energy efficiency is extremely important for electric vehicles to improve their driving range. As the motor output energy directly acts on the tire, the tire slip energy generated by tire excessive slip will reduce the effective utilization of motor output energy, resulting in the reduction of energy efficiency, especially in the case of low friction coefficient, or even vehicle instability in some changes, such as slalom change, etc. Therefore, this paper designs an integrated chassis control and verifies the energy utilization. First, based on model predictive control (MPC), an integrated chassis controller is proposed by explicitly incorporating both motor energy and tire slip energy in the main objective function. Second, the reference control actions of the torque distribution method optimized for the motor energy, which facilitates solution-search process of MPC. Then, a semi-empirical UniTire tire slip energy model is proposed for derivation of the tire dissipation energy. Acceleration and stability tests are conducted by four in-wheel independent motor-drive electric vehicles (4WIMD-EVs) on winter proving ground, respectively. The acceleration change results show that both tire dissipation energy and motor output energy are well suppressed to achieve energy-efficient, and the energy utilization ratio of tire dissipation energy to motor output energy is only 35% to achieve stable acceleration. The slalom change verifies vehicle stability, and the results show that the slip ratio of four wheels only reaches to 0.04, and the motor output energy of four wheels is effectively utilized to generate differential yaw moment.