Dual Motor Differential
Engineering
Engineering Senior Design Project - EE123 A/B
The aim of the Dual Motor Differential Senior Design team is to actively participate in the automotive industry’s transition towards developing more sustainable vehicles. As electric vehicles are becoming commonplace it is becoming necessary to replace traditional mechanical components with sophisticated electronic counterparts that increase the efficiency and safety of new designs. The Dual Motor Differential group serves this need by eliminating the mechanical differential from a vehicles drive train and replacing it with a controller designed to manipulate individual motors at each driven wheel.
The proposed controller will be capable of adjusting the power delivered to each wheel automatically according to the changing load conditions that a vehicle may endure. The focus of the project consists primarily of developing a high performance feedback system using load simulations and modeling through industry standard simulation tools. The system will consist of a human-driven simulation that will translate an animated vehicles conditions to a series of motor control schemes that will govern a set of motors in the laboratory. The primary focus of the research lies in the control scheme that will elaborately model the individual motor responses of a dual motor vehicle in real-time.
Dual Motor vehicles have been examined by automotive manufacturers for many years, but not until recently has it been possible to develop embedded systems sophisticated enough to compute the control schemes in real time. The Dual Motor Differential project assists the development of this technology by creating a research tool capable of simulating the possibilities a dual motor vehicle would need to react to. The final design of the Dual Motor Differential project will yield valuable data necessary to creating safe and efficient electric vehicles in the near future.
