The governments worldwide have initiated programmes for faster adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. One of the major challenges in meeting the targets of EVs' programmes is to develop cost effective and different types of EV drivetrains in a short span of time. One possible way to reduce the development time is to adapt systems and techniques, existing in industry applications, for EV application. Since, EV motor has to operate over a wide speed and torque range, it is necessary to ensure that the controller should have a good dynamic response over the entire operating range. An induction motor-based drivetrain with direct torque control (DTC) is chosen in this work. The DTC suffers from high torque ripple, and it will have an impact on rideability and comfort. To improve the performance of the DTC algorithm, a multi-band error status selection (ESS) method for the torque hysteresis controller is proposed and compared the existing ESS method. The proposed modification in the DTC architecture is tested on an experimental test bed for standard drive cycles used for validation of vehicles. The experimental results show that drive performance is enhanced using the proposed methodology.

In recent times, there has been a surge in R&D activities in the area of electric vehicles (EVs). This surge is fuelled by various governmental policies that aim at increasing the penetration of EVs on roads. This work aims at developing and analyzing drivetrain configurations for city commute vehicles. Since city commute involves frequent start stops, it is necessary to focus on the dynamic performance as well as the system efficiency. Here two drivetrain configurations are considered. The first has a battery pack, an inverter, and an induction motor while the second configuration has an additional dc-dc converter. A detailed control strategy for each drivetrain is presented. Moreover, an experimental setup is developed that mimics the behavior of a scaled-down vehicle. Both the configurations are subjected to extensive experimentation using the developed setup and it is found that despite the use of an additional dc-dc converter, the second configuration has better overall system efficiency in city driving conditions. To explain the results, detailed efficiency maps of the individual subsystem and the overall system are also presented. Furthermore, the drive cycle response and energy consumption analysis, for both the drivetrains for NYCC and city part-NEDC are presented.