Integrated vehicle control unit development with active safety functions for electric vehicles

Abstract

The importance of electronic control systems has increased with the increase in safety standards for the driver and passengers on both the commercial and defense side in the automotive. In this thesis, the developed integrated vehicle control unit for military electric land vehicles is only one of dozens of electronic control units used on the vehicle. It is called an integrated system because of the functions of the different control units it contains. To list these functions, it consists of vehicle mode determination, torque demand from the accelerator pedal, power management system, motor torque limiting, regenerative brake control, fault detection and safety function, traction control and vehicle stability control subsystems. Traction control and vehicle stability systems are among the most complex functions of the integrated vehicle control unit. These complex systems are functions of active safety systems. Active safety systems come up with the names of ABS, TCS and ESC today, and they take control of the vehicle partially or completely by detecting any uncontrolled vehicle movement or condition that may occur while driving through the sensors or systems on the vehicle. In this way, it aims to prevent accidents by managing the vehicle in a more stable and controlled manner. Active safety systems have become a necessity in commercial vehicle applications as per the standards, and their use in military vehicle applications has become increasingly widespread in recent years. The main purpose of the TCS system is to automatically provide traction control by activating in case of loss of traction in any of the wheels due to road conditions such as wet or icy ground. With the use of the TCS system, the road holding and steering control that will decrease due to the loss of traction are prevented. It detects the wheel slip rate by reading the vehicle speed and wheel speed, and accordingly, it optimizes the torque demand from the driver and requests torque from the motor to keep the slip rate at the level where it can provide the most road grip compared to the road surface. The ESC system is an active safety system developed to keep the vehicle on the road in the desired direction, to intervene with the motor torque and the brakes independently of each other. It optimizes how much torque to the vehicle and to which wheel it will brake, by means of the information it reads from various sensors on the vehicle. In sharp cornering turns, depending on the steering ratio and vehicle speed, it tries to keep the vehicle on the road in the desired direction by making independent braking interventions to the wheels in order to prevent the vehicle from skidding. In order to perform simulation tests of the functions of the integrated vehicle control unit, an electric military land vehicle dynamic model has been developed within the scope of the thesis study. The developed model consists of steering unit, electric motor, battery, powertrain, brake fluids, wheel and vehicle body subsystems. As functions for vehicle dynamics have been developed on the control side, the wheel and vehicle model have been designed in more detail in the vehicle model. For example, the TCS system developed for the vehicle control unit uses the wheel and vehicle speed to calculate the longitudinal wheel slip rate. The wheel model was needed to calculate the wheel speed in the simulation tests. The wheel model was developed with the Pacejka Magic Formula approach as it is suitable for characterizing longitudinal and lateral behavior.