Multi-Objective Optimization and Performance Comparison of Different Driving Configurations of In-Wheel Motors

Abstract

Energy consumption and environmental pollution have stimulated the development of electric vehicles (EVs), among which the in-wheel motors (IWMs) are convinced to be the ultimate driving technology for the simplification of the powertrain. In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages of different driving configurations of conventional IWMs are discussed. Subsequently, four dual-motor IWMs including dual-motor torque-coupling driving configuration (DMTDC), dual-motor speed-coupling driving configuration (DMSDC), dual-motor multi-modes driving configuration (DMMDC) and dual-motor power-split driving configuration (DMPDC) are proposed. Thereafter, a two-layer hierarchical multi-objective optimization regarding the parameters of different configurations is proposed. The upper layer contains four multi-objective optimization algorithms while the lower layer runs dynamic programming (DP) to obtain the optimal energy consumption and acceleration time. The results show that the performances of the dual-motor IWM driving configurations have improved significantly compared to single-motor IWM driving configurations.

Keywords

• In-wheel motor
• economic performance
• multi-objective optimization
• driving configurations
• dynamic programming