Drive system control and energy management of a solar powered electric vehicle

The paper describes an advanced drive system control scheme for a solar powered vehicle. The drive system control scheme extracts the maximum electrical power from a distributed solar array that covers the surface of the vehicle, with distributed RISC-based peak power tracker controllers for each individual solar panel. The vehicle propulsion has two steering wheels and one propulsion wheel based on brushless DC machine drive control. The system is capable to sequence from start-up to shutdown, is torque or speed controlled, has a on-board computer for system monitoring and communication for energy management in the race strategy which optimizes the energy management. The drive system has been fully implemented in a two seat carbon fiber prototype with satisfactory performance and can be easily translated to other types of electrical vehicles.