Design and implementation of an Electric Differential for traction application

The use of an Electric Differential (ED) constitutes a technological advance in vehicle design along with the concept of more electric vehicles. EDs have the advantage of replacing loose and heavy mechanical differentials and transmissions with lighter and smaller electric motors directly coupled to the wheels via a single gear or an in-wheel motor. This paper deals then with an Electric Differential System (EDS) for an Electric Vehicle (EV) directly driven by dual induction motors in the rear wheels. A sensorless control technique is preferred to a position or speed encoder-based control one to reduce the overall cost and to improve the reliability. The EDS main feature is the robustness improvement against system uncertainties and road conditions. The EDS control performances are validated through experiments on a dSPACE-based test bench. The experimental results show that the proposed controller is able to track the speed reference and the curvature angle with good static and dynamic performances.