IoT-based traction motor drive condition monitoring in electric vehicles: Part 1

This paper presents an implementation of a Wireless Internet of Things (IoT) system applied to the traction motor drive condition monitoring in electric vehicles (EVs). The design and testing of the prototype using an ESP8266 microcontroller module to acquire motor's vibration, current, and temperature information for the motor condition monitoring application is presented. This IoT system has been designed and developed from the ground up using commercially off-the-shelf components and open-source software platform for fast, reliable data acquisitions, low power consumption, and data gathered by the IoT system get reported to the cloud server in real time. The experimental results reveal that the IoT system is capable of capturing and reporting vital motor's parameters to cloud server and an automatic notification is sent to operators when motor's abnormality is detected in real time. Thanks to IoT technology, the preventive maintenance of traction motor can be effectively and remotely planned with rich data collection and analysis. With advanced power consumption reduction techniques, a sensor node consumes extremely low amount of battery power at which ideal for mobile applications.