Design and integration of power wheels with rim motors for a powered wheelchair

This paper presents the design and integration of dual power wheels for a novel powered wheelchair driven by rim motors. Each power wheel is composed of a power train of a rim motor, drive, hybrid electromagnetic brake, and battery bank. The installation of dual power wheels turns a manual foldable wheelchair into a powered wheelchair. The multifunctional optimization design of rim motor is introduced before the power wheel structure is described. A driving strategy is then proposed for the wheelchair with a stable soft-starting control, dual-wheel differential speed control, three-phase short-circuit brake control, and magnetic particle brake control. The experimental results show that the novel powered wheelchair has better power economy than most commercial products in terms of driving range.