Evaluation of energy efficiency of electric vehicle with different actuator architectures

In this paper, a distribution vehicle, which can be equipped with many actuators as wheel electric motors and steering wheels and which is supported to follow a given trajectory, is chosen as an application for determining the optimal vehicle configuration and expected energy gains. The different vehicle configurations are formed by the amount and the position of these actuators, defining 16 different architectures. From the total efforts at the gravity center of the vehicle, the control allocation of the nonlinear system under nonlinear constraints is used to determine the torque of the actuated wheels and the angle of steered wheels. The same objective function is used for actuation allocation while different constraints assumed for describing each vehicle architecture. Energy losses in the tire-road contact zone, necessary power for steering system, kinetic energy of the vehicle during the maneuver and the consumption energy are estimated for comparison purposes in the case of lane changing. Along with that, the performance of the vehicle´s steering system was also assessed in the case of a different torque of the electric motors.