Design of Torque Vectoring system for Formula SAE electric vehicle

With the evolution of technologies new active safety systems have been developed to guarantee safety and stability when driving vehicles. Torque Vectoring (TV) is an active control system, that substitutes the need of a mechanical differential, and it’s widely used in racing and commercial electric vehicles. This thesis has the objective to design a Torque Vectoring controller for a Formula SAE racing car that is equipped with 4 in-wheel electric motors. This control system, also known as dynamic control of traction, can improve the cornering performance of the vehicle by properly allocate the torque among the four independent electric motors. Yaw rate is the main parameter used to define the stability behaviour of the vehicle and a physical model of the car is built up to generate a reference value of this state variable. To assess and design the controller first it’s presented the generic vehicle model, then followed by the used 2 DOF Bicycle model of the car. The TV control system contains a wheel slip limiter which considers powertrain saturations and wheel slip constraints. The designed torque vectoring control system, built in Matlab Simulink, is implemented to the professional automotive control software CarSim and its performance is analysed in various manoeuvres. At the end, the results of all tests are evaluated and the effectiveness of the controller is assessed.