Road to a Real Mechanical Engineer
General Motors Electrifled Drivetrain System Modeling
Sep. 2019 - May 2020
Enhancing the driving experience of electric vehicles through drivetrain feedback control
About
On average, American people spend an hour daily in their cars. The undamped vehicle vibrations can have undesirable physical effects on humans. Additionally, Vibrations can cause accelerated fatigue (and in some worst-case scenarios, immediate failure!) to the mechanical components. The vibrations in the longitudinal direction of motion are prone to resonances exhibited by the components of the driveline. These vibrations can be controlled by modifying the motor torque using feedback control. This project includes exploring how some of the established control strategies could be employed to provide a robust system damping in an automotive application using a representative simulation environment.
Drivetrain Modeling
Modeled drivetrain for Chevy Bolt and linearized the system of equations
Derived state-space representation for the system
Constructed drivetrain model using Matlab & Simulink
System Identification and Correlation
Traveled to GM Michigan proving ground to gather real vehicle data
Applied system identification technique to generate bode plots from real data
Correlated our model with data by modifying vehicle parameters
Feedback Control to Damp out Vibration
Applied classical control - PID
Applied advanced control - Optimal control, Model Predictive Control (MPC)
Work in progress
