Electric Traction Drive Systems

Abstract: Electric traction drive systems (ETDS) have experienced substantial changes over the past two decades. Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) with a range of ~300 miles are available today with comparable or better performance than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. However, BEVs are still expensive for competing with ICE vehicles. The U.S. Department of Energy and the United States Council for Automotive Research LLC (USCAR) have established a partnership focusing on pre-competitive research and development (R&D) to enable increased vehicle electrification. The partnership has established progressively higher technical targets for battery, ETDS, and other power conversion systems needed in EVs. This tutorial starts with an overview on the electric traction drive system targets as well as their breakdown for the inverter and motor in terms of cost, power density, specific power, efficiency, and reliability. We will then present our recent work on inverters, focusing on inverter topology and performance improvements by using wide-band-gap devices, and reduced-rare earth electric motors.

Gui-Jia Su has more than 30 years of experience in power electronics and motor control, holds 15 patents, and is a Battelle distinguished inventor. He has the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, all in electrical engineering. He is a distinguished member of the R&D staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he has led many R&D projects in automotive power electronics and motor drives, including integrated EV battery charging systems, dc-dc converters, current source inverter based IPM drives, integrated traction and compressor motor drive systems, segmented motor drive systems, wide-band-gap power converters, and novel multilevel inverters. Dr. Su is a recipient of the IEEE IAS Industrial Drive Committee third prize paper award, 1993, the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society IECON’01 best presentation award, 2001, the IEEE IAS Industrial Power Converter Committee first prize paper award, 2007, and the IEEE VPPC best paper award, 2009 and 2011.

Jason Pries received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, Milwaukee, WI, in 2005, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering-Systems from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, in 2012 and 2015, respectively. He joined the Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, as a Research and Development Associate in 2015. His research interests revolve around magnetics, including the design and optimization of electric machines and wireless charging pads, high-fidelity modeling of magnetic materials and systems, and high-performance computing for eddy current problems. Dr. Pries is the recipient of a Department of Energy Vehicle Technology Office Distinguished Achievement Award and UT-Battelle Research Accomplishment for his work on a non-rare earth electric motor. He is currently a Science Policy Fellow with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.