Design and Evaluation of a Coupled Motor Drive Powertrain for an Electric Bus

This paper presents a theoretical sizing framework for torque coupled and speed coupled motor drive configurations for an electric bus using given performance requirements. Either the motors are sized or the coupling mechanism is sized, given specifications of the other. The performance of the coupled configurations was evaluated and compared with a single motor drive configuration, using both theoretical calculations and AVL CRUISETM, for a 10 ton bus. Performance obtained from simulation and theoretical calculations matched closely, which corroborates the sizing framework. The coupled configurations were observed to satisfy all performance requirements, unlike the single motor drive configuration.