Innovative control system for high efficiency electric urban vehicle

Designers faces many problems while designing and constructing prototype of special purpose car and this is what happens in case of high-efficient electric city car named Bytel, which was especially built for Shell eco-marathon competition. Bytel takes part in Urban Electric category and its drive consists of two brushless DC motor (BLDC) mounted directly in wheels. Smart Power team which carries the task comes from the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice. One of the assignments which required individual approach was the innovative control system of the car and it is the main topic of this article. The core task of the control system is receiving steering signals from the driver, signal processing and sending them to drivers. It is equipped with many additional functions like e.g. visualization, measurement and storage system as well as safety systems. All of these facilities serve the purpose of improving driver’s safety and enable delivery of a lot of data to analyze which has a huge influence on power consumption. The paper shows the whole process of forming the systems from design assumptions, construction to tests in labs.