A Fuzzy Logic Control Scheme for Electric Automotive Water Pumps

Abstract

The use of electric vehicles (EV) is gradually gaining acceptance over the Internal Combustion (IC) vehicles owing to the need to do away with fossil fuels and their attendant global warming issues. Furthermore, the use of these vehicles calls for an additional mechanism for its cooling as compared to those obtainable on the conventional IC Engines. Electric Automotive Water Pumps (AWP) have been adopted in EHV to replace the belt-driven pumps systems in IC engines. However, the control of these AWP has remained a challenge as the existing control schemes result in fixed gain, thus making it difficult for dynamic vehicle conditions as it may result in overheating conditions. Thus, to address the issues associated with the fixed gain, this paper proposes the use of a fuzzy logic based controller (FLC) to control the AWP in EVs. The proposed FLC offers an intelligent and adaptive control strategy for the AWP. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed FLC outweighs that of the conventional PID when compared showing no overshoot and providing successful tracking. Thus, depicting that the FLC can be adopted for EVs.