Active thermal management method of dual-motor drive system for improving the travel performance of electric tracked vehicles

Based on the dynamic limit of maximum driving current, the active thermal management (ATM) method can make motor systems safely reach the thermal limit state, to maximize the load capacity of the motor and the travel performance of the electric vehicle. However, experiments in this paper reveal that the traditional ATM method is not suitable for the dual-motor system of an electric track vehicle (ETV), since directly limiting the driving current will destroy the cooperative relationship between the speed of the two motors and lead to the driving path deviation of the ETV. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel ATM method that controls the operating temperature of the dual-motor system by dynamically limiting the linear velocity and angular velocity of the ETV. A region-based limiter is constructed to accurately limit the linear velocity and angular velocity under the constraint of speed cooperativity between the motors. The experimental results show that the proposed method can maximize the travel performance of the ETV without affecting the thermal safety of the dual-motor system and the travel path of the vehicle.