Brushless DC motor drive for steer-by-wire and electric power steering applications

Due to the growing demand of cars, trucks, and sport utility vehicles (SUVs) in today´s society, there becomes the need to create automobiles that are optimized in different aspects. In current cars, many mechanical systems are robbing the conventional internal combustion engine from valuable horsepower. For instance, the steering systems of the most later model vehicles could be observed to be one of these resource-robbing systems because of their inefficient use of either the rack and pinion system or the re-circulating ball system. In either case, they are both mechanical systems that incorporate the use of hydraulics (power steering), which prove to be very inefficient systems. The implementation of the electric power steering and steer-by-wire systems brings hope in creating steering systems for most vehicles, which will still be equipped with power steering. This is a much safer and more efficient choice for the future production of cars. This paper gives a state-of-the-art review of automotive steering systems, which present numerous application opportunities for advanced electric motor drives, specially brush-less DC (BLDC) motor drives.