A fault tolerant e-motor drive system for auxiliary services in hybrid electric light commercial vehicle

Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicles are going to become mature technologies in automotive industry. Looking at today´s market, several electric/hybrid cars are proposed for people moving whereas the same is not true for light freight transportation, basically for matters of costs. Nevertheless, the demand for low-consumption low-emission light commercial vehicles is increasing in the last years due to the impressive growth of the e-commerce along with the related logistics management, and the extension of hybrid power-train to light commercial vehicles is under evaluation as it can offer many advantages, one for all the possibility to access limited traffic zones in urban areas. This paper focuses on the development of an e-motor drive system to power the auxiliary services in the zero emission mode of a hybrid electric light commercial vehicle. The study has been developed in the frame of the project “LowEmission Innovative Vehicles for Urban Transport of Goods & People”, funded by the Italian Ministry of Environment in 2012-2014.