Grant: Discovery Development Grant

Driven by the local and global warming problem, and the soaring prices of gas and diesel; there is relentless need for green and efficient cars, metros as well as rail locomotives. The research program will introduce innovative green and efficient propulsion drive packages and will serve the automotive and the rail's metro and locomotive sectors. This program will also integrate the wireless power transfer technology in powering rail and automotive cars. In the rail industry, this will be revolutionary as it will eliminate the need of the wayside power system substations and rails. This means a disruptive cost savings in the operation of transit systems. New software packages will be developed to guarantee successful design of drive packages based on vehicle weight and route load cycles. The team will work on motors, inverters, batteries, and interface algorithms with a multidisciplinary vision. This will allow the training of motor designers, inverter developers, and electromechanical integrators with software programming capabilities. In the research program, novel drive packages will be developed, where during motoring, the power flows to the inverter/motor with the braking energy fed back to the battery through the bidirectional inverter until zero speed, resulting in a longer friction brake life span. The energy storage media can be a battery, super capacitors (SC), a flywheel or a combination of them. The selection of the solution relies on the driving pattern, route and weight. The objectives of the program are to (1) design an example of a power train for a hybrid fuel cell (FC)/battery vehicle that improves fuel efficiency and reduces the main pollutants emitted to the environment; (2) build software packages that represent the driving pattern or rail alignment in any city, such as Toronto and Vancouver, and use it in designing and validating vehicle and route models; and (3) build test bench that scales down and transform any internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle to hybrid FC/battery/SC vehicle. This program will have a major impact on Canada, in terms of (1) the establishment of research expertise and infrastructure in the local area; (2) the impact on the UOIT community through creating jobs and the use of the developed technologies as non-niche products; (3) and pollution reduction. This research program, based on the applicant's strong high qualified personnel training history, will train 3 Ph.D, 8 M.Sc, and 4 undergraduate students to design a motor, build an inverter, and program interface algorithms for integrating the components together; all with wide eyes on performance improvement. This research program will not only focus on better options for the power train, which has attracted huge research attention, but also intelligent techniques for power management, better packaging, and control algorithms, in which the applicant possesses extensive industrial/academic experience.