Integrated braking control for electric vehicles with in-wheel propulsion and fully decoupled brake-by-wire system

This paper introduces a case study on the potential of new mechatronic chassis systems for battery electric vehicles, in this case a brake-by-wire (BBW) system and in-wheel propulsion on the rear axle combined with an integrated chassis control providing common safety features like anti-lock braking system (ABS), and enhanced functionalities, like torque blending. The presented controller was intended to also show the potential of continuous control strategies with regard to active safety, vehicle stability and driving comfort. Therefore, an integral sliding mode (ISM) and proportional integral (PI) control were used for wheel slip control (WSC) and benchmarked against each other and against classical used rule-based approach. The controller was realized in MatLab/Simulink and tested under real-time conditions in IPG CarMaker simulation environment for experimentally validated models of the target vehicle and its systems. The controller also contains robust observers for estimation of non-measurable vehicle states and parameters e.g., vehicle mass or road grade, which can have a significant influence on control performance and vehicle safety

Controlling disorder and superconductivity in titanium oxynitride nanoribbons with anion exchange

In recent years, conversion chemical reactions, which are driven by ion diffusion, emerged as an important concept for formation of nanoparticles. Here we demonstrate that the slow anion diffusion in anion exchange reactions can be efficiently used to tune the disorder strength and the related electronic properties of nanoparticles. This paradigm is applied to high-temperature formation of titanium oxynitride nanoribbons, Ti(O,N), transformed from hydrogen titanate nanoribbons in an ammonia atmosphere. The nitrogen content, which determines the chemical disorder through random O/N occupancy and ion vacancies in the Ti(O,N) composition, increases with the reaction time. The presence of disorder has paramount effects on resistivity of Ti(O,N) nanoribbons. Atypically for metals, the resistivity increases with decreasing temperature due to the weak localization effects. From this state, superconductivity develops below considerably or completely suppressed critical temperatures, depending on the disorder strength. Our results thus establish the remarkable versatility of anion exchange for tuning of the electronic properties of Ti(O,N) nanoribbons and suggest that similar strategies may be applied to a vast number of nanostructures