Dr Philip So
Research Fellow
PhD, BEng (Hons)
Academic and research departments
Centre for Automotive Engineering, School of Mechanical Engineering Sciences.About
Biography
Philip joined the University of Surrey as a Research Fellow in 2018. He is based at the university's Centre for Automotive Engineering, working with Prof Aldo Sorniotti. He was previously involved in STEVE and TELL, which were European Horizon 2020 projects with partners from across the continent. Philip is currently active in the Horizon 2020 Multi-Moby project and ZEBRA. His research focuses on energy management of electric vehicles and vehicle dynamics control.
Philip received his doctoral and bachelor's degrees, both in Mechanical Engineering, from the National University of Singapore in 2018 and 2012 respectively.
Publications
So Philip, Gruber Patrick, Tavernini Davide, Karci Ahu Ece Hartavi, Sorniotti Aldo, Motaln Tomaz (2020) On the Optimal Speed Profile for Electric Vehicles,IEEE Access8pp. 78504-78518 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
The main question in eco-driving is ? what speed or torque profile should the vehicle follow to minimize its energy consumption over a certain distance within a desired trip time? Various techniques to obtain globally optimal energy-efficient driving profiles have been proposed in the literature, involving optimization algorithms such as dynamic programming (DP) or sequential quadratic programming. However, these methods are difficult to implement on real vehicles due to their significant computational requirements and the need for precise a-priori knowledge of the scenario ahead. Although many predictions state that electric vehicles (EVs) represent the future of mobility, the literature lacks a realistic analysis of optimal driving profiles for EVs. This paper attempts to address the gap by providing optimal solutions obtained from DP for a variety of trip times, which are compared with simple intuitive speed profiles. For a case study EV, the results show that the DP solutions involve forms of Pulse-and-Glide (PnG) at high frequency. Hence, detailed investigations are performed to: i) prove the optimality conditions of PnG for EVs; ii) show its practical use, based on realistic electric powertrain efficiency maps; iii) propose rules for lower frequency PnG operation; and iv) use PnG to track generic speed profiles.