Integrated Pressure Estimation and Control for Electro-hydraulic Brake Systems of Electric Vehicles Considering Actuator Characteristics and Vehicle Longitudinal Dynamics

In the automotive field, electro-hydraulic brake systems (EHB) has been developed to take place of the vacuum booster, having the advantage of faster pressure built-up and continuously pressure regulation. Pressure control, one of the most crucial issues to be solved for EHB, is influenced by the system nonlinearities (e.g., pressure-position, friction). Recently, there are a series of studies that focus on this issue. However, the pressure control based on pressure estimation is rarely investigated in the previous literatures. In order to achieve cost-effective and highly integrated, the pressure is regulated without any add-in sensors, making it very difficult to achieve a satisfactory performance. A pressure control system based on pressure joint estimation is developed in this article according to a requirement-oriented model. The pressure joint estimation is designed considering actuator characteristics and vehicle dynamics. The wheel speed feedback is used for modification via a proportional-integral observer. A pressure control combining feedforward, torque-adaptive friction compensation with feedback controller is employed to improve the pressure-tracking performance. The constraint of feedback gain of controller is derived based on the small-gain theorem to remain the input–output stability of the overall control system. Superior to the estimation method based on actuator characteristics, the joint estimation method improves the accuracy by more than 10%. The pressure-tracking performance and robustness of system are validated by vehicle experiments under the typical common braking situations.