Hierarchical Model Predictive Control for Electro-Thermal Coordination of Vehicle Energy Systems

Modern vehicles are governed by nonlinear dynamics spanning multiple timescales and physical domains. Due to electrification and increasing on-board power demands, managing both the electrical and thermal energy of these systems has become a significant challenge, limiting capability, safety, and efficiency. This talk will present a hierarchical control framework for vehicle energy management that meets this challenge by coordinating control actions throughout complex systems. Results to be presented include a hardware-in-the-loop implementation of electro-thermal hierarchical control and a decentralized passivity-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach that leverages the system structure to guarantee closed-loop stability under switching. Biography: Dr. Herschel C. Pangborn is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on the dynamic modeling, control, and design of electro-thermal energy systems in vehicles and buildings, with particular emphasis on hierarchical control and switched systems. Prior to earning his doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2019, Dr. Pangborn received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Penn State in 2013 and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Illinois in 2015. During the second half of 2019, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Illinois. Dr. Pangborn is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the University of Illinois MechSE Graduate Teaching Fellowship, and the ASME Energy Systems Technical Committee Best Paper Award. He has also been included on the University of Illinois List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.