Improvements on availability and comfort of electric drives for electric power steering application

The present article is dealing with the requirements and measures for an increase in availability of electric drives in general and electric assisted power steering application (EPS) in detail. Beginning with a brief explanation on the current state-of-the-art a system attempt is introduced to collect and differentiate appropriate technical and methodical solutions. Composition of different approaches towards suitable electric drive architectures requires detailed analyses on new and additional requirements. Therefore aspects like an appropriate level of assist in a degraded operation mode as well as quality and duration of assist after fault-occurrence are focused in an extensive manner. Consequences on EPS-application are finally discussed in a brief summary of an introduced drive-architecture.