Thermal management system modeling for full vehicle simulation

With the advent of unconventional vehicles, the new thermal management systems have come into picture. Electric vehicles have completely changed the core tasks required for TMS. Along with controlling the temperature in the traction battery and cooling the power electronics, electric motor and range extender, integrating these different cooling systems and the efficient climate control in the vehicle interior is now the main focus, with the biggest constraint of saving the energy along with. Because traction batteries in electric vehicles still have a limited capacity in comparison to conventional cars, so to increase the range of the electric vehicles and efficient working of the high voltage components, there is the need for efficient cooling systems. It is of central importance to ensure that all operating functions are reliable, while also maintaining comfort and the energy efficiency of all technical systems. This limited range can be extended by using more efficient auxiliary loads such as heating and climate control.

The thermal influence on a battery must therefore be monitored and controlled by appropriate thermal control systems, i.e. by means of heating or cooling as necessary.

so to model the coolant loop and thermal management system for hv components, the individual component of the coolant loops like radiator, chiller, pump, valves, PTC heater, etc. were modeled and then integrated with the full vehicle architecture. New strategies to control the operation of the components and of the coolant loop were developed as per requirements. To prevent any negative impact of these models on computation speed, the appropriate accuracy was maintained along with the complexity. Generic Adaptive thermal management strategies provides quite promising results for different vehicle configurations. To meet more competitive requirements, more advanced strategies needs to be studies.

Skills & Software used - 1-D thermal modeling, component modeling, ADVISOR, FastSim, Matlab\Simulink, Simscape.