Hutchinson ThermalLab™: How to Shift Vehicle Thermal Management Testing from Road to Rig

Authors

Dipl.-Ing. H. De Campos Garcia, Dipl.-Ing. A. Bacar, F. Chopard PhD, HUTCHINSON S.A. Center of Research & Innovation, Chalette-sur-Loing; Dipl.-Ing. G. Zotter, Dipl.-Ing. A. Baumgartner, J. Humenberger BSc, Dipl.-Ing. (FH) P. Drage, AVL List GmbH, Graz:

Year

2021

Print Info

Production/Publication ÖVK

Summary

An efficient Vehicle Thermal Management System (VTMS) is a prerequisite for reaching high overall vehicle energy efficiency, regardless of which propulsion system is employed by the vehicle. This is particularly important in the development of plug in hybrid electrical vehicles (PHEVs) and battery electrical vehicles (BEVs) that incorporate batteries. The lifetime of the battery and its fast charging capability are strongly dependent on the battery cell temperature and hence the VTMS is key. Furthermore, there is often not enough waste heat from the e-drive available to heat up the cabin of a BEV at cold ambient conditions. Therefore, electrical energy from the battery is used to ensure passengers’ thermal comfort, which results in a significant reduction of the driving range in cold climates. A smart VTMS using a heat pump application or super-insulating solutions can overcome this situation. For these reasons, thermal management is an essential aspect of the entire vehicle development process. However, such an efficient system is also quite complex and therefore requires a large amount of testing and calibration time in its integration. The ThermalLab™ offers the possibility to frontload thermal management testing from the road to the rig using a Hardware-in-the-Loop approach. This novel solution is a model-based-testing equipment, where the entire VTMS (all coolant circuits and the refrigerant cycle including dummy cells in real battery pack environment) can be tested under dynamic conditions while the VTMS is embedded in an emulated vehicle and environment. Unlike to expensive vehicle tests in climatic wind tunnels or on the road, using the ThermalLab™ as development environment, the performance of the entire VTMS setting - with real piping and fluid management components - can be tested and optimized in this laboratory under real driving cycles (WLTP, RDE, etc.) and ambient conditions. Furthermore, ensuring proper functionality of all the subsystems and even pre-calibration of all actuators of the system on the rig in an early stage of the development process, without any need of a vehicle prototype or a dependency on the weather provides a significant added value. Within this paper, this unique testing approach is explained as well as the measured results regarding influence on driving range, cell temperature, passenger comfort etc. using multisource heat pump systems combined with heat storage accumulators. Concluding, this paper shows the importance of VTMS for PHEV and BEV development, innovative measures to solve the target conflict of optimized passenger comfort, battery lifetime versus the driving range and a novel model-based-testing laboratory for thermal management systems to speed up the development process.

Number of pages

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