RDE-thermal management – From road to rig

Authors

Christian Beidl, Johannes Hipp, Institute for Internal Combustion Engines and Powertrain Systems,
Technical University of Darmstadt;
Günter Hohenberg, Stefan Geneder, IVD Prof. Hohenberg GmbH

Year

2019

Summary

Reflecting the enormous importance of the thermal management the Institute VKM (TU Darmstadt) and IVD Prof. Hohenberg GmbH collaborate in joint projects on this subject since many years. Figure 1 shows on the left side a VW Jetta II front section on a TUD engine testbed in 1990. The challenges of the vehicle thermal management at that time were rather low. The main task was to prevent overheating of the components in full load situations. In the mid-2000s also a fast warm up came in to the focus to reduce fuel consumptions in the NEDC cf. 1. Nevertheless, the vehicles featured still only a pure mechanic thermostat.
Due to electrified powertrains with complex thermal circuits and higher demands on power efficiency and emission reduction for combustions engine driven powertrains the importance of thermal management has raised. That’s why more and more current vehicles have a mechatronic Thermal Management Module to control the heat amounts optimal as required. A vehicle that possesses such a new mechatronic Thermal Management Module is the actual VW Golf VII. Therefore, one vehicle is used at IVD as “rolling thermo lab”. The electrification of the powertrain raised the attention as beyond the new requirements of the electrical components and the new operation modes thermal energy gets a valuable asset. The objective of this papers is
therefore to show the impacts of electrified powertrains and the mechatronics modules on the thermal management and to display approaches for the realization of the thermal boundaries for RDE tests at the testbed.
In general the thermal management is a component of a complete toolbox for the methodical
representation of realworld tests of different targets at the Engine-in-the-Loop (EiL) testbed. The challenges within RDE development and suitable use of adequate methodological approaches are sometimes complex. This is mainly because of the incidence of variables and interactions, which has to be considered depending on the scope of the investigation. Depending on the application, it has to be defined which simplification in which process step is permissible.
For this reason, the methodological approaches at the VKM address RDE relevant influences individually, taking the interactions into account. If a methodological approach fulfills its goal or if the comparison to other RDE influences and their methodological approaches is of interest, the methodological modules are combined. In that sense, the process is characterized by modularity and cooperation.

Members Login