Modeling of Full Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Full Electrical Vehicles (FEVs) and Hybrid Electrical Vehicles (HEVs) are vehicles with many electric components compared to conventional ones. In fact the power train consists of electrical machines, power electronics and electric energy storage system (battery, super capacitors) connected to mechanical components (transmissions, gear boxes and wheels) and, for HEV, to an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). The approach for a new vehicle design has to be multidisciplinary in order to take into account the dynamic interaction among all the components of the vehicle and the power train itself. The vehicle designers in order to find the correct sizing of components, the best energy control strategy and to minimize the vehicle energy consumption need modeling and simulation since prototyping and testing are expensive and complex operations. Developing a simulation model with a sufficient level of accuracy for all the different components based on different physic domains (electric, mechanical, thermal, power electronic, electrochemical and control) is a challenge. Different commercial simulation tools have been proposed in literature and they are used by the automotive designer [1]. They have different level of detail and are based on different mathematical approaches. In paragraph 2 a general overview on different modeling approaches will be presented. In the following paragraphs the author approach, focused on the modeling of each component constituting a FEV or HEV will be detailed. The authors approach is general and is not based on vehicle oriented simulation tools. It represents a good compromise among model simplicity, flexibility, computational load and components detail representation. The chapter is organized as follows: