Challenge

Some years ago road vehicles were solely equipped with internal combustion engines (ICEs) powertrain. This changed in recent years with a variety of prototype implementations and actual products with different concepts. ICE vehicles are obviously still the best choice for long distance and heavy traffic, but especially electric and hybrid-electric vehicles and alternative fuels become increasingly important for the majority of daily other mobility needs. Extending this trend means that in the near future there will be more purposely built vehicles. Model diversification will also start to happen under the hood and vehicles will be developed for a special purpose, application scenario and environment. Because of the large power consumption for cooling and/ or heating especially in extreme environments these loads are not allowed to be ignored in a thorough analysis.

Goal

Finding the best propulsion technology and powertrain structure with taking into account the auxiliary consumption for a special transportation purpose and environment. The best technology will be determined by a weighted catalogue of criterions, which will consider among others efficiency, environment impact, availability and quality of local energy resources and rough package considerations.

Realisation

For the assessment and selection of different powertrain technologies a simulation environment is developed which is capable of systematically checking different drivetrain choices and configurations in reasonable time. The target is to conduct a concurrent optimization of powertrain structure, component sizing and non-causal control strategy. This tool is aimed for the early phase of development and will provide optimised powertrain choices with individual rating to the vehicle concept team.