Vehicle Design

Multi-Moby is an ambitious project aiming at quickly finalising the results of a cluster of ongoing and past European projects, addressing the development of technologies for safe, efficient and affordable urban electric vehicles (EVs). This paper presents the developments that have been implemented in the first half of Multi-Moby, which deals with low-cost M1 and N1 EVs, to be manufactured via low-investment and lean processes and plants. The Multi-Moby EVs have excellent passive safety characteristics, enhanced by pre-emptive active safety controllers. The vehicles can be coupled with efficient 100 V or 48 V powertrains. Fast charging is enabled by the integrated design of hybrid supercapacitor-battery cells and wall box chargers. The project will also consider low-cost automated driving solutions, with focus on gimbal-based camera systems for environmental sensing and detection.

Traction inverters play a crucial role in the growing industry of electric vehicles. On the one hand, the traction inverter design is quite challenging and needs to pursue key design goals including high efficiency, high reliability, high power density, and low weight and cost. On the other hand, a modular and scalable design methodology to cover a wide range of vehicles is highly desirable. This article explores the optimal or near-optimal design configuration of the multilevel neutral-point-clamped legs of traction inverters for three use cases: an electric motorcycle, an electric passenger car, and an electric truck. The design is based on the use of an array of switching cells. The optimal configuration and operation of the switching cells are obtained through a weighted objective function in terms of efficiency, reliability, and simplicity. The design optimization results illustrate the modularity, scalability, and suitability of the used design approach, where a single module fits all applications, and the available degrees of freedom enable the adaptation of the design to the application and operating conditions, to maximize its efficiency and reliability.

This article addresses a common issue in the design of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) by introducing a comprehensive methodology for the modeling and simulation of BEVs, referred to as the “PerfECT Design Tool”. The primary objective of this study is to provide engineers and researchers with a robust and streamlined approach for the early stages of electric vehicle (EV) design, offering valuable insights into the performance, energy consumption, current flow, and thermal behavior of these advanced automotive systems.

This paper provides an extensive review on the latest works carried out to optimize the power flow in EV powertrains using multispeed discrete transmission, continuously variable transmission and multi-motor configurations. The relevant literatures were shortlisted using a keyword search related to EV powertrain in the ScienceDirect and Scopus databases. The review focused on the related literatures published from 2018 onwards. The publications were reviewed in terms of the methodologies applied to optimize the powertrain for efficiency and driving performance. Next, the significant findings from these literatures were discussed and compared. Finally, based on the review, several future key research areas in EV powertrain efficiency and performance are highlighted.

The Horizon Europe HighScape project will explore the feasibility of a family of highly efficient power electronics (PE) components and systems for Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs), including integrated traction inverters, onboard chargers (OBCs), DC-DC converters, and electric drives for auxiliaries and chassis actuators. 

In the work leading to this deliverable, the HighScape component providers and developers, focusing on the adoption of Wide Bandgap (WBG) based PE devices, have been generating the detailed simulation models of the respective components and systems (i.e., traction motor and traction inverter, OBCs, DC-DC converters, drives for Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), and high voltage levelling suspension systems, and thermal systems for PE components/the whole vehicle), with a coverage of their parametrisation involving a wide range of BEV applications targeted in the project. The models enable model-based component and system design at the electrical, electronic, thermal and control levels. The components and systems models have been assembled into a vehicle simulation toolchain, for the rapid assessment of the implications of component design at the vehicle level, including considerations of thermal aspects. Due to the associated computational effort, the component models have been converted into surrogate models, such as Functional Mock-up Units (FMU) before their inclusion in the BEV simulation model. The definition, benefits and limitations of such surrogate models are discussed in the document.