Soutenance de thèse : Gabriele LEONCINI

Development of a methodology for thermal management sizing optimization of a medium duty electric vehicle

Doctorant :  Gabriele LEONCINI

Laboratoire INSA : CETHIL

Ecole doctorale : ED162 : Mécanique, Energétique, Génie Civil, Acoustique de Lyon

In the last decade, medium duty electric vehicles (MDEV) have been detected as a way to decrease greenhouse gases emission related to road transportation. The operation of the vehicle thermal management system (VMTS) is fundamental to ensure that electric vehicles components operate in their optimal temperature range to achieve high performances while preserving their lifetime. However, VTMS power consumption (pump, fan, electric heaters, HVAC) affects negatively vehicle autonomy. Hence, an optimal trade off must be found. Moreover, automotive state of the art tends to oversize VTMS in order to cover extreme use cases, leading to increased investment costs, whilst affecting negatively the vehicle payload. This thesis work has the objective to develop a methodology of optimization to size the thermal management system by using a typical operative mission realized by the electric truck throughout the year and by taking into account the characteristics of each component and their interactions through a dedicated model.
The model has been validated through experimental data whilst the mission operated by the electric truck has been recreated by using time series clusterization over existent data. These allowed to recreate a year of driving by using few representative days and thus significantly reduce the computational resources. The problem of size optimization has been firstly written by using a MILP approach in order to have a first glance over critical variables. Next, new design variables (i.e., the degradation of the battery due to temperature ranges) are then integrated to have a better understanding of how each component can affect the size of the system and two different solutions for the size optimization problem are proposed and compared to the current reference case of the electric vehicle deployed in Europe by Volvo group. Results shows an improvement of the system sized of 2.3 % for the degradation of the battery compared to the reference case.