Component Sizing of Single-Motor Heavy-Duty Powertrains

The electrification of the transportation sector rep-resents a huge opportunity to reduce the amount of carbon emissions globally and would contribute to the mitigation of the climate change. Besides the ecological benefits, for manufacturers and operator's, economic aspects such as the total cost of ownership play an important role for the utilization of these vehicles, which seems to be the real burden of the electrification. Designing efficient electric powertrains in the early stages of the vehicle development process is challenging due to the large number of design choices at the system and component level. Therefore, actual literature focuses on power sizing of the electric motors by using high-level component models, while neglecting other important design parameters, such as corner and maximum speed. To address this issue, this paper analyzes the component sizing of the powertrain for heavy-duty single engine vehicles including the aforementioned parameters. The main questions answered by this paper are: “How to choose the corner speed of the traction drive?”; “How to choose the ratio of the corner speed to the maximum speed?”; and “What are the interdependencies on the transmission?”. Therefore, a longitudinal simulation model of a heavy-duty electric vehicle is established. Second, different variants of electric machines were calculated from a base machine by changing only the winding pattern, while keeping the outer dimensions fixed. In addition, the transmission is designed according to defined performance requirements. Finally, a simulation study is performed to compare the powertrain variants over different european route profiles.