Modeling and Simulation Analysis of an Electric Vehicle in Cold Ambient Conditions: Energy Consumption and Impact of Battery Heating on Driving Range

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Thanks to greatly increased energy density of battery, the average driving range of an electric vehicle has been advanced quite a lot. However, drastic reduction of driving range in cold ambient conditions still greatly restricts the wide application of electric vehicles.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">This paper presents a methodology of establishing multi-discipline coupled full vehicle model in AMESim to investigate the energy consumption of a pure electric vehicle in cold ambient conditions. Different strategies of battery heating through Positive Temperature Coefficient (PTC) part and/or combination of Motor Waste Heat Recovery (MWHR) were also investigated to study whether there is an improvement of driving range.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">Firstly, basic framework of the full vehicle model established in AMESim was introduced. Next, modeling details of individual sub-systems were illustrated respectively. Then, full vehicle energy consumption test was carried out in -7°C ambient condition to check the simulation accuracy. Finally, a variety of battery heating strategies parameterized by heating threshold X and Coefficient of Performance (COP) were investigated to study the effects of improvement of driving range.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">On the whole, simulation results of energy consumption and driving range are in good agreement with experimental data. In architecture 1, no PTC heating or only PTC heating (COP=1) was considered, the optimum X was found at 10°C, middle of a search interval of [0°C, 20°C]. The corresponding driving range is 237.177km, which is nearly 2km longer than that of base scheme, namely no PTC heating. In architecture 2, which accounts for a virtual heat pump (COP=2), the optimum X was found at 25°C, near the border of specified [0°C, 30°C] search scope. The corresponding driving range is 282.191km, and a range enhancement of 9.64km was acquired compared to the basic scheme of no heating. However, as to the actual architecture that using PTC and/or MWHR, a solely utilization of MWHR was foun to be the optimum, in other words, PTC heating in advance of MWHR has no benefit to the improvement of driving range.</div></div>