Predictive Thermal Management for an Electric Vehicle Battery and Powertrain Circuit

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are gaining prominance in the domain of private transportation. The thermal management strategies employed for the powertrain and the battery significantly impact the vehicle's performance and energy consumption. In this paper we present a predictive thermal management strategy of battery electric vehicles. This strategy integrates the thermal management of both, the battery and the powertrain with a unified model predictive control (MPC) algorithm. This strategy enables the minimization of power consumption of the control inputs while ensuring component operation within their designated temperature range. In this study the cooling circuit of the powertrain and the battery of the vehicle is modeled using lumped-parameter models to derive the system dynamics for model-based controller design. A baseline strategy is compared to a nonlinear model predictive controller within a simulation study, where the MPC shows reduced utilization of the control inputs while maintaining temperature constraints for the components.