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The floristic region of Adjara represents “Hotpoint” of Caucasian which is distinguished with the uniqueness of its Current activities in the field of vehicle electrification offer a great potential for contributing to climate change mitigation by reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Beyond the environmental strain, there is an economic one, too. It is therefore crucial for the European automotive industry to exploit not only the environmental benefits, but also the business opportunities which come from the transition from conventional fuel powered to electrified vehicles. To capture these opportunities, electric vehicles must deliver better performance at a lower price, overcoming the constraints that are currently limiting their mass-market uptake. This paper presents the approach of the research and innovation action H2020 project QUIET to meet these stringent requirements by developing an improved and energy efficient electric vehicle with increased driving range under real world driving conditions. This is achieved by exploiting the synergies of a technology portfolio in the areas of: user centric design with enhanced passenger comfort and safety, lightweight materials with enhanced thermal insulation properties, and optimised vehicle energy management. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2021-02-01-07 Full Text: PDF

Climate control systems have a largely negative effect on the energy consumption of electric vehicles and consequently on their real driving range. Improving the efficiency of climate control systems requires advanced simulation tools for an accurate evaluation of both the energy savings and thermal comfort of innovative heating and cooling solutions. In this study, the advancements beyond the state of the art consists primarily of the methodology tackling the reduction of computational costs of intensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and/or time-consuming experimental investigations and the simultaneous assessment of vehicle cabin thermal comfort and energy flows. The approach was validated against climatized chassis dyno measurements from the EU Horizon 2020 research project QUIET. Indeed, all the considered locations within the cabin were properly validated, both in steady state and transient conditions with the largest deviations at steady state below 3 °C. Additionally, the validation results show a perfect agreement for the average cabin predicted mean vote (PMV) value and a largest deviation in terms of the PMV for the other locations below 0.3. Furthermore, the applicability of the methodology is proved with the help of its application on a parametric study for which various cabin temperature setpoints and heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) modes were simulated in winter operation.

Thermal management systems of passenger vehicles are fundamental to provide adequate cabin thermal comfort. However, for battery electric vehicles they can use a significant amount of battery energy and thus reduce the real driving range. Indeed, when heating or cooling the vehicle cabin the thermal management system can consume up to 84% of the battery capacity. This study proposes a model-based approach to design an energy-efficient control strategy for heating electric vehicles, considering the entire climate control system at different ambient conditions. Specifically, the study aims at reducing the energy demand of the compressor and water pumps when operating in heat pump mode. At this scope, the climate control system of the reference vehicle is modelled and validated, enabling a system efficiency analysis in different operating points. Based on the system performance assessment, the optimized operating strategy for the compressor and the water pumps is elaborated and the results show that the demand-based control achieves up to 34% energy reduction when compared to the standard control.

The energy demand for conventionally heating the interior of a full electric vehicle can reduce the driving range by up to 50 %, if the energy is taken from the battery. Other heating concepts require complex additional heating equipment and can increase the weight of the vehicle significantly. This paper describes an energy efficient heating system using conductive heating coating, leading to reduced energy consumption and high comfort level due to the emission of infrared radiation.

In the pursuit of higher energy efficiency, reduced usage of fossil fuels and lower emissions in urban areas, hybrid vehicle technologies are a promising basis for the transportation of refrigerated goods. The goal of the project, described in this contribution, is to develop a refrigerated vehicle for the delivery of goods in urban areas and to design an optimized operating strategy based on hybrid electric technology. The electrically operated cooling system will be powered by the traction battery of the hybrid vehicle. Independent of the vehicle’s operating mode, the electric energy is always generated at high efficiency. Even in idle periods, or during stopand-go traffic, full cooling performance can be delivered continuously. The design and optimization will be conducted by a multiphysical simulation of the entire vehicle including all relevant cooling components. This paper describes the development of a Toyota hybrid vehicle model and the implementation and validation of the operational strategy of the considered vehicle. Efficiency and power of the vehicle are calculated using efficiency maps of the internal combustion engine and the two motor generators. Measured reallife driving cycle data of a company, which distributes fresh organic vegetables and food in Vienna directly to the customer, will be used to compare the performance of the new vehicle concept with ordinary diesel driven refrigerated vehicles. The proposed hybrid refrigerated vehicle enables significantly higher energy efficiency than the ordinary system. This can be explained by the advantages of a hybrid electric vehicle itself, especially in the setting of urban traffic. Furthermore

Heating in winter can reduce the maximum driving range of electric vehicles by about 50%. Therefore, thermal management is currently a big issue in this sector. This contribution shows the development and implementation of an entire vehicle model which is capable of investigating novel concepts for increasing the maximum driving range of electric vehicles. Therefore, a co-simulation interface between two simulation tools is created. The developed virtual environment is then used to simulate and optimize the energy efficiency of an electric reference vehicle by investigating different thermal management concepts.