Thermal management of refrigeration unit for electric refrigerated vans: An experimental case study

In future, electric vehicles are expected to be adopted in the food transport to aid addressing limited access to fossil fuel and reduce greenhouse gas emission. However, their construction has to include consideration of a Temperature Refrigeration Unit (TRU) that is used to transport foods at low temperatures without significantly impacting the vehicle’s operation or driving range. In this paper, we investigate the benefit of implementing Model Predictive Control (MPC) in a thermal management system (TMS) of a TRU for electric vans. A comparative study between the developed MPC-based TMS and the traditional proportional–integral (PI) - based TMS has been carried out using a physical thermal rig. The experimental results show up to 43% energy savings could be achieved by the MPC, compared to the case using the PI strategy.