Abstract

Electric vehicles are booming. There are plenty of engineering programs that are initiated each year. Engineering an electric vehicle requires advanced methods and tools. But it happens that these tools can barely exchange data between each others. Hence, understanding systems' interactions and boundary conditions can be complicated. It is however important to connect different engineering fields, different components and systems engineers, different domain specialist, to limit issues and errors happening at the interfaces. Creating, managing and maintaining a digital thread is a good way to safeguard what is happening at these interfaces and avoid communication issues. This paper showcases how a single system simulation model can be used to gather data coming from different components engineers and simulation engineers in order to master the integration of these components. The import of data can be done through the use of FMUs (Functional Mock-up Units) or the use of Apps. Battery data are imported from Battery cell design simulation tool, Inverter power electronics model is imported from an EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool, inverter thermal model is imported from a CFD code and the electric machine model is imported from an electromagnetic simulation tool. The purpose of this simulation platform is to be able to perform a high level synthesis of the vehicle performances. Attributes like range, longitudinal performance and thermal safety are assessed. In the paper, we will go through the comparison between two inverter semi-conductors technologies (IGBT and SiC MOSFET) and two cooling systems for the inverter itself (direct water cooling or indirect water cooling). The pros and cons of the different technologies are discussed as well as the process to setup the model and to gather all the data. Some perspectives regarding more use cases that could be done with the platform will also be introduced like Hardware-In-the-Loop software verification or Predictive maintenance/fleet monitoring.