STeVE

Can you imagine the number of transport applications that need to be electrified to meet the increasingly stringent emissions standard?  Have you thought about the diversity of technical solutions, along with the time and effort required to find the optimal solutions for each transport application?  In this sense, reducing the development time of electric vehicles becomes an urgent priority at the forefront of the automotive industry's agenda. For this aim, new methodologies and tools, supporting the exploration of the system-level design space, are required. These methodologies should allow for assessing different sizing choices of electrified powertrains in the early development phases, both efficiently in terms of computational time and with reliable results in terms of energy consumption.

In this perspective, the STeVE project (Scalability of powerTrain of electrified Vehicles of an Eco-campus), aims to contribute to reducing the time-to-market of electric powertrains by developing new methodologies based on the scalability approach. This project is carried out jointly within an international collaboration between the University of Lille and Ghent University in Belgium. The scaling procedure is aimed at predicting the data of a newly defined design of a given component of the powertrain with different specifications based on a reference design, without redoing the traditional time and effort-consuming steps.

The research activities, within the framework of STeVE, have yielded significant insights and a comprehensive understanding of the scaling of electrified powertrains. Currently, the developed set of tools comprises:  

1. Different derivations of scaling laws of powertrain components, e.g. voltage source inverter, electric machine, and gearbox, validated based on either numerical campaign or experimental campaign. 
2. Flexible simulation tools for different power-rated vehicles: this approach includes scalable models (static or dynamic) and control of powertrains. This is achieved based on keeping a reference model and control of the powertrain fixed (due to security considerations to protect your source code if access to the reference models may be restricted), but complemented with power adaptation elements at the electrical and mechanical sides to consider the scaling effect.
3. Holistic design methodology: the scaling approach considers the interaction between the scaled components to guarantee optimal powertrain performances

Reliable energy consumption quantification of various electrified vehicles with different power ratings, ranging from light to heavy-duty vehicles.

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