ASP projects

PMM-HEV: Power Management and Modelling of Hybrid Electrical Vehicle

In the context of the development of the future mobility models it is necessary to consider the different aspects that may determine the feasibility of a proposed solution. For sure, the need to reduce the emissions and energetic consumption associated to the movement of people and goods has become a major issue of the policy makers both in the perspective of improving the quality of the urban environment and mitigating the effects associated to the climate changes. Anyway, the definition of new technological models needs to be considered under the perspective of economic feasibility, in order to be applied on an industrial scale. In particular, the introduction of hybrid powertrains on traditional vehicles may be a solution to adapt the automotive market to the new constraints in terms of pollutants emission, thus balancing the needs of both companies and end users.
In this perspective, our commercial partner, Iveco CNH Ind., started to develop a new lightweight commercial vehicle with a parallel hybrid configuration, in order to comply with the new regulations in terms of pollutants emissions and, moreover, guarantee to its clients the access to the Congestion Charge Areas or the Low Emissions Zones, which have been introduced in many city centres and that constitutes a major issue, for example for a delivering company.
The task of the project, in particular, was to develop a flexible software platform that allows the company to assess in advance the performances of the vehicle architectures considered, in order to boost the design, assessment and prototyping times and, thus, to reduce the general costs associated to these activities. This task is associated, in general, to the growing interest toward the simulation and fast-prototyping techniques that are gaining more and more relevance in the automotive sector, but also in other industrial contexts. Another major goal was to go beyond the usual assessment techniques based on standard driving cycles, since they generally do not correspond to the real operating condition of the vehicle. This has been required in order to find more consistent data, allowing a higher optimization and the definition of ad-hoc control logics, designed to reduce the fuel consumption and pollutants emission of these architectures.
All these tasks were solved by implementing a simulation tool based on an object-oriented language that allows fast assessment of the vehicle performances under real operating conditions, included constraints on the congestion area, state of charge of the storage system, auxiliaries, inclination of the road etc, permitting the evaluation of possible architectures and design solutions. Moreover, two different innovative control logics have been developed and implemented for the power management of the hybrid powertrain, with a consequent test on the simulation platform itself. First of all, these models have been developed on an open-source software based on the Modelica language, then they have been exported on a commercial tool that has allowed a more detailed definition of all the components with a consequent higher reliability for the results of the simulations accomplished.

Principal Academic Tutor
Giambattista Gruosso, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano

Academic Tutor
Paolo Guglielmi, Department of Energy, Politecnico di Torino
Giancarlo Storti Gajani, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano

External institutions
Iveco CNH Industrial

External tutor
Marco Aimo Boot, Iveco CNH Industrial

Team members
Luca Bellini, Civil Engineering, Politecnico di Torino [Team Controller and Communication Coordinator]
Alberto Bolzoni, Electrical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Alessio Canepa, Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Davide Cardella, Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Alessio La Bella, Automation Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Davide Moschetta, Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Giulia Musacci, Mechanical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Valentino Peluso, Electronic Engineering, Politecnico di Torino

Download the poster of the Project