Modeling and On-Road Testing of an Electric Two-Wheeler towards Range Prediction and BMS Integration

Abstract

The automotive sector is currently shifting its focus from traditional fossil fuels to electrification. The deployment of a Battery Management System (BMS) unit is the key point to oversee the battery state of the electric vehicle (EV) to ensure safety and performances. The development and assessment of electric vehicle models in turn lays the groundwork of the BMS design as it provides a quick and cheap solution to test battery optimal control logics in a Software-in-the-Loop environment. Despite the various contribution to the literature in battery and vehicle modeling, electric scooters are mostly disregarded together with a reliable estimation of their performance and electric range. The present paper hence aims at filling the gap of knowledge through the development of a numerical model for considering a two-wheeler. The latter model relies on the conservation energy based-longitudinal dynamic approach and is coupled to a Li-Ion Battery second-order RC equivalent circuit model for the electric range prediction. More specifically, the presented work assesses the performance and electric range of a two-wheeler pure electric scooter in a real-world driving cycle. The e-powertrain system embeds an Electrical Energy Storage System (EESS) Li-Ion Battery pack. On-road tests were initially conducted to retrieve the main model parameters and to perform its validation. A global battery-to-wheels efficiency was also calibrated to account for the percentual amount of available net power for the vehicle onset. The model proved to properly match the experimental data in terms of total distance traveled over a validation driving mission.