High Performance Hybrid Vehicle Concept—Preliminary Study and Vehicle Packaging

Abstract

The aim of this work was to develop the design of a direct liquid cooling system for a battery pack of a high-performance plug-in hybrid vehicle. The cooling system of the battery pack is of an innovative type, with the direct cooling of the power busbars and the poles of the lithium cells. In order to obtain preliminary information for the dimensioning and verification of the battery pack cooling system, a simulation model of the whole vehicle and its powertrain was developed. In this way, the current profiles to which the storage system will be subjected can be estimated and can be used to fine-tune the cooling system. The use of a simulation model of the entire vehicle was necessary because the vehicle is still at the design stage, and only experimental data on the specific consumption of the internal combustion engine and experimental characterization data of the lithium cells used, as well as data provided by the manufacturers of the electric motors and inverters, are currently available.