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Vehicle thermal management is a key issue for improving the fuel consumption. Though simulating the thermal behavior and predicting the contribution on fuel economy are significantly effective, the simulation requires large amount of data that is not available in the early phase of vehicle development. This study presents a practical methodology for powertrain thermal modeling. Adding the model to a vehicle dynamic simulation made it possible to visualize the detailed energy flow within the vehicle and to predict the fuel consumption during driving cycles including cold-start condition. The simulation approach is characterized by introduction of optimization techniques for identifying parameters. The model was validated with measured warm-up behavior. The model provided satisfactory accuracy and demonstrated the ability of this approach.

This study aims to build a conceptual simulation used at the early stage of PHEV development. This simulation enables to design vehicle concept and fundamental architecture with regard to fuel economy, vehicle acceleration and electric range. The model based on forward-looking method comprises of plant-model and controller-model which are made by one-dimensional simulation tool “GT-SUITE” and Matlab/SIMULINK respectively. In order to automatically couple between them and to implement iterative calculations of SOC (State-of-Charge) convergence, optimization and automation tool “modeFRONTIER” was used. As a case study of this simulation, we adopted series-parallel type plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) and demonstrated the results on fuel economy of a legislative driving cycle and 0-60mph vehicle acceleration. Moreover, procedures to identify component specifications meeting vehicle targets and requirements at the early stage of vehicle development were concretely described.