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More stringent federal emission regulations and fuel economy requirements have driven the automotive industry toward more sophisticated vehicle thermal management systems in order to best utilize the waste heat and minimize overall power consumption. With all new technologies and requirements, how to properly design, optimize, and control the vehicle thermal and cooling systems become great challenges to automotive engineers. Model based approach has become essential to the new thermal management system architectures design and evaluation of the optimal system solutions. This paper will discuss how the model based vehicle thermal system simulation tools have been developed from analytical & empirical data, and have been used for assessment and development of new thermal management system architectures.

More stringent Federal emission regulations and fuel economy requirements have driven the automotive industry toward more efficient vehicle thermal management systems to best utilize the heat produced from burning fuel and improve driveline efficiency. The greatest part of the effort is directed toward the hybridization of automotive transmission systems. The efficiency and durability of hybrid powertrain depends on the heat generation in electric motors and their interactions among each other, ambient condition, the cooling system and the transmission component configuration. These increase the complexity of motor temperature prediction as well as the computational cost of running a conjugate heat-transfer based CFD analysis. In this paper, 1D physics based thermal model is developed which allows rapid and accurate component-wise temperature estimation of the electric motor during both steady-state and transient driving cycles.