A Review on Vehicle Cabin Heating Solutions for Cold Ambient Conditions

In electric vehicles, along with cooling and heating requirement of battery, cabin atmosphere also need to be controlled according to human comfort level. Productivity level of humans decreases when cabin’s environment (including temperature, relative humidity and air velocity) varies too far from comfort range. For cold ambient conditions, waste heat from internal combustion engine is enough for heating passenger cabin in conventional vehicles. In contrast to that, electric vehicles do not have enough waste heat available to warm up cabin atmosphere during winters. Using battery power for heating in winters reduces vehicle mileage drastically. Consequently, many alternative cabin heating technologies and their combinations are proposed and designed to reduce the dependency on battery energy to improve thermal comfort under cold weather conditions. These technologies include dedicated heater systems, reversible heat pumps, conventional fuel powered heaters, thermoelectric heating, surface radiant heating etc. Several integrated thermal management systems have been developed which maintains a balance between cooling/heating requirements of battery and cabin simultaneously.