Design and analysis on integrated thermal management solution for electric vehicles

Thermal management system (TMS) for battery electric vehicles (BEV) incorporates maintaining optimum temperature for cabin, battery and e-powertrain subsystems under different charging and discharging conditions at various ambient temperatures. Current methods of thermal management are inefficient, complex and lead to wastage of energy and battery capacity loss due to inability of energy transfer between subsystems. In this paper, the energy consumption of an electric vehicle's thermal management system is reduced by a novel approach for integration of various subsystems. Integrated thermal management system (ITMS) integrates air conditioning system, battery thermal management and e-powertrain system. Characteristics of existing integration strategies are studied, compared and classified based on their energy efficiency for different operating conditions. A new integrated system is proposed with a heat pump system for cabin and waste heat recovery from e-powertrain. Various cooling and heating strategies for battery are identified for different ambient temperatures. A Multicase simulation model is created using MATLAB-Simulink to test under real time operating conditions. From the results it is found that the proposed integrated model has 15% less power consumption than the conventional system.