Development & Implementation of Simulink Powertrain & Simscape Thermal Modeling for a Virtual Co-Simulation Platform

Thermal Modeling plays on an important role in nowadays high-fidelity vehicle modeling. As virtual platform development more and more usage case on powertrain development, and Model Predicted Control (MPC) turns to be a new widely applicable method to thermal system control. The need of a faster than real-time high-fidelity thermal modeling with powertrain system on virtual environment rises. Traditional thermal modeling tool such as GT-SUIT and AVL Simulation Suite can provide detail modeling capabilities, however, performance of simulation decreases while fidelity increases, especially in the co-simulation environment. In this paper, Simscape toolbox from MathWorks is proposed to do thermal modeling in the virtual platform for co-simulation. Simscape is part of MATLAB which is widely used in the co-simulation environment. Simscape can provide physics based thermal modeling like GT-SUIT or AVL, the main benefit of usage Simscape is to decrease the number and complexity of co-simulation software integration, and its accessibility and performance improvement in the co-simulation platform. The development of Simscape thermal modeling and integration and validation in CarMaker-Simulink-Vissim co-simulation platform will be discussed.