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

Thermal Modeling plays an important role in high-fidelity vehicle modeling. As virtual platform development processes and methods are being increasingly leveraged to enable more virtualized development of powertrain, propulsion, control, and thermal management systems, the need for a fast yet high fidelity model only grows more urgent. Traditional modeling tools such as GT-Suite and AVL Simulation Suite can provide detailed modeling capabilities for both Powertrain and Thermal, however, simulation performance decreases with improved fidelity which is especially true in a co-simulation environment. In this paper, Matlab Simulink is proposed to be added to a co-simulation platform in order to substitute traditional tools. A powertrain model can be built from a mathematic model in Simulink while a Thermal model can be built in Simscape, which is a Simulink-based thermal modeling tool. Simscape provides physics-based thermal modeling similar to GT-Suite and AVL while reducing the overall complexity of the co-simulation platform used within the Hyundai America Technical Center Inc. This leads to significant overall process improvements for the co-simulation platform. This paper explains Simulink Powertrain & Simscape thermal model build-up from GT-Suite, their integration into an IPG CarMaker and PTV Vissim co-simulation, and validation of this overall platform.