Demand for electrically driven vehicles has increased significantly in recent years, due to its subsidized rate, economical operation and environmentally friendly features. If discussed about India, the sales have increased by 174% in a single year. This drastic jump in sales has encouraged the current automobile manufacturers to come up with more and more electric-driven vehicle platforms in a crunch time frame. And to fulfill these requirements, manufacturers have to work a lot to introduce new technologies like E-axle, which can be space effective, less expensive and easy to assemble.
But the introduction of such new technologies brings an even bigger requirement for new validation methodologies, and in the case of electric vehicles (EV) where the development time has been very less, as brought a bigger challenge of more dependency on virtual simulation. As the operational procedure of E-axles is completely different from the conventional axles, the loads that are coming will also be different and unexpected. Now modeling these loads in a virtual interface and correlating the results with the physical measurements requires a robust methodology that is multi-disciplinary and closer to the physical world.
This paper describes a methodology of E-axle virtual simulation with a correlation of 81% with the measurement. The methodology incorporates forces experienced by E-axle, due to powertrain fluctuations, road excitation, vibration load and vehicle functional loads. The methodology also includes the noise and vibration simulation of the axle, which governs a major portion of the validation of EV.