Power HIL Simulation of an Electric Minibus Powertrain

Abstract

The objective of this project is to utilize the test bench at the Coimbra Institute of Engineering – Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra (ISEC-IPC, Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Coimbra – Instituto Politécnico de Coimbra), Coimbra, Portugal, to perform a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation. This involved, first, to take contact and study different components of the test bench and consequently improving the charging procedure to allow charging in a safe environment. Then, Energetic Macroscopic Representation (EMR) graphical formalism technique was employed to organize the simulation. In particular, such technique was employed to ease the integration between the controls of the traction drive and the load drive through a dSPACE platform. This involved an intermediate stay of about one month at University of Lille 1 at Lille, France, to learn and improve the EMR technique and to take contact with other HIL platforms and dSPACE system. Finally, the test bench was used to emulate the electric minibus of Coimbra (in reduced-scale) with a real driving profile reference to study the system