Electric Vehicle and Charging Technology

The goal of this course is to educate students to design and evaluate various (hybrid) electric vehicles with respect to their performance, efficiency, sustainability and its charging technology. Specifically, it will delve into the following topics

• Tank to Wheel, Well to Tank, Well to Wheel efficiencies and emission estimation for conventional, hybrid and fully electric vehicles based on energy source for propulsion.

• Types, operational principles, advantages and disadvantages of vehicle architectures: internal combustion engine; micro, mild and full hybrids (series, parallel, series-parallel), plug-in hybrids, full electrics, fuel cell vehicles;

• Vehicle load forces en dynamics, mechanical transmission components, power and energy consumption, drive cycles, battery sizing and electric vehicle range, MPGe, planetary gears as a power-split, regenerative braking.

• Principles of battery operation, battery types, the key performance parameters of batteries, from cell to battery pack, charge-discharge curves, battery and thermal management systems.

• Fundamentals and types of electric machine drives used in electric cars: its characteristics, efficiency, basics of motor control.

• Basics of power electronic converters used in electric cars and chargers, topologies and control.

• Charging methods of EVs: AC charging, DC charging, vehicle-to-grid technology, wireless charging, battery swap; charging time estimation, effects of fast charging on battery; Smart charging of EVs and vehicle-to-grid, communication protocols for smart charging.

• Modelling and investigating the performance of the electric vehicle drivetrain using quasi-static simulation in MATLAB/Simulink.

• Case study of EV: Toyota Prius HEV, Tesla Model S, Porsche Taycan, Audi e-tron, Hyundai Ioniq 5

The course will have a design project where students have to form teams to design their own EV by making choices for the vehicle drivetrain and corresponding charging technology. Emphasis will be on justifying and quantifying the technological design choices including drivetrain architecture, well-to-wheel efficiency and emissions, energy storage, power electronics, type of motor and charging method.