Design and Implementation of Comprehensive Thermal Management Verification Model for Electric Vehicles Operating in Cold Climates

The electrification of vehicles has become a major focus in the automotive industry due to worldwide efforts toward reducing carbon emissions and achieving sustainable mobility. However, a significant challenge in expanding electrified vehicle market is to address the issue of limited driving range, particularly in cold climates. Thus, a precise and reasonable model that integrates both the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system and the battery thermal management system is necessary to systematically analyze the system performance at early development stage. Motivated by this, we developed an electric vehicle simulator that includes an integrated thermal management system and validated it by comparing with the real experimental data, and we have demonstrated the reliability of the developed model. Using the model, we could apply various control methods, e.g., PID, model predictive control, for tracking the reference cabin temperature under various driving environments. Our findings indicate that the simplified control-oriented model can be a reliable tool for various vehicle thermal control designs. We believe that this study can provide valuable insights into the design and optimization of the thermal management system of electrified vehicles.