Vehicle drivetrain: Emulation and simulation using electric machines

This paper presents an approach to emulate, at a reduced scale, a vehicle drivetrain by two electric machines easily exploitable. Two control laws associated to the electric machines are established in order to reproduce the dynamic behavior of a vehicle drivetrain on an equivalent electric system. In this study, the vehicle drivetrain used for an illustration corresponds to an urban vehicle with an internal combustion engine and a manual gearbox. Choosing a mission profile with acceleration and braking phases of driving, the proposed approach is validated by simulation. Also, the equivalent system can be used to make different tests on gearboxes such as manual, robotized or automatic associated to an internal combustion engine. Therefore the proposed approach is very useful to calibrate industrial automotive test benches in order to optimize time and cost of development phase of transmission components.