Tech Briefs June 1, 2021
As more consumers express concern for the environment, electric vehicles (EVs) are on track to outpace conventional internal combustion engine vehicles as the transportation mode of choice. In response to this growing demand, leading automakers are doing their part to pave the way for EVs, revving up the development of electric and hybrid motors alongside the manufacturers of combustion engines. One such automaker is Volkswagen, whose Kassel plant in Germany specializes in the development, planning, and production of electric drives. It has a production output of 150 electric and 300 hybrid drives daily.
As essential components in electric drives, rotors need to be tested for durability, since they must endure a very large number of revolutions at varying speed and torque during drive operation. However, evaluating the strength of rotor laminations is time-consuming. VW Kassel is automating this test process for rotors, as well as reducing development costs and increasing product quality, by building simulation applications with COMSOL Multiphysics ®software.
In 2015, Volkswagen began developing a modular system — called the Modular Electrification Toolkit (MEB) — to optimize EV design and make the manufacturing process more efficient. The MEB accounts for the torque, power, and speed for the main rear-wheel drive and for the optional front-wheel drive used in all-wheel drive versions ( Figure 1).
Among other requirements — such as the ratios for the axles, drive units, weight, and wheelbases — the design and placement of the high-voltage drive battery plays a major role in the overall MEB concept. While the MEB helps to optimize individual components and the system as a whole, balancing these requirements takes careful consideration on the part of the designer, especially when accounting for new technologies like digitalization, autonomous driving, and electric drives.
From the very beginning of the electric drive development process, there has been close cooperation among staff involved in design, simulation, and testing at VW Kassel. First, the simulation experts review the performance specifications for an electric drive and use simulation to investigate how to best approach the design. For example, modeling the drive greatly reduces the number of variants and distributing a simulation application based on this model enables the designers to then benchmark different variants and choose the best one.
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