With the large number of advanced vehicle architectures, including gasoline, diesel, electrical, hybrid and fuel cells, it is impossible to manually build every single powertrain configuration due to time and cost constraints. The role of simulation in vehicle development has become critical to automakers and suppliers.
Argonne National Laboratory, under a contract sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE), developed the Powertrain Systems Analysis Toolkit (PSAT), a flexible, reusable model for simulating advanced vehicles. Selected by the DOE as its primary vehicle simulation tool to support its FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies Program, PSAT received R&D Magazine's prestigious 2004 R&D 100 Award, which recognizes the 100 most technologically significant new products and processes from around the world in a calendar year. PSAT provides automotive and truck manufacturers and their suppliers with the ability to assess advanced technologies by providing accurate performance and fuel economy simulations.
Developed with Matlab/Simulink, the graphical user-interface (GUI)-driven application simulates more than 400 predefined configurations, including conventional, electric, hybrid and fuel cell vehicles. This capability is possible because PSAT is able to build all drivetrain configurations according to users' inputs with a drag-and-drop model building approach, drawing from a large library of component models.
Using test data from Argonne's Advanced Powertrain Research Facility, conventional and mild-hybrid vehicles have been validated within 2% and full hybrid vehicles within 5% for both fuel economy and battery state-of-charge on several driving cycles.
PSAT component interactions are based on real-world scenarios. Control strategies can be implemented directly and tested on the bench or in an actual vehicle (using PSAT-PRO). With PSAT, a driver model follows a standard or custom driving cycle, sending a power demand to the vehicle controller, which sends a demand to the propulsion components. Component models react to the demand and feed back their status to the vehicle controller.
More info: http://www.anl.gov/techtransfer/pdf/Profile_PSAT.pdf
Argonne researcher Aymeric Rousseau uses PSAT to analyze test data from the Advanced Powertrain Research Facility. (Click image to enlarge)
