As the powertrain domain controller, the Vehicle Control Unit (VCU) provides torque coordination, operating and shift strategies, high and low voltage coordination, charging management, on-board diagnostics, battery monitoring, thermal management and more for electrified vehicles. and connected vehicles.

The VCU also provides full functionality for highly automated driving solutions. Thanks to modular and customizable hardware and software, the vehicle control unit can be flexibly designed to meet future requirements in the VCU Performance (VCU-P) concept. The VCU Performance Concept sets new standards in vehicle handling. It uses microprocessor technology and a large amount of RAM and flash memory. VCU-P also provides scalable feature expansion.

The Battery Monitoring and Management System (BMS) is one of the most important systems of an electric vehicle, as it ensures not only that the traction drive is provided in real time with the battery parameters necessary to implement the propulsion function, but also the safe operation of the battery. This system must calculate in real time the current values of many battery parameters (such as state of charge, permissible current and discharge power, permissible current and charging power, state of “health”), but also estimate their values for a short period of time in the future. To implement these tasks, non-trivial algorithms are used, since all operational parameters depend on the degree of charge and temperature, which are constantly changing. Laboratory staff and students are developing these algorithms, prototyping controllers, and testing the performance of the algorithms on test equipment.

Electric water pumps, coolant valves and expanders play a crucial role in controlling the temperature of the components and interior of an electric vehicle, for example in the battery cooling and heating circuits and in the refrigerant circuits. These drives are currently being installed as distributed mechatronic drives in automotive systems. This means that each drive has a dedicated control unit and communicates via a CAN bus with the head controller.

This distributed architecture results in a complex system, especially when you consider all the individual parts that need to be mounted together individually, as well as the number of pipes and hoses that need to be connected. As a result, the architecture can move to a higher level of integration that centralizes the various functions of the drive, reservoirs and electronics into an integrated thermal management system (ITMS). Such a system will have one controller that controls various actuators and is connected via CAN-FD to the head controller of the electric vehicle.

The advantages of such an integrated thermal control system are less complexity, the ability to ensure heat transfer between units and, as a result, reduced energy costs to maintain the required thermal conditions. Ultimately, overall efficiency is improved due to lower energy losses and better distribution of thermal energy.