Integrated Approach for System Oriented Analyses and Optimization of Complex Hybrid Powertrain Applications by Means of Vehicle-in-the-Loop Roller Test Bench

Central activity in the development process of automotive drive systems is the validation to meet the customers’ demands. Thereby the transmission topology as well as the operation and drive strategy and their independencies have a great influence on the comfort and the energy efficiency of the vehicle. Especially in modern drivelines, like in hybrid electric vehicles there are great independencies between those factors, which have to be considered and integrated in order to achieve a global optimum.In this contribution an integrated validation and development environment with the focus on hybrid transmission applications is presented. This approach is capable to integrate and consider aspects of complex powertrain systems, as hybrid powertrains, and to cover the competing aspects of NVH, drivability as well as energy efficiency. The approach is an integral combination of new or already published as well as established individual methods that have been extended with challenging aspects of hybrid powertrain development. One integrated method is the time-efficient arrangement of measuring points in order to shorten the global needed conditioning phases. For gearshift evaluation of a dual clutch transmission, this reduces operation time on the roller test bench about 80% compared to an experienced test driver [1]. The integrated approach uses system identification to create time and cost efficient test runs for the test based optimization [2]. Thereby advanced methods for rating the drivability and for automatic identification of NVH-Phenomena [3] are used to optimize multi criteria objective functions. The measurement is done in the IPEK-X-in-the-Loop Framework (XiL) [4], which enables a transmission assessment on the complete vehicle level.Copyright © 2013 by ASME