Coupling IPG Automotive Tools with Simulink Fuel Cell Models

FuelCell systems are coming back to the forefront and carry a lot of innovations. This brings many investments in physical benches for testing this complex system and its integration in an electric vehicle.

IPG tools associated with SHERPA’s modeling technologies proposes solutions in order to balance the Physical-to-Digital ratio and increase the digital part in the conception and validation phase. Our digital benches permit to design the FuelCell system, so as the associated control algorithms, and to evaluate with the complete system view, the energy balance on specific scenarios.

Indeed, a key point are the use cases that define the usage of the final user. A personal car in urban zone, a bus, a delivery commercial vehicle have each of them a specific profile of usage and this has to drive the design of the energy architecture.

Coupling the strength of IPG tools to design precise use case scenario, with the precision of SHERPA’s models in various technical domains (FuelCells but also Heat Pumps and Thermal systems…)  allow to evaluate rapidly and with accuracy specific energetic architectures using criteria linked to the entire vehicle usage (Autonomy of your vehicle for example).  It permits also to evaluate energy management strategies with a high level of robustness because you are able to cover much more use cases in simulation than on a bench test.

This paper will show some specific applications around the sizing and integration of FuelCell technology inside electric vehicles, in order to illustrate the added value of coupling CarMaker/TruckMaker scenario with precise multi-energy models in Simulink in order to optimize the energy management of the electric vehicle.