CORDIS

Not only Europe´s environmental conscious societies are eagerly looking for the integration of clean mobility into their urban live. The global trend for sustainability is obvious, and electro-mobility is moving forward driven by a significant progress with attractive market oriented cars with enhanced drive dynamics, cruising capabilities and driving range overcoming meager car concepts out of the past.

Objectives: In OSEM-EV, comprehensive thermal management will be researched, developed and integrated in demonstration vehicles. The objectives of OSEM-EV consist of thermal management solutions including thermal insulation (passenger compartment), thermal energy storage, innovative heating and cooling approaches applied to the powertrain subsystems (i.e. battery, inverter and motor), battery life duration enhancement as a side effect of thermal management, electronic control of electro-thermal energy and power flows, increased energy efficiency of electrified components and subsystems (e.g. heat-pump), energy substitution as well as energy harvesting functions.
Approach: To fulfil the stated objectives, OSEM-EV is composed out of 12 leading European partners: 2 OEMs, 4 Tier 1, 2 Tier 2 and 4 research institutions will combine their knowledge. The multidisciplinary con-sortium will focus on thermal and coupled electro-thermal energy management, storage, substitution and harvesting. The OEM Daimler produced 2.3 million cars in 2013. Daimler has the broadest range of locally emission-free electric vehicles powered by batteries and fuel cells in addition to vehicles with hybrid drive. Daimler will exploit the outcome of OSEM-EV in terms of battery thermal endurance, battery lifetime prolongation and affordable battery capacity. The Tier 1 (AVL, Siemens, Valeo and Hutchinson) will contribute with thermal insulation materials, thermal preconditioning, range increase, electro-thermal architectures, energy management control algorithms and platforms. Further, the Tier 2 (Saft and Infineon) will provide the components (e.g. battery models, multi-core microcontrollers) for realizing the integration of cost efficient innovative vehicle subsystems. Finally, the research institutions (Fraunhofer IISB, Technical university Dresden, Brno University of Technology) will support the industrial partners with the development of new simulation and modelling methods for coupled electro-thermal architectures and control algorithms.

OSEM-EV will facilitate standardization of the temperature levels of the subsystems in the energy network, foster lower cost, higher efficient cooling solution and scalable subsystems. The demonstrators will consider safety aspects and be evaluated with respect to thermal robustness. OSEM-EV will provide solutions for predictable mileage exploring novel concepts such as thermal energy storage subsystems. OSEM-EV will also directly influence the battery efficiency by thermally preconditioning the car itself. Thermal conditioning will set for example the temperature of the battery to the best operating range. OSEM-EV will enable an architecture with an electro-thermal network within the EV, making use of the available energy sources, control them in an optimized way, and minimize the impact of the external factors (temperature). The OSEM-EV consortium will take a radical approach, which not only relies on improving the efficiency of individual subsystems, but also focuses on their interoperability.

Impact: Customer acceptance on electrified cars is pivotal towards European economy. European cars attract customers around the globe. Superior design, driving dynamics, quality and functionality even allow selling for a premium price. Today the European automotive industry contributes €839bn or 6.9% to the EU27 GDP. As a matter of fact, the vehicle markets are undergoing a dramatic change. The steps to achieve 95g CO2 per 1km are scheduled in 2021 by the societies and legislation. This will drive the ratio between comb