Hyundai Motor Company Simcenter to optimize hybrid vehicle performance

“By pre-defining major calibration values using HiL simulation, we were able to reduce the number of actual vehicle tests by 40 percent.” Bang Jae-Sung, Ph.D.Senior Engineer R&D Center Hyundai Motor Company

Korean modernity

Over the last two centuries, mankind has dramatically evolved. And certainly, modern times have brought many benefits, including longer lives, comfort, communication means, traveling tools and much more.
But at the same time, continuous population growth, industrialization and globalization have put enormous stress on the environment.
Unfortunately, it was only in the last decades of the previous century that scientists started to share persuasive evidence that we are slowly but certainly causing irreparable damage to our planet.
The current generation is the first in human history to consider how to balance technological advancement with low environmental impact.
As a result, engineers are challenged to develop technologies that can satisfy operational and consumer requirements while also meeting the demands for low energy consumption and emissions. To fulfill those demands, many industries, particularly transportation, will require a drastic modernization, both technologically and in terms of process.
It’s not a coincidence that the Korean word for modernity is “hyundai.” The engineers of Hyundai Motor Group (HGC), the third-largest vehicle manufacturer in the world, have experimented since the late 1980s with alternative, more environmentally-friendly propulsion methods than traditional internal combustion engines (ICEs), including flexible-fuel vehicles, electric vehicles and hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs).
The latter are currently the most interesting, awaiting the availability of batteries that can allow a larger range and additional infrastructure to charge electric motors.

Complex HEV engineering

Designing HEVs presents complex challenges, such as determining which configuration will perform the best for a particular vehicle and its intended use.
The main idea is to let the electrical motor support the ICE so that it can work more efficiently, or even be replaced for some drive cycles, like city use, for example.
Significant engineering effort goes into the sizing of components and in defining the control algorithms that coordinates collaboration of the electric motor and ICE for optimal efficiency.
At the same time, engineers must consider other critical performance requirements, including driving dynamics and comfort.“The project we did with the Simcenter Engineering specialists showed us that we can realize a good correlation between results from HiL simulation and the real vehicle behavior for multiple attributes simultaneously.” Bang Jae-Sung, Ph.D. Senior Engineer R&D Center Hyundai Motor Company

Implementing a simulation-based approach

Together with Siemens PLM Software specialists, Hyundai engineers researched the possibility of saving development time and cost by implementing a more automated performance optimization process, using state-of-the-art simulation capabilities.
Together, they executed a project in which they virtually tested, validated and calibrated an HEV main controller using a real-time, closed-loop, model-based system simulation.
Though hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test platforms are industry-standard, this test case was rather unique in that it accurately captured both fuel economy and drivability simultaneously.
“HiL simulation can be a difficult balancing task,” says Jae-Sung. “On one hand, you have to limit the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) so that the calculation can run in real time, but on the other hand the simulation model needs to remain sufficiently accurate so that it still produces realistic results. This requires very specialized software tools.
By using Simcenter Amesim™ software from Siemens PLM Software for the plant model in co-simulation with the MATLAB, Simulink and Stateflow environments for the controller models, we could achieve this objective really well.”

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