Increasing driving range and decreasing propulsion losses in an electrified vehicle by combined electric machine and gear-box design

Research Project, 2020

In this project, losses in electrical machines and gearboxes are investigated. A power of 100 kW with 1500 rpm on the wheels are used as a starting point. Various gear ratios are investigated and machines using teh resulting speeds on the high speed side of the gerabox are investigated in terms of weight and loss.

Various oil viscosities and volumes within the gearbox are accessed. The oil type and volume for the best efficiency will be identified. The numerical simulations will employ the Lattice-Boltzmann method. The numerical tool will be the commercial software OMNIS. Meanwhile, to resolve specific physical mechanisms (e.g., temperature, air bubbles and vibration), another numerical tool based on the open-source code LUMA will be developed in collaboration with Dr. Adrian Harwood and Dr. Alistair Revell at the University of Manchester.
Experiments will be conducted at the Chalmers laboratory of fluids and thermal sciences at the Fluid Dynamics Division, which is a Chalmers infrastructure. A new test rig has been constructed at the lab by improving the original FZG gear test rig. The testing section of the new rig is made of PMMA for the optical access in PIV measurements. The high-speed recording employs Nikon V1 with a frame rate of 400 fps. Moreover, torques and losses will be measured during tests.