High efficiency energy management in BEV applications

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are promising candidates to replace cars including ICE drive trains in the coming years especially in urban regions in order to contribute to a reduced exhaust and noise emission. Up to now the BEV's bottleneck is the battery system which is able to store only a very limited amount of energy on board. Hence, it is necessary to use the rare energy in the most efficient way. In this work a simple method is presented to reduce the electric losses during operation through an adaptive control of the HVAC power input, depending on the driving situation. It is shown that the proposed method enables an energy saving and therefore a range extension about more than 1% without any additional hardware effort. This basically does not seem to be much but can be an important step contributing to BEVs' final breakthrough. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.