Automotive: The Design Engineer's Guide

Powertrains and EV/HV/PHEVs

An automotive vehicle's powertrain is the backbone of its functionality. Within the powertrain sits the engine, transmission. drive shafts, differential, and final drive. As demand for greener technology increases, designers are moving away traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle architecture to hybrid or fully electric designs.

These developments in powertrain technology are driven by the electrification of multiple components, with motors and electric pumps replacing heavier, less efficient mechanical and hydraulic systems. However, the tradeoff of this, allied to increased use of electronics in vehicle safety, comfort and infortainment systems, is much greater power consumption. This has led to the adoption of 48V architecture in powertrains.

The 48V design challenge

With such increased power consumption, existing 12V architectures are unrealistic and inefficient. Large currents would require substantial heavy, expensive cabling, and losses in wiring would be unavoidable. 48V architectures allow more power to be delivered through existing cabling, and gives designers the ability to make further changes to the powertrain.

The increase in electronic components within the powertrain presents a number of new challenges and considerations to designers, with a large increase in the number of passive components required to for energy and filtering applications, ensuring power systems meet performance goals. Here we explore the design considerations, challenges and critical criteria for selecting passive components for 48V powertrain architecture.

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Designing DC-DC converters for electric vehicles

While the automotive industry is moving towards hybrid and electric vehicles with entirely 48V architectures, current designs combine them with 12V systems so that existing low-power applications (such as infotainment, driver assistance, and ECUs) can remain unchanged.

A bi-directional DC-DC converter forms the backbone of these mixed voltage systems, providing a bridge between the two voltages, and allowing either battery to be charged from the other. Here we provide an in-depth guide to automotive DC-DC converters, exploring the different design requirements, challenges, regulations and criteria to consider when selecting passive components.

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Electric vehicle on-board chargers

How an electric vehicle will be charged forms a key part of the design process. Mild hybrids use a combination of an ICE and a generator to charge the battery, plug-in hybrids and battery EVs plug into the mains grid and recharge from there.

The type of mains charging, either AC or DC, will have an effect on the components required to charge the battery. While DC charging uses chargers external to the vehicle, AC charging requires an on-board charger that converts mains power to a DC voltage. On-board chargers require careful selection of passive components to ensure efficiency and reliability, and here we look at the key requirements and challenges.

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