24 V steering for commerical vehicles (EHPS)

As a supplier of semiconductor and system solutions Infineon is constantly improving itself with producing innovative and efficient solutions. The market trends of CAV (commercial construction and agriculture vehicles) requires increasing eco-friendly products with environmentally friendly solutions. Especially, for commercial construction and agriculture vehicles that need to operate at the highest possible availability and the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO).    

Driving assistant systems is expected to increase even more in the CAV market, especially for reducing the risk of accident, reaching efficient consumption, and better TCO for commercial vehicles.  Even the political regulations will have a determined influence on the future of mobility. The upcoming CO2 emissions regulations have a strong impact on the commercial vehicles, such as busses, trucks and forklift. 

Electrification of loads and higher voltages are needed as contribution to a better and greener world. Hence, the new steering for CAV are motivated by major 3 trends: CO2 reduction, upcoming level3 and level4 automated driving stages as well as recommendation for cost of insurance (because safer cars will have higher insurance costs) - these three factors call for more technical optimizations. China, USA or Europe are all regions affected by these trends and will inevitably implement new electronic based system solutions.

Full power steering at anytime

The advantages of EHPS (Electro hydraulic power steering) for CO2 reduction is important. It provides the demand oriented amount of oil and pressure that is required to operate the hydraulic steering systems of industrial vehicles on demand.

According to these trends, Infineon delivers for all requirements the perfect fitting products, by delivering the following system variants (see graph below):

System variants of EHPS for commercial vehicles

(Level 1-2) The benefits from pure hydraulic steering to EHPS are:

• Fuel savings of 0,9 to 1,2%
• CO2 reduction of 6 to 11g /km

At the same time, as using limited sensors, basic EHPS has lower safety requirements compared to more complex steering systems.

Due to the need of more automated drive level 2 and higher, the EHPS and full EPS is and will be state of the art.

(Level 3) Steering with lane keep assist

• Using EHPS (Electro Hydraulic Power Steering) for base functionality
• Adding 1x 3ph motor to generate torque overlay
• Motivation: reduced accident and insurance costs

(Level 4) Fail operational steering

• Full fault tolerant steering
• Different variants in design
• Variants using hydraulic power
• Variants using electric only power steering
• Synergies with fault tolerant EPS for cars
• Motivation: highly automated trucks: level3, level4