Study on the Benefits of Integrated Battery and Cabin Thermal Management in Cold Weather Conditions

To expand the global adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), improving their driving range is of utmost importance. One of the major obstacles along the way is the degraded EV performance in extremely cold or hot environments, where significant amount of energy is used for cabin and battery temperature regulation while the battery’s power and energy capacity are also impeded. To mitigate this issue, we present an integrated cabin and battery thermal management system to simultaneously optimize battery and cabin temperatures in real time. A new nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC)-based thermal management strategy is developed to simultaneously achieve cabin temperature regulation and driving range maximization. The benefits of the proposed integrated thermal management (ITM) of battery and cabin are investigated for cold-temperature driving in various scenarios. Simulation results identify several important factors that affect the EV driving range in cold weather, and we show that up to 713% range improvement, relative to the case where only cabin heating is considered, can be achieved using the proposed NMPC-based ITM strategy.