Analysis of electric vehicle powertrain simulators for fuel consumption calculations

In this paper, three electric vehicle (EV) powertrain simulators are analyzed by combining their modeling methodologies into a single MATLAB script file. A simplified electric vehicle powertrain (SEVP) simulator is compared with two widely used powertrain simulators, ADVISOR and FASTSim. Validation of the simulators is carried out using dynamometer test data on two models of the Nissan LEAF from the Advanced Powertrain Research Facility (APRF) of Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). The single script file approach is used to offer plug-and-play functionality with powertrain component models from the three simulators to determine their contribution to fuel consumption prediction. These test results show that a simplified powertrain model for an EV can predict EV fuel consumption to the same, (or better) level of accuracy as the state-of-the-art vehicle simulators.