Development of a Solar Electric Vehicle Digital Twin

As the world has been increasingly faced with the consequences of human-induced climate change, vehicle electrification has been seen as a critical process in moving away from a carbon-based economy. However, the impact of vehicle electrification on carbon dioxide emission will be limited if the electricity that is used to charge that vehicle comes from a coal-fired or natural gas power plant. Solar electric vehicles address the source of electricity generation by incorporating solar panels into the design of the vehicle itself. While a small number of commercial solar electric vehicles are starting to hit the market, much of the visible development work has taken place in solar racing competitions since the 1980s. As complex electromechanical systems, the prototyping of solar electric vehicles can be expensive in terms of time and money. In recent years, physics-based modeling or digital twins have been advanced as a way to nimbly explore the design space of complex engineered systems. One such platform for physics-based modeling is MATLAB Simscape, which has been used to model conventional, electric, and hybrid vehicles. In this work, we extend that modeling to consider a solar electric race vehicle inspired by the vehicle Appalachian State University entered into the 2022 American Solar Challenge,