Application of a P2 mild hybrid functional model with dual clutch transmission on a complete vehicle model

Automotive manufacturers nowadays are facing several challenges, brought by contrasting factors, like the pursuit of mechanical performances, environmental and safety regulations and also market demands, that very frequently require conflicting approaches. From this perspective, constructors are required to develop more and more complex systems to control a wide range of features belonging to different fields. This is leading to an increasingly extensive use of systems modelling and simulations, an approach that is rising to be quite dominant in the automotive field, that prioritizes the functionality of a component and assesses its integration into a larger system at each stage of the development, before the physical prototype is created. This can ensure lower development times and costs and an increase in the reliability of the systems. Further widening the perspective, in the automotive scenario, due to the complexity and variety of the vehicle systems, the co-simulation of more conjoined sub-models developed in different dedicated software, may prove beneficial in a world combining so many different fields and demands. In the hereby paper it is presented the co-simulation of a driveline model previously developed in Simulink, with a vehicle model created in a VI-CarRealTime environment. In particular, it is showed the simulation of the dynamics of a 48V mild hybrid vehicle, equipped with a P2 parallel architecture of the hybrid system, and a dual clutch transmission. This type of driveline, besides offering advantages in terms of energy efficiency and vehicle dynamics, is particularly interesting for the variety of driving modes in which it can operate. As said, the driveline is represented in a Simulink model, previously built and here developed in order to further enlarge its working modes possibilities. The aim of the model is to compute the torque that arrives at the differential in the different manoeuvres. For better representing the vehicle response and simulate its real dynamics, a complete vehicle model is built on Vi-CarRealTime, a dedicated software able to replicate a wide range of the vehicle data and features. A simple vehicle model was also present in the Simulink model, but giving the complexity of the system, a more dedicated environment was preferred. The new complete model offers a direct way to obtain a wider range of data, with also the possibility to implement components from the Adams-Car environment, without the need to develop complex algorithms and codes, that would have meant high development times and higher possibilities of making errors. The ultimate goal of this work is to effectively co-simulate the Simulink driveline model, in which we can easily reproduce all the possible longitudinal manoeuvres of a P2 mild hybrid 48V DCT vehicle and obtain the torque generated and arriving at the differential, with the VI vehicle model. This latter, inserted in a Co-simulation model in Simulink, will receive in input the differential torque computed by the joined sub-model, and provide us with an overview of the whole vehicle longitudinal dynamics. In particular, in this paper are also presented the effects of the engine mounts, how they are going to work in a longitudinal dynamics manoeuvre and their influence on the ride comfort. Final results are later going to be correlated with the ones obtained by the simple vehicle model developed in the Simulink environment.