Development of a HIL application for a BEV Powertrain Control Unit

In manufacturing field, testing control algorithms can be time-consuming, expensive and potentially unsafe. To remain competitive, to reduce time to market and to deliver high-quality and reliable control systems, test engineers have replaced traditional testing methods with Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing, in which the plant to be controlled is replaced by models running on a real time computer and connected to the physical controller by specific IO board. A HIL based on a commercially available National Instruments NI platform has been developed to simulate a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor to test the response of an Electric Vehicle Control Unit (EVCU) under test. After connecting and emulating all the signals needed form the EVCU, the HIL application performances have been analysed by actuating a torque on the EVCU user interface and monitoring the EVCU behaviour, checking if the simulated inverter and electric motor are correctly responding to the commanded gate switch by computing the correct currents and torque. As it will be shown in the thesis the HIL application works correctly even though some deviation between the actuated torque and the calculated torque, mainly due to a quite simple electric motor modelling approach. As a future work this HIL application will be expanded including all the vehicle domain and additional control node (real or emulated), in order to reproduce as close as possible the controller operating condition as in the real vehicle.