Suhail Akhtar

Project Title: Develop EV driving profiles that reflect spatial, meteorological, temporal and comfort demands of users.

Keywords: Driving Cycles, Electric Vehicles, Urban/Rural Driving Profile, EV Driving Cycles, real driving cycle, driving behaviour.

This work is a part of a funded project “POWERDRIVE” by Horizon Europe whose main focus is to “accelerate the twin green and digital transitions and associated transformation of our economy, industry and society with a view to achieving climate neutrality in Europe by 2050”.

To comply with the described policy framework and meet the work programme requirements and EU policy goals, POWERDRIVE aims at developing a next generation, highly efficient, cost-effective, and compact power electronics solution that integrate a portfolio of technologies for multi-objective optimisation of electric powertrains of battery electric vehicles (BEV). These integrated solutions can be applied to both low-performance and high-performance vehicles, and they will be suitable for diverse types of electric vehicles (EV).

The concept of POWERDRIVE is that all the experience and expertise of the project partners in the development of electric drivetrain components will be leveraged and lead into the integration of advanced power electronics solutions for an optimised powertrain. This concept brings additional opportunities to strengthen Europe’s supply chain in electromobility for road transportation and to achieve zero-emission road mobility.

Our main objective of the project is to extract real traffic data as well as analysing the human effect on the driving and load profiles experienced by a vehicle. In POWERDRIVE, such data serve as a reliable input for the full efficiency profiles of the powertrain.

A range of real-world driving cycles and the methods to develop them have been proposed for electric vehicles, typically for particular cities/locations. However, not enough focus has been given to the more nuanced demands on the vehicle such as different driving behaviours, weather, and geographic conditions. To achieve this different driving cycles will be developed to reflect driving behaviours, driving conditions (urban / rural, congested /uncongested), ranges of demands on the vehicle (air conditioning / heating / media), use case scenarios (commercial fleet / private users) and charging profiles. A further aim is to determine the set of conditions (optimised traffic flow, incentivisation policies, prioritisation policies, etc.) that will provide the fastest trajectory to zero-emission mobility in urban contexts

Supervisors: Prof. Margaret O’Mahony & Prof. Brian Caulfield