Abstract
At present, the prevalence of electric vehicles is increasing continuously. In particular, there are promising applications for commercial vehicles transferring from conventional to full electric, due to lower operating costs and stricter emission regulations. Thus, cost analysis from the fleet perspective becomes important. The study of cost competitiveness of different drivetrain designs is necessary to evaluate the fleet cost variance for different degrees of electrical machine commonality. This paper presents a methodology to find a preliminary powertrain design that minimizes the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for an entire fleet of electric commercial vehicles while fulfilling the performance requirements of each vehicle type. This methodology is based on scalable electric machine models, and particle swarm is used as the main optimization algorithm. The results show that the total cost penalty incurred when sharing the same electrical machine is small, therefore, there is a cost saving potential in higher degrees of electrical machine commonality.
Highlights
Electric commercial vehicle fleets can be economical compared with conventional commercial vehicle fleets based on fossil fuels [1]
There might be some electrical machine (EM) from the database not suited for the specific applications, which will be discarded by the optimizer
This is due to the fact that a larger EM is needed to meet both the torque and speed requirements with a single-speed mechanical transmission (MT), compared with 2 and 3-speed MTs, which leads to higher EM and power electronics converter (PEC) costs
Summary
Electric commercial vehicle fleets can be economical compared with conventional commercial vehicle fleets based on fossil fuels [1]. In Sweden, they benefit from the relatively high price of fuel and low price of electricity. For electric vehicles in general, and even more so for heavy duty commercial vehicles, the battery is the single most expensive component. With the development of battery technology and battery manufacturing processes, the benefits of economies of scale, as well as the potential mass-deployment of charging infrastructure allowing the vehicles to operate with a smaller battery capacity (e.g., a dense fast charging network or even Electric Road Systems for dynamic charging [3]), the relative importance of the battery in the overall upfront cost decreases, the powertrain plays a more important role in the cost analysis. The upfront cost of the powertrain may be reduced by finding commonalities between different vehicles in the fleet, this could negatively affect operation cost due to reduced efficiency
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