A fast remotely operable digital twin of a generic electric powertrain for geographically distributed hardware-in-the-loop simulation testbed

The automotive industry today is seeing far-reaching and portentous changes that will change the face of it in the foreseeable future. Digitalisation and Electrification are two of the key megatrends that is changing the way vehicles are developed and produced. A recent development in R&D process is the Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) method that uses a hybrid approach of testing a physical prototype immersed in a virtual environment, which is nowadays being creatively re-applied towards geographically separated multi-centre testing strategies, that suits the horizontally integrated and supply-chain driven industry very well. Geographical separation entails the deployment of a “Digital Twin” in remote centre(s) participating in multi-centre testing. This PhD aims to produce a highly robust, efficient, and rapidly computable Digital Twin of a generic electric powertrain using the multi-frequency averaging (MFA) technique that has been extended for variable frequency operation. This PhD also aims to commission a local HIL simulation testbed for a generic electric power inverter testing. The greater goal is to co-simulate the local HIL centre testing a prototype inverter, and its Digital Twin in a different location “twinning” the prototype inverter as best as possible. A novel approach for the Digital Twin has been proposed that employs Dynamic Phasors to solve the system in the frequency domain. An original method of multiplication of two signals in the frequency domain has been proposed. The resultant model has been verified against an equivalent time domain switching model and shown to outperform appreciably. A distinctive advantage the MFA Digital Twin offers is the “fidelity customisability”; based on application, the Twin can be set to compute a low (or high)-fi model at different computational cost. Finally, a novel method of communicating high-speed motor shaft position information using a low-speed processing system has been developed and validated. This has been applied to run real-life HIL simulation cycles on a test inverter and effects studied. The two ends of a multi-HIL testbed, i.e., local HIL environment for an inverter, and its Digital Twin, has been developed and validated. The last piece of the puzzle, i.e., employing a State Convergence algorithm to ensure the Digital Twin is accurate duplicating the performance of its “master”, is required to close the loop. Several ideas and process plans have been proposed to do the same

Multi‐frequency averaging (MFA) model of a generic electric vehicle powertrain suitable under variable frequency of averaging developed for remote operability

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2020. Geographically distributed hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing has the potential to allow hybrid vehicle powertrain components (battery, motor drive, and engine) to be developed at geographically remote locations but tested concurrently and coupled. Inter-location internet communication links can allow non-ideal behaviour observed in a physical component in one location (e.g. an electrical drive) to be imposed on another physical component elsewhere (e.g. an ICE), and vice-versa. A key challenge is how to represent the behaviour of a remote, physical component under testing in a local HIL environment. Internet communications are too slow and unreliable to transmit waveforms in real-time and so one solution is to use a local 'slave' model whose behaviour and parameters are tuned based on observations at the remote location. This study proposes a multifrequency averaging (MFA) slave model of an electric motor drive system for use in this application; it addresses a weakness in previously published work by extending the MFA model to variable frequency operation. The model was benchmarked against experimental operation (and its equivalent simulation model) in open-loop and closed-loop space vector pulse-width modulation control strategy, fixed and variable frequency operation. Results show significant reconciliation of model and experiment

A Fast and Accurate GaN Power Transistor Model and Its Application for Electric Vehicle

In order to overcome the challenge of balancing accuracy with simulation speed of power electronics converters for system-level simulation, the paper proposes a GaN power transistor model that can accurately and rapidly predict power losses, which is suitable for system-level application such as an electric vehicle. The model is based on equivalent circuit and formed by behavioural equations to carefully model both conduction and switching losses. As a novelty, transistor power losses due to dynamic ON-state resistance is also included in the model. By comparison with experimental measurements and other available models of the similar type from the literature, it is shown that our model gives accurate results of the power losses and it helps to reduce the error by more than 70%. To accelerate simulation speed, power loss calculation and simulation time-step is decoupled. The power losses are represented in different levels and in the form of mathematical equations and look-up tables in MATLAB/Simulink. It is shown that our approach is able to reduce the simulation time by almost 18 times and maintain the same accuracy. The proposed GaN transistor loss model is finally implemented into a racing vehicle powertrain, where designers can obtain the power losses and temperature of the used power transistors in an easy and rapid way to optimise power electronics design

Bhageerath: an energy based web enabled computer software suite for limiting the search space of tertiary structures of small globular proteins

We describe here an energy based computer software suite for narrowing down the search space of tertiary structures of small globular proteins. The protocol comprises eight different computational modules that form an automated pipeline. It combines physics based potentials with biophysical filters to arrive at 10 plausible candidate structures starting from sequence and secondary structure information. The methodology has been validated here on 50 small globular proteins consisting of 2–3 helices and strands with known tertiary structures. For each of these proteins, a structure within 3–6 Å RMSD (root mean square deviation) of the native has been obtained in the 10 lowest energy structures. The protocol has been web enabled and is accessible at

A fast remotely operable digital twin of a generic electric powertrain for geographically distributed hardware-in-the-loop simulation testbed

The automotive industry today is seeing far-reaching and portentous changes that will change the face of it in the foreseeable future. Digitalisation and Electrification are two of the key megatrends that is changing the way vehicles are developed and produced. A recent development in R&D process is the Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) method that uses a hybrid approach of testing a physical prototype immersed in a virtual environment, which is nowadays being creatively re-applied towards geographically separated multi-centre testing strategies, that suits the horizontally integrated and supply-chain driven industry very well. Geographical separation entails the deployment of a “Digital Twin” in remote centre(s) participating in multi-centre testing. This PhD aims to produce a highly robust, efficient, and rapidly computable Digital Twin of a generic electric powertrain using the multi-frequency averaging (MFA) technique that has been extended for variable frequency operation. This PhD also aims to commission a local HIL simulation testbed for a generic electric power inverter testing. The greater goal is to co-simulate the local HIL centre testing a prototype inverter, and its Digital Twin in a different location “twinning” the prototype inverter as best as possible. A novel approach for the Digital Twin has been proposed that employs Dynamic Phasors to solve the system in the frequency domain. An original method of multiplication of two signals in the frequency domain has been proposed. The resultant model has been verified against an equivalent time domain switching model and shown to outperform appreciably. A distinctive advantage the MFA Digital Twin offers is the “fidelity customisability”; based on application, the Twin can be set to compute a low (or high)-fi model at different computational cost. Finally, a novel method of communicating high-speed motor shaft position information using a low-speed processing system has been developed and validated. This has been applied to run real-life HIL simulation cycles on a test inverter and effects studied. The two ends of a multi-HIL testbed, i.e., local HIL environment for an inverter, and its Digital Twin, has been developed and validated. The last piece of the puzzle, i.e., employing a State Convergence algorithm to ensure the Digital Twin is accurate duplicating the performance of its “master”, is required to close the loop. Several ideas and process plans have been proposed to do the same

In Silico Mining and Characterization of High-Quality SNP/Indels in Some Agro-Economically Important Species Belonging to the Family Euphorbiaceae

(1) Background: To assess the genetic makeup among the agro-economically important members of Euphorbiaceae, the present study was conducted to identify and characterize high-quality single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers and their comparative distribution in exonic and intronic regions from the publicly available expressed sequence tags (ESTs). (2) Methods: Quality sequences obtained after pre-processing by an EG assembler were assembled into contigs using the CAP3 program at 95% identity; the mining of SNP was performed by QualitySNP; GENSCAN (standalone) was used for detecting the distribution of SNPs in the exonic and intronic regions. (3) Results: A total of 25,432 potential SNPs (pSNP) and 14,351 high-quality SNPs (qSNP), including 2276 indels, were detected from 260,479 EST sequences. The ratio of quality SNP to potential SNP ranged from 0.22 to 0.75. A higher frequency of transitions and transversions was observed more in the exonic than the intronic region, while indels were present more in the intronic region. C↔T (transition) was the most dominant nucleotide substitution, while in transversion, A↔T was the dominant nucleotide substitution, and in indel, A/- was dominant. (4) Conclusions: Detected SNP markers may be useful for linkage mapping; marker-assisted breeding; studying genetic diversity; mapping important phenotypic traits, such as adaptation or oil production; or disease resistance by targeting and screening mutations in important genes

A Comparative Cross-Platform Analysis to Identify Potential Biomarker Genes for Evaluation of Teratozoospermia and Azoospermia

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors.Male infertility is a global public health concern. Teratozoospermia is a qualitative anomaly of spermatozoa morphology, contributing significantly to male infertility, whereas azoospermia is the complete absence of spermatozoa in the ejaculate. Thus, there is a serious need for unveiling the common origin and/or connection between both of these diseases, if any. This study aims to identify common potential biomarker genes of these two diseases via an in silico approach using a meta-analysis of microarray data. In this study, a differential expression analysis of genes was performed on four publicly available RNA microarray datasets, two each from teratozoospermia (GSE6872 and GSE6967) and azoospermia (GSE145467 and GSE25518). From the analysis, 118 DEGs were found to be common to teratozoospermia and azoospermia, and, interestingly, sperm autoantigenic protein 17 (SPA17) was found to possess the highest fold change value among all the DEGs (9.471), while coiled-coil domain-containing 90B (CCDC90B) and coiled-coil domain-containing 91 (CCDC91) genes were found to be common among three of analyses, i.e., Network Analyst, ExAtlas, and GEO2R. This observation indicates that SPA17, CCDC90B, and CCDC91 genes might have significant roles to play as potential biomarkers for teratozoospermia and azoospermia. Thus, our study opens a new window of research in this area and can provide an important theoretical basis for the diagnosis and treatment of both these diseases.Peer reviewe