A hardware-anywhere-in-the-loop simulator for dynamic real-time analysis of electric propulsion systems

This work introduces a low-level real-time vehicle simulator with hardware-anywhere-in-the-loop (HAIL) capability. Vehicle dynamics are simulated on a high-performance workstation running a real-time operating system. The vehicle’s battery pack is both modeled in simulation and interfaced externally, providing the option of establishing a baseline performance in the simulation, and then evaluating candidate battery packs against these results. This simulation test bed is applied to an electric vehicle and an unmanned underwater vehicle, two vehicle types that present very different loads to the batteries. The HAIL platform is validated against the verified simulated performance of both vehicle models, achieving an error of less than 2% across 25 trials. This paves the way for expansion to include an electric drive and dynamometer, as well as peripheral power electronics systems