We are delighted to share the news that one of our graduate Energy Engineers, Aaron Mansfield has been awarded the ASHRAE Ireland Student Award for his Final Year Project titled; ‘Thermal Model of an Electric Vehicle’s Cabin & HVAC system.’ The project focusses on studying the energy efficiency improvement as a result of retrofitting a heat pump into an electric vehicle.
Aaron recently completed his BEng (Hons) in Sustainable Energy Engineering from Munster Technological University in Cork where he obtained a First-Class Honours for his work on his Final Year Project.
ASHRAE Ireland Student Awards reward students in specific student branches who have contributed to HVAC&R related topics in their respective institutes. All student awardees are in either final year or master’s level and have been selected by their respective student branch advisors, based on the quality of their final year thesis or project, so this is a huge acomplishment.
A huge congratulations to Aaron on this achievement from all the team at EM3. No doubt we will be seeing great things from him for years to come. The full abstract of the project can be found below for those interested.
Abstract: HVAC control exists in all modern vehicles and must be given an appropriate consideration in electric vehicles since there is no waste heat from combustion to harness for cabin heating. All of the HVAC energy comes from the battery and normally consists of a PTC heater and refrigerant loop combination or a heat pump. A transient thermal model of an electric vehicles cabin and HVAC system has been developed as part of this project. The model has been validated using test data from Argonne National Laboratory. The model uses a P-control system with a 20 second dead time and +/-1°C dead band range. 4 thermal loads have been identified for the vehicles cabin: Ambient, Radiative, Metabolic and Mixing Load. The energy usage of each HVAC technology and subsequent affected range has been calculated through the model. The PTC model calculated an energy consumption of 65Wh-750Wh, heavily depending on ambient temperatures, and a range reduction of 8-35km. The heat pump was found to have reduced steady state operation by 70% which resulted in an 8% range decrease compared to an 18% range decrease from the PTC technology under the same conditions. Preconditioning was evaluated and was found to have reduced battery energy consumption by 30-80% on short journeys and sharply decreases with longer journeys.
