Study of a hardware-in-the-loop bench for an electrified working vehicle

The increasing demand for more efficient working vehicles able to meet pollutant emissions regulations is currently pushing research teams both from the academia and from the industrial field towards hybrid and electric architectures as suitable solution. Despite the well consolidated position of this technology in the automotive field, several aspects prevent its widespread adoption in heavy-duty applications. The higher complexity of the energy management required can be explored with new testing and validation procedures which involve Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) technologies. With this simulation approach, complex system like architectures for hybrid electric working vehicles can be partially simulated and partially replicated in scaled version to deeply explore control strategies on real hardware and real mechanical layouts. In this work, the design of a HIL bench for simulation of a hybrid electric agricultural tractor will be presented. The control architecture for proposed hybrid powerunit will be tested on the configured HIL bench to evaluate performance on three different working tasks derived from experimental measurements.