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The present work investigates the economic feasibility of ecological vehicles. The comparison has been developed between traditional vehicles, gasoline and diesel fueled, and green vehicles powered by electric, hybrid or natural gas motors. Nowadays, the vehicle life cycle cost is an important decision criterion used by consumer to buy a car, due to fuel price increasing. Life cycle cost includes purchase cost, operation cost, but also social cost lead to environmental impact regarding production, use and end-of-life phases. The proposed research focuses life cycle cost from consumer side in order to evaluate the economic feasibility, using ecological solutions for transportation in EU. Different use scenarios are proposed, considering different vehicle sizes and mileages, without considering taxes and any governance incentives. © 2014 IEEE.

A niche of the electric vehicle market is the electric retrofit of existing vehicles. These updates replace internal combustion engines with high efficiency electric motors and high capacity Li-ion batteries. This market is dominated by mostly small and medium size enterprises that provide tailored solutions to customers. These companies seek to reduce their costs and lead times by using virtual prototyping tools and methods in the main design processes. In this context, our work defines a design methodology to support designers in the definition of cooling systems. As a test case, we analyzed the electric retrofit of a small electric car with a lead-acid battery that was updated to Li-ion technology. We focused on a simulation of the cooling of the battery using a thermal analysis based on the physical parameters of the cell and test bench results. The issue is the evaluation of the heat generated by the electrochemical reactions of lithium ion battery cells. A representative battery module was simulated following the methodological approach. The virtual prototyping analysis was divided into two levels: the thermal simulation of a single cell, and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of a battery module composed of LiFePO4 prismatic cells. The geometric and fluid dynamic parameters were investigated with a CFD solver to study the cooling performance. A cooling system configuration was proposed and analyzed using the virtual prototyping tools. © 2013 IEEE.

Nowadays, electric vehicles fill a relevant car market share. The Li-Ion batteries currently represent the best solution in term of environmental impact and performance. Thermal management for Li-Ion batteries is a very interesting topic, since high temperatures accelerate degradation rate of a cell and compromise its safety level. The battery thermal modeling can be quite challenging. The proposed approach describes a methodology to simulate different thermal management algorithms in order to obtain an uniform temperature distribution in a Li-Ion battery pack. A test case has been developed where the application of an thermal algorithm has been analyzed through CFD simulations.