ODIN · Optimized electric Drivetrain by INtegration

One of the primary goals in the development of electric vehicles is to reduce the cost while ensuring performance and meeting automotive quality standards to reach market acceptance. System design of the electric power-train is based on existing components currently in different phases of the development process. Integrating these components into an electric power-train using current designs can only result in a suboptimal solution since components are generally not designed for integration, but rather to optimally fulfill the supplier's requirement specification.It is postulated that the most cost effective and reliable design is a highly integrated solution that reduces interfaces, variations of components and uses synergy effects e. g. common housing/casing wherever possible. The large design effort for such integration requires sufficiently large number of produced systems and will thus become attractive when the market enters the strong growth phase. This is expected around 2020 or early as 2018.Optimally integrated solutions are not achieved by simply assembling existing components, but by ensuring that components are designed according to integration aspects of the system requirements and by implementing and testing the complete integration early in the process.This project aims to develop a compact, efficient, highly integrated electromechanical powertrain, production optimized to deliver key cost reduction goals. The partners will focus on optimizing the integrated unit for an entry power level of a typical urban vehicle. In parallel they will assess scalability potential to meet the performance criteria of other platforms. Innovative simulation and optimization software tools will be used early in the concept phase to assess optimal design variations, the output of which will be a key input into determining how difficult they will be to scale between differing vehicle and system sizes. Built up of prototypes and implementation in demo car is planned.