Fast, Detailed, Accurate Simulation of a Thermal Car-Cabin Using Machine-Learning

Abstract

Car-cabin thermal systems, including heated seats, air-conditioning, and radiant panels, use a large proportion of the energy budget of electric vehicles and thus reduce their effective range. Optimising these systems and their controllers might be possible with computationally efficient simulation. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art simulators are either too slow or provide little resolution of the cabin’s thermal environment. In this work, we propose a novel approach to developing a fast simulation by machine learning (ML) from measurements within the car cabin over a number of trials within a climatic wind tunnel. A range of ML approaches are tried and compared. The best-performing ML approach is compared to more traditional 1D simulation in terms of accuracy and speed. The resulting simulation, based on Multivariate Linear Regression, is fast (5 microseconds per simulation second), and yields good accuracy (NRMSE 1.8%), which exceeds the performance of the traditional 1D simulator. Furthermore, the simulation is able to differentially simulate the thermal environment of the footwell versus the head and the driver position versus the front passenger seat, but unlike a traditional 1D model cannot support changes to the physical structure. This fast method for obtaining computationally efficient simulators of car cabins will accelerate adoption of techniques such as Deep Reinforcement Learning for climate control.