An EV-simulator for Electric Vehicle Education

This paper presents an Electric Vehicle simulator to aid in Electric Vehicle Education. There has been an exponential surge in demand for developing new generation of vehicles using electric-technology. That has caused rapid shift in design paradigm from mechanical to electrical. Such a paradigm shift requires developing new technology educational programs in electric vehicles. The EV-simulator presented in this paper will be helpful for such programs. The simulator is written in Visual C++/MS Visual Studio .NET 2007. It is called LAMAR-EVSim1 after Lamar's first Electric Vehicle Lamar-EV1. The tool is primarily tailored for educational use. Input data to the simulator is presented through a set of input data files including specifications of: the vehicle, the electric-elements, and the environment. The simulator estimates output parameters hierarchically from the tire, gear-box, motor, battery-pack, and finally at vehicle-level. The estimated output parameters include: various drag forces, torques, currents, voltages, RPMs, powers, top speeds, and mileages. Unlike other ev-simulators, this simulator embeds dynamic equations & algorithms context-sensitively so that the output simulation trace are self-instructive.