CAR Participates in ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit
The Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research (CAR) participated in the 2022 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit showcasing the Ohio State led NEXTCAR program with partners BorgWarner and Transportation Research Center (TRC). The summit, held in Denver Colorado May 23-26, brought together technical experts from a variety of disciplines across industry, academia, and government to think creatively about America’s energy challenges and share cutting edge research in energy innovation. The Summit was attended by the Honorable Jennifer M. Granholm, U.S. Secretary of Energy.
“The ARPA-E innovation summit is an amazing event that brings together more than 2,000 attendees, 20 government agencies, and 200+ project teams all focused on the next generation of advanced energy technologies,” said CAR Senior Associate Director, David Cooke, who serves as the project manager. Resuming the in-person event was excellent change a pace and provided the opportunity to meet with numerous teams across industry, academia, and government.”
The team is currently porting technologies developed during Phase-I from a mild HEV powertrain to a Plug-in HEV powertrain on a Chrysler Pacifica vehicle platform. Additionally, the team is extending these technologies to achieve 30+% energy savings leveraging higher levels of automation and connectivity. Key additions include optimizing the energy use of on-board auxiliary loads (mainly HVAC system and Thermal Management Systems) and using a Deep Reinforcement Learning framework to account for uncertainty in driving conditions such as traffic and enable validation of the technologies in representative traffic environments.
The vehicle is being outfitted by a third party upfitter with the required sensing and computing stack to achieve SAE-L4 capable driving automation.
Baseline vehicle energy evaluation is underway and this will be followed by a systematic evaluation of the energy efficiency benefits from the various enabling technologies on a closed-course test-track at TRC to evaluate gains in a real-world setting,” said CAR Research Associate Dennis Kibalama, who is a Lead Engineer on the project.
Project Partner and commercialization strategy leader, BorgWarner has developed an Intelligent Driving application which can be resident on any vehicle controller, is propulsion system agnostic, and supports varying levels of automation (SAE L0 – L5).
