Design and experimental analysis of an efficient HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) system on an electric bus with dynamic on-road wireless charging

The design, control and experimental verification of an HVAC (heating, ventilation, air-conditioning) system to achieve high operational efficiency for an electric bus equipped with a dynamic wireless charging capability are described in this paper. Target power capacities of the HVAC system have been set as 28 kW of cooling and 26 kW of heating with a 600 V in-vehicle environment with COPs (coefficient of performance) of more than 1.6 for cooling and 2.6 for heating, which are required for customer's comfort. For an efficient HVAC system design, an integrated air-conditioning with a heat pump system is proposed and analyzed to meet the objectives of the HVAC system, incorporating the waste heat recovery from the drive motor, its driver, and other wireless charging electric modules. In addition, a control algorithm for operational energy management, considering the real-time power consumption and the wirelessly delivered power, is also proposed and verified to secure an actual operational energy consumption target. Through the component- and vehicle-level of the experimental performance verification, combined with energy demand dynamic model, the proposed HVAC system is verified experimentally to meet target power capacities and efficiency measures for cooling and heating, which are important to electric buses, especially with dynamic wireless charging capability.