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In order to provide efficient thermal management for an electric vehicle, the development of the cooling and conditioning system has to start early on in the overall product development cycle. This means that the first simulation models have to make do with relatively few actual data, mostly based on concepts and design studies. Accordingly the possible results are mainly useable for early on feasibility assessments. With more data and more details available, these simulation models gradually evolve, until in the end the overall cooling system is modeled with a relatively high level of detail. This allows e.g. transient analysis of warm-up or cool-down runs, simulation of driving cycles, implementation and optimization of control strategies. Although this basic workflow is true both for ICE and electric vehicles, for the latter specific topics like battery thermal management and HVAC integration add to the overall complexity.

Reliability of CAE processes is one of the major tasks of development groups within the automotive business in our days. Since more than 15 years ECS is dealing with the simulation of vehicle thermal management including the engine cooling package as well as the HVAC system. For these purposes the 1D software (KULI) and various 3D approaches are used to analyze the thermal efficiency of such systems. This paper shows examples where 1D and 3D simulations were combined to increase the reliability of the results.