Simulation of Customer Loads for Control Units under Thermic Loading

Electronic components in vehicles, like control units, are affected by various different loadings, e.g. due to:

• temperature changes
  
• long stay at high temperature
  
• simultaneous influence of temperature and humidity

The time series of temperature and humidity for a whole vehicle life depend on many influencing factors, like climate, vehicle usage or vehicle dependent mounting location.

Knowledge of realistic temperature and humidity time series is necessary to determine resulting damages of a whole population of control units in customer usage. Collecting real-world measurements is due to the variety of influential factors and the need for long test periods to cover climatic changes a very demanding process.

Simulation environment with realistic temperature and humidity profiles

Therefore, a simulation environment has been developed to provide an opportunity to simulate realistic temperature and humidity time series of many customers with taking all various influences into account. Climate data of different regions is used and user behavior is described by associating single drives to driver types like commuters or taxis, which defines basic vehicle usage. Every single driver can be described by additional parameters (e.g. starting time and duration of the trip) and vehicle typical differences in mounting location can be considered.

This setup facilitates the simulation of temperature and humidity time series for many control units. Load distributions of complete customer groups can be identified and compared with other regions or user behavior. Thanks to targeted variation of input parameters, determination of sensitivity to these parameters is possible.