Mobility and Systems

To reduce the significant impact of the transportation sector on the environment, developed countries worldwide have started a massive electrification of their car fleets with a high-volume production of the main components of the electric vehicle powertrain: the battery, the inverter, the electric motor, and the mechanical transmission elements. The electric motor is a central component of the powertrain, generally made of rare-earth magnets, copper, magnetic iron sheets (FeSi), aluminum and steel.

Each day, a human being breathes between 10,000 and 20,000 liters of air, which makes air quality a major concern for citizens and governments. While exhaust emissions have been drastically reduced over the past few decades due to more stringent regulations and technical progress, non-exhaust emissions from electrified vehicles were widely neglected. The proposed thesis aims to develop and validate methods of generation and characterization of aerosols as emitted during disc/pads contact to improve knowledge regarding the behavior of such particles and the ways to reduce these emissions.

Today, the awareness by the public authorities of the ecological footprint and the health impact of existing transport systems requires a significant change in the mobility offer. This thesis subject is part of the objectives of the 2020 French government plan for the deployment of hydrogen for the energy transition, which aims to promote the development of hydrogen-powered electric mobility, in particular for heavy duty applications (trucks, buses, trains, planes, ships, etc.).

Following the rapid emergence of electric vehicles on the automotive market, manufacturers are seeking to regularly improve the performance of their products in order to stand out from the competition. The sizing phase of the electric machine is therefore important, and designers often use multi-objective optimization methods coupled with multi-physical models that describe the performance of the machine with great precision. These models are based on the geometrical parameters of the design to be simulated and on the physical characteristics of the materials given by the suppliers.