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Audi Hungaria: how we test our electric drives

2021. 06. 04.

Audi Hungaria’s Vehicle Drive Development area, with its close to 400 highly qualified employees, follows electric drives from the pre-development phase through series development up to the support provided for series production. The area carries out the testing and inspection of electric drives, among others, with the help of back-to-back (i.e. B2B) benches and acoustic test benches.

Győr, 4 June 2021 -

“Our Technical Development is AUDI AG’s third-largest development hub and also the centre of competence for simulation and acoustic and strength analysis testing. Audi Hungaria specialists also provide services for the various production sites of the Volkswagen Group, as they are capable of testing all drive systems of the Group on their test benches. We continue to build our competence in the field of vehicle drive development by continuously expanding our measurement portfolio. I can confidently say that we are not only ready for e-transformation in the field of vehicle drives, but we are also shaping it,” said Alfons Dintner, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Audi Hungaria.

The perfect interplay of the electric motor, the gearbox and power electronics is necessary for the operation of an efficient and reliable electric drive. One of the tasks of the specialists in Vehicle Drive Development is therefore to responsibly design the components and subsequently test and approve their operation. Their activities also include the validation of electric drive systems in the pre-production phase and providing support for series production. To ensure this, detailed measurements are carried out on various test benches under extreme thermal, electrical and mechanical conditions.

The set-up used on the B2B test benches consists of two electric drives, half shafts and two spur gear drives. During the testing process, one of the electric engines takes over the drive function, thus driving the other electric drive through the spur gears, so that the latter becomes the test machine in a classical sense. The main feature of the device is that it can be operated without a braking device, so that two drives can be tested simultaneously. Tis way, one of the electric drives operates in motor mode and the second in generator mode, in alternating mode. This, on the one hand, allows approval procedures to be performed extremely efficiently and fast and, on the other hand, the optimum design of the test bench allows a higher torque or speed to be easily reached by simply modifying the spur gear.

The B2B test bench can also stand up to the test of the weather: the pallets used in B2B tests, on which the electric motor is preassembled by the staff and transferred into the test chamber, can also be operated in a conditioning cabinet. The conditioning cabinet allows the drives to be tested under extreme weather conditions, from the Arctic cold to the Sahara heat and beyond: technicians can test the drives in temperatures ranging from -70°C to 160°C, allowing them to even model various, quite extreme driving environments in which the drive can later be used daily by our customers. In addition to the external temperature, the temperature of the electric drive’s coolant can also be adjusted independently in a range of -40°C and 80°C.

A wide range of test profiles can be run with the combination of the B2B test bench and the conditioning cabinet, including, for example, life cycle tests in different climatic conditions as well as experiments at temperature limits.

The Győr site, in close cooperation with AUDI AG, plays a leading role in the active environmental testing of electric drives. This, above all, includes the management and support of the related test runs and the coordination of internal and external test capacities.

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