Towards Better Alternator Efficiency

Abstract: The requirements on vehicle industry are constantly getting stricter, especially when it comes to emissions. At the same time cars, trucks and buses are needed for our way of living. This have forced companies to be as ecient as possible in their way of using fossil fuels for travelling and transport. To increase the eciency companies investigate all possible fuel savings to decrease their carbon footprint as much as possible. One area of savings that is not that obvious to many people is the alternator. Several percent of the total energy used by a vehicle are needed to operate the alternator. With a typical alternator eciency of 70% considerable savings can be achieved. This thesis that concern alternator eciency was carried out at Scania in Södertälje, Sweden. The goal of the thesis is to construct a mathematical model of an alternator. The model is supposed to consider all losses in the alternator and together with the output power give an eciency model of the alternator at different speeds and loads. A great part of the project has been dealing with the magnetic losses. The magnetic losses have been modeled as an equivalent circuit with the load angle as a central piece. The equivalent circuit is built up by the fact that the alternator used in the vehicles is a salient pole alternator. The equivalent circuit describes a voltage equation where the voltage drop over the magnetic inductance is described. From that relations between the signals in the alternator and output signals can be written. The alternator model is then used together with data recorded from different buses all over the world, this to be able to investigate how the alternator contributes to the fuel consump- tion depending on the way that the buses are driven. The result of this thesis is a mathematical model that describes the losses in the alternator for different load cases and speeds.