Fast modelling and identification of hydraulic brake plants for automotive applications

Diffusion of electric and hybrid vehicles is accelerating the development of innovative braking technologies. Calibration of accurate models of a hydraulic brake plant involves availability of large amount of data whose acquisition is expensive and time consuming. Also, for some applications, such as vehicle simulators and hardware in the loop test rig, a real-time implementation is required. To avoid excessive computational loads, usage of simplified parametric models is almost mandatory. In this work, authors pro-pose a simplified functional approach to identify and simulate the response of a generic hydraulic plant with a limited number of experimental tests. To reproduce complex nonlinear behaviours that are difficult to be reproduced with simplified models, piecewise transfer functions with scheduled poles are proposed. This innovative solution has been successfully applied for the identification of the brake plant of an existing vehicle, a Siemens prototype of instrumented vehicle called SimRod, demonstrating the feasibility of proposed method.