Improving Electric Vehicle Range and Thermal Comfort through an Innovative Seat Heating System

In the last decade, car manufactures invested a lot of effort to align their products to the latest energy directives which encourage the production and usage of electrified vehicles to reduce the greenhouse gases production. This resulted in several important developments, which enhanced the advantages of electric vehicles in terms of local emissions (zero tailpipe emissions), efficiency, convenience in urban areas and others and ultimately led to their ever-increasing adoption. However, there are still some challenges that need to be addressed. One example is the negative influence of low (winter) and high (summer) atmospheric temperatures on electric vehicle range due to the cabin temperature heating and cooling. This requires more efficient ways of using energy to avoid sacrificing the passenger thermal comfort for an increased vehicle range. The present study proposes a new strategy for heating the seats in electrically powered vehicles using an uneven distribution of the heating elements. The uneven positioning of the heating elements is based on the thermal sensitivity of the human skin measured data and scientific literature. For this, a thermal sensitivity test device was developed to map the human skin thermal sensitivity. To test the new solution, a vehicle seat was equipped with heating pads (arranged according to the position of the relevant human skin thermal sensitivity points). For the next step, comparative measurements (power consumption, temperature distribution-with an IR camera-and human subjectivity test) were carried out between a classical vehicle seat heating system and the newly proposed heating solution. The outcome of the study revealed that the proposed heating system will supply at least the same thermal comfort sensation as the standard vehicle seat but using only half of the energy consumption, which translates in an increase of the electrically powered vehicle range between 1.2% and 1.5%, depending on the climate and driving conditions (over the WLTC). For example, a vehicle with a 16 kWh battery driving over the WLTC in Frankfurt climate conditions can gain in 1 year between 139.6 and 164.5 km.