Modeling Challenges in Automotive EMC
Automotive electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) becomes increasingly important with the trend of vehicles moving toward intelligent and connected. It is critical to incorporate EMC design and control risks at the early design stages, instead of conventionally addressing EMC issues at the last stage. Simulations become more important as they can be used to effectively achieve this goal. In addition, many EMC issues, such as the inconsistency between the module- and system-level electromagnetic interference (EMI) tests, may be well studied using simulation. However, it is usually very challenging to perform automotive EMC simulations, due to the limitations in computational resources, limitations of computational methods and algorithms, and lack of availability of critical information. In this paper, the radio-frequency (RF) interference from the motor drive system to the RF antennas installed in a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) was used as an example to demonstrate the challenges in vehicle-level simulation and a divide and conquer approach was presented as a possible solution. With an effective and efficient method, design explorations using simulation were also demonstrated.