The high-profile British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) has been a tradition since 1958 and is a great spectacle of 30+ highly-engineered road cars battling to win. In 2022 the championship will add a new dimension and will become the world’s first major touring car championship to feature high-performance mild-hybrid vehicles.
The BTCC has specified that an electric motor can be used tactically by drivers to boost the internal combustion engine (ICE) performance and enhance vehicle acceleration. This contract was awarded to Cosworth Electronics, which subcontracted this highly specialised endeavour to Delta Motorsport. Due to their multidisciplinary engineering reputation and expertise in electronics, Delta Motorsport agreed to design a new battery pack and associated electronics for the “tactical boost.”
The new 48V lithium-ion-based battery pack has an innovative intelligent power management and high-power-density DC-DC converter and regulation system. The battery pack powers the inverter-motor combination and also accepts regenerated power from it, while the high-power-density converter solution powers all the car’s electrical circuits and devices. The level of power density and power management achieved by this architecture allowed the alternator system to be removed, further improving weight, performance and reliability.
The system achieves compact size, light weight and high performance by utilising a modular power delivery network (PDN) that incorporates the 48VDC power source that is fed to four DC-DC converters connected in parallel, which together supply regulated 13.8V power at up to 92 amps (approximately 1.2 kilowatts of power). The load is shared by the four converters, although it can be fully supported by just three, i.e., N+1, or aviation-level redundancy.
The hybrid system’s 3-phase brushless motor connects to the battery through a bidirectional inverter that routes battery power to the motor and regenerated power from the motor back to the battery.
