Infrastructure & Methods

The Institute of Sustainable Mobile Powertrains is located at Schragenhofstraße 31 in the west of Munich. The site comprises a spacious powertrain laboratory with office spaces, seminar rooms, testing facilities, and a well-equipped prototyping workshop. The buildings are easily accessible by tram, subway, bicycle, and car, and are situated in the Kapuzinerhölzl, a green island in the middle of the city, between the Nymphenburg Palace Park, the Botanical Garden, and the Hartmannshofer Park.

The powertrain laboratory covers an area of over 1000 m² and includes 13 test rigs in 9 separate test cells with separate control rooms, as well as additional areas for component testing. The test facilities are inaccessible to the public, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and prototypes.

Electric machines and internal combustion engines up to a power of 700 kW can be operated at the site. The test facility has a powerful connection to the city's electrical grid rated at 1200 kVA, allowing a wide range of drive systems from small equipment to cars, trucks, and large-scale engines to be tested.

Below is an overview of the available infrastructure. Please contact Christian Hödl for further information on availability and technical details.

Powertrain test rigs

Test stand for electric machines up to 250 kW
Mobile small-scale test stand for electric machines up to 15 kW
Single-cylinder research engine 0.5 l gasoline for transparent engine and thermodynamic engine testing
Single-cylinder research engine 0.5 l gasoline for tribology engine testing with glass liner
Single-cylinder research engine 1.8 l diesel for transparent engine and thermodynamic engine testing in trucks
Single-cylinder research engine 5 l gas for transparent engine and thermodynamic engine testing

Fuel & Gas supply

Charge air conditioning up to 10 bar
Ventilation system for hydrogen operation in all test cells
Natural gas supply up to 250 bar
Hydrogen supply up to 350 bar
Gas mixing system for custom blends
Special fuels (e.g., biogas, methanol, ammonia, e-fuels)
Conventional fuels (gasoline, diesel)

Component test rigs for fuel injection technology

Diesel fuel injection chamber with optical access
Gasoline fuel injection chamber with optical access and cooling system
Injection trajectory indicator

Prototyping and mechanical workshop

CNC milling machine DMU60 Monoblock, 5-axis
Cycle lathe GDW
Welding workshop (TIG, MAG, electrodes, autogenous)
Sandblasting cabinet
FDM printer
Electronics workshop
Adhesives laboratory
Vehicle workshop with lift

Electrical capabilities

2x 630 kVA three-phase power supply
2-channel DC source/sink including battery simulator (1200 V / 1200 A / 400 kW)
Power analyser, including Yokogawa WT5000

Exhaust gas measurement technology

Condensation particle counter TSI (cut-off 10 nm and 23 nm)
Partial flow particle counter Horiba MEXA-2100SPCS - Scanning mobility particle sizer TSI (SMPS) - Differential mobility analyzer TSI (DMA) - FTIR gas analysis (AVL SESAM i60 FT SII and IAV versa 06) - Microsoot sensor AVL - HSense for Hydrogen emissions - LubeSense for oil consumption and emission
Conventional analysis with Horiba MEXA-ONE-D1

Optical measurement technology

High-speed color camera (Phantom V2012) and monochrome (HSS6, Phantom V2011, V5011, Imager ProX), high-speed IRO's
High-speed Nd:YAG laser (10kHz, 9mJ@532nm) and high-speed dye laser
Low-speed Nd:YAG laser (10Hz, 420mJ@532nm) and low-speed dye laser
PIV system
Flash lamps, LED lighting system (developed in-house)
Various endoscopes in the visible and UV-optimized range
Spectrometer
Self-developed optical motors (passenger car, heavy-duty, and high-speed large-scale motor) with full optical access through glass bulbs and side illumination option
Cold injection chambers (0.5-4 bar abs., 1-50 bar abs.)

IT Infrastructure @NMA

In-house IT cluster, administered by NMA, supported by LRZ
6 CPU workstations with up to 192 cores and 800 GB RAM each
3 GPU workstations with NVIDIA Tesla A100 GPUs and 1 TB RAM
More than 300 TB of internal high-speed data storage
10 Gb/s data connection linking test facilities and IT cluster

Software for research and development

FEM: Ansys Multiphysics
CAD: Catia, Solidworks
CFD: Converge, Star CCM+, PreonLab
Simulation 0D/1D: GT-Suite, Matlab/Simulink, Python
Automation and control: Labview
Measurement data processing: AVL Concerto 5
Experiment planning and execution: DoE
Full access to A2MAC1 vehicle database including teardown reports, photos and cost analyses