Design and control of the energy management system of a smart vehicle

This thesis demonstrates the design of two high efficiency controllers, one non-predictive and the other predictive, that can be used in both parallel and power-split connected plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Simulation models of three different commercially available vehicles are developed from measured data for necessary testing and comparisons of developed controllers. Results prove that developed controllers perform better than the existing controllers in terms of efficiency, fuel consumption, and emissions

A Novel Model of Internal Combustion Engine for High Efficiency Operation of Hybrid Electric Vehicles and Power Systems

This article realizes a novel model of an internal combustion engine (ICE) based on its operating torque and speed for the purpose of designing new control strategies to optimize engine efficiency and performance in hybrid electric vehicles and power systems. The proposed model is developed such that it utilizes only a limited number of experimentally measured operating conditions of the internal combustion engine. Therefore it helps in minimizing the expensive and time consuming testing of the vehicle under a large number of operating conditions in comparison to other models. On the other hand, it is possible to utilise the model to determine a novel control strategy for fuel consumption reduction in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). This fuel consumption reduction is achieved through the use of the proposed model to predict the efficiency of operation of the ICE instead of the fuel utilization predicted by conventional models. In order to prove the accuracy of the proposed model, efficiency of operation of six known ICEs have been modelled and compared with three existing models utilizing larger numbers of experimental data. The errors in efficiency in comparison to known data are found to be within a reasonable range. The paper finally demonstrates the possible applications of the proposed model in high efficiency control of ICE in a model of the 2010 Toyota Prius developed using experimental data. The demonstration for the proposed model is in the form of a vehicular system however it is envisaged that this model has applications in hybrid power systems also

Design of the experimental setup for a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle

This paper identifies the procedure utilized to determine the required ratings of components for the experimental setup of a 2 by 2 power-split connected plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. The test vehicle considered for this project has been selected from the available small scale conventionally driven vehicles in Western Australia. The main criteria for vehicle selection required that an existing electrical network was available, with alternator and battery and that the chassis has significant space and supportable structure for the coupling of an electric motor to the driveshaft. Following the selection of the vehicle the appropriate sizing of electrical components was undertaken considering a scaled standardized drive cycle selected to be utilized for testing. This involves the estimation and selection of the electric motor size, energy storage requirement and associated ratings of power electronics for control. The ADVISOR software package has been utilized to support the calculated sizes of electrical components for this experimental setup

High Efficiency Control of Internal Combustion Engines in Blended Charge Depletion/Charge Sustenance Strategies for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles

This paper realizes a novel control strategy for the fuel consumption reduction in plug-in hybrid and hybrid electric vehicles having an internal combustion engine (ICE) and one or more motor/generators. The proposed control strategy combines power balancing and variable speed control to achieve a more efficient utilization of fossil fuel energy that is consumed over standardized drive cycles. Furthermore, a high-efficiency region in the ICE performance map is utilized to aid with energy management decisions. For the test bench, three vehicle models have been developed in ADVISOR (the software package utilized in this paper) using available measured data. After verifying the accuracy of models, the proposed control strategy is implemented in the three vehicles to demonstrate reduced fuel consumption. The proposed control strategy is applicable to parallel-connected and power-split-connected topologies