Fuel economy of a hybrid electric vehicle with short term velocity predictions : GA based approach

Abstract

The increasing of fuel price and environmental concerns, researches were pushed to think about more fuel-efficient and less emission vehicles. As a result of this great enthusiasm, researchers were able to introduce Hybrid technology to the field of automobile. In hybrid electric power trains, an internal combustion engine (lCE) together with an electric motor (EM) is used as two energy sources. Use of an electrical motor in place of the ICE during different stages of driving results a definite saving in fuel usage. Researches did not satisfy with this saving and these endless efforts gave the birth to the concept of intelligent vehicles or telematics - enabled Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV). These vehicles may use a sensor network to obtain the information about the degree of traffic flow in the environment which they are operating, and subsequently adjust their drive cycle to get the better improvement in fuel economy based on these information. In this thesis, a conventional vehicle and a HEV with different amount of traffic flow information are compared in terms of fuel economy over two different drive cycles. First simulation results for conventional vehicle was compared with simulation results for an HEV without traffic flow information and HEV with available of traffic flow information for 4 seconds & 8 seconds ahead of current time, over New European Drive Cycle (NEDC). Thus estimated the same for a Sri Lankan Drive Cycle named Colombo Drive Cycle (CDC) . Results show that with increase of traffic flow information, the fuel economy of the HEV is increased. Finally two drive cycles were compared and the comparison shows that the improvement in fuel saving is very significant for CDC