Certain investigations on the improvement of hybrid electric vehicle performance through system optimization

Abstract

Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) are expected as one of the key solutions for mobility in the future, with reduced pollutions and better fuel economy alternative. Hence one of the primary requirements for the automobile manufacturers has to come up with alternative modern vehicle design technologies, that could support reduced pollution and improved useful energy efficiency. With the year on year increase on the number of the light-duty vehicles on road, the effect of emissions polluting the environment is also proportionally increasing. Although the use of other modes of transport like the ships and flights are increasing, the road transport mode will still continue to be the prominent one. Basically, there are three main concerns in driving the conventional fossil fuel based vehicles, that stimulates the automobile manufacturers to look for an alternative mode of vehicle technologies. They are pollution of the environment, vehicle dependency on fossil fuel, which is non-renewable and the global warming effect due to emissions. There are several research agencies which are working on improving road transport vehicle efficiency and reducing the emissions. Some of the key agencies include the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Energy Agency (IEA), and the International Transport Forum (ITF). They are working together to almost double the fuel efficiency by 2050 and hence decreasing emissions by almost 50%. One of the best approaches and forecast provided and supported by those agencies is to migrate to pure electric vehicles. The electric vehicles are pollution free and silent, and hence proves to be pure eco-friendly vehicles. Although car manufacturers are into the production of such pure electric vehicles on a small scale, there are some disadvantages currently that prevents them to move into mass production. One other vehicle technology that combines the advantages of the electric vehicle and conventional fossil fuel based vehicle is Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV). In this research, an analysis on Parallel HEV to reduce fuel usage and improve emission control performance, in addition to optimizing the size of its key components has been performed. The optimization of the parallel HEV is performed using both the analytical and heuristic approach and their pros and cons were discussed. newline