Simulation Tools for Hybrid Electric Vehicle Architecture Simulations

Increasingly stringent regulations on emissions require automobile manufacturers to find new ways to reduce the emissions produced by their vehicles. If current trends provide for an indication of where the automotive industry is headed, hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs) will become very prevalent in the market in coming years. These technologies are all relatively new and still need much development before they can hold a significant place in the automotive market. It is for this reason that companies are investing heavily in training the next generation of engineers to work on this problem. EcoCAR 3, a four year long Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVTC), is one way companies are pursuing this. EcoCAR 3 challenges the engineering students to modify a stock Chevrolet Camaro, donated by GM, to reduce the vehicle’s energy consumption and tailpipe emissions, while maintaining standard vehicle performance. Due to the presence of multiple components in a HEV (engine, battery-pack and at least one electric machine), the complexity of optimizing the operation of the vehicle’s powertrain components significantly increases in comparison to a conventional vehicle. One of the topics that EcoCAR 3 series stresses during year 1 is architecture selection for the Chevrolet Camaro, which involves the team to select a vehicle architecture that meets the goals of both the competition and the team. Increasing demand for HEV designs require automated modeling and simulation tools to construct a design space search. Composability and scalability are highly desirable in these simulators to provide design candidates. The work described in this project focuses towards the tools developed and the validation done for these tools. These tools were developed for the EcoCAR 3 team of the Ohio State Universiy, which would provide assistance in generating different size engine fuel consumption maps and different size electric machine efficiency maps quickly. The maps generated by these tools can then be utilized to test how varying engine and electric machine sizes can affect the overall performance of the vehicle with different architectures.No embargoAcademic Major: Mechanical Engineerin