Study of emissions and fuel economy for parallel hybrid versus conventional vehicles on real world and standard driving cycles

Parallel hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) increasing rapidly in the automobile markets. However, the benefits out of using this kind of vehicles are still concerned a lot of costumers. This work investigated the expected benefits (such as decreasing emissions and increasing fuel economy) from using the parallel HEV in comparison to the conventional vehicle model of the real-world and standard driving cycles. The software Autonomie used in this study to simulate the parallel HEV and conventional models on these driving cycles. The results show that the fuel economy (FE) can be improved significantly up to 68% on real-world driving cycle, which is represented mostly city activities. However, the FE improvement was limited (10%) on the highway driving cycle, and this is expected since the using of brake system was infrequent. Moreover, the emissions from parallel HEV decreased about 40% on the real-world driving cycle, and decreased 11% on the highway driving cycle. Finally, the engine efficiency, improved about 12% on the real-world driving cycle, and about 7% on highway driving cycle