Hybrid Electric Vehicle Powertrain Laboratory

Abstract

Personal vehicles have made great contributions to our life and satisfy our daily mobility needs. However, they have also caused societal issues, such as air pollution and global warming. Further to the recent attention to low-carbon energy technologies and environmentally friendly mobility, hybrid electric vehicles play an important role in the current automotive industry. As a leading center and an educational institution in Canada, McMaster University wants to build a Hybrid Electric Vehicle Powertrain Laboratory for introducing undergraduate students to hybrid powertrain architectures, instrumentation and control. A phased development of the hybrid powertrain teaching laboratory is being pursued. The first phase is to design a electric motor laboratory, as a platform for demonstrating motor characteristics. A LabVIEW based interface is designed to enable electric motor characterization tests. This laboratory set-up is still under construction. Real experiments would be implemented, once finishing the utility connections. For the hybrid powertrain laboratory, an innovative design architecture is proposed to enable different hybrid architectures, such as series, parallel, and power-split modes to be investigated. Instead of a planetary gearbox, bevel gearboxes with a continuous variable transmission (CVT) are used for making the laboratory more compact and flexible for demonstrating hybrid functionalities. The additional generator provides the ability of input power-split for allowing the engine to operate at a narrow high efficiency region. After designing the hybrid laboratory, a novel rule-based energy management strategy is applied to a simplified simulation model.