Interdependence of System Control and Component Sizing for a Hydrogen-fueled Hybrid Vehicle

<div class="htmlview paragraph">Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) researchers have embarked on an ambitious program to quantitatively demonstrate the potential of hydrogen as a fuel for internal combustion engines (ICEs) in hybrid-electric vehicle applications. In this initiative, ANL researchers need to investigate different hybrid configurations, different levels of hybridization, and different control strategies to evaluate their impacts on the potential of hydrogen ICEs in a hybrid system.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">Because of limitations in the choice of motor and battery hardware, a common practice is to fix the size of the battery and motor, depending on the hybrid configuration (starter/alternator, mild hybrid, or full hybrid) and to tune the system control for the above-available electrical power/energy.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">ANL has developed a unique, flexible, Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) platform for advanced powertrain technology evaluation: The Mobile Advanced Technology Testbed (MATT). MATT has the flexibility to easily test advanced components in various hybrid configurations. In addition, MATT has the capability of emulating any size of motor and battery. Therefore, the powertrain under test can be evaluated with different levels of hybridization. The versatile control system software developed by ANL provides rapid evaluation of control options associated with each hybrid configuration and each level of hybridization.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">The powertrain currently under investigation at ANL consists of a supercharged hydrogen-fueled internal combustion engine and a dual clutch transmission. The engine and transmission are not emulated and are therefore fixed in terms of sizing.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">Since the motor and the battery are emulated, MATT makes it possible to resize the battery and the motor for every change in control strategy, thus enabling an iterative loop between control strategy and component sizing. This iterative sizing process would then result in components optimized for a control strategy. The ultimate aim of this iterative process is to identify the optimal control strategy and component sizing for a particular specifications set (performance and fuel economy).</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">As a first step, this interdependent sizing process was studied in simulation only by using ANL-developed PSAT (Power-train System Analysis Toolkit) [<span class="xref">1</span>], and the results are presented in this paper.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">The next stage is to validate the simulation results with the test data collected on MATT for different levels of hybridization and different control strategies.</div>