Vehicle Plant Model and Supervisory Control Development for a Parallel Pre-Trans Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle

The Arizona State University EcoCAR-3 team is a new team in Advanced Vehicle Technology Competitions (AVTCs), competing among 16 North American Universities under a 4 year competition aimed at redesigning a high performance conventional vehicle into a hybrid electric vehicle, reducing the environmental impacts while maintaining the performance of the vehicle. The team imitates General Motors (GM) Vehicle Development Process (VDP) in designing, building and refining the vehicle. The first step in design process is Powertrain Architecture selection, and the team is designing a parallel pre-transmission plug-in hybrid vehicle to meet the competition targets. The proposed powertrain consists of a 2.4L gasoline (E85) engine, a 140 kW electric motor, 6-speed automatic gearbox and 18.9 kWh battery pack. The vehicle is capable of delivering 30 mile all-electric operation, along with an impressive Utility Factor weighted fuel economy of 50 mpgee.This paper presents the vehicle model development done by the Arizona State University EcoCAR-3 team in year-1 of the competition. The paper explains the detailed vehicle architecture, modeling platform, technical goals of the team and vehicle performance and energy consumption calculations. Control strategies for power flow management, as well as control system development has been addressed, along with approaches used to address any modeling imperfection.