Control and energy management strategies for a novel series hybrid

In this work a novel series hybrid powertrain concept is presented. The concept removes the requirement for a power electronic converter to manage the state of charge of the accumulators by controlling the power flow between the generator and accumulator. Instead, the engine and generator are directly coupled and the state of charge of the accumulators is maintained by controlling the speed and power output of the engine to control the power flow to the accumulators. Results are presented from a proof-of-concept system that was built for a vehicle with a target peak power of 60kW with supercapacitors. Models are also presented comparing and contrasting a battery version with the supercapacitor version for a Formula Student vehicle. The powertrain is particularly suited for applications which have very high torque requirements, and hence the use of a mechanical gearbox introduces significant cost & weight, and is also ideally suited for applications where power needs to be distributed throughout an application to multiple locations, and hence multiple mechanical linkages would normally be required. The supercapacitor version is most suited to applications with high peak to average load ratios and noisy load cycles, and the battery version could be seen as a low cost route to range extend a battery electric vehicle.