SIL, HIL, and Vehicle Fuel Economy Analysis of a Pre-Transmission Parallel PHEV

EcoCAR 2 is a collegiate level Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition which challenges students to re-engineer a General Motors (GM) donated 2013 Malibu Eco as a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle over the course of three years. The competition is organized by Argonne National Laboratory with the U.S. Department of Energy and GM as the headline sponsors. As part of this competition, Mississippi State University (MSU) has designed a pre-transmission parallel PHEV which utilizes a 145 kW permanent magnet brushless DC motor, a 18.9 kWh Li-ion battery, and a GM 1.4 L turbocharged engine which has been tuned for E85 fuel. A supervisory control system has been utilized to interface the hybrid components to the production vehicle, and implements a control strategy enabling charge depleting (CD) and charge sustaining (CS) modes of operation. In order to develop this control strategy and evaluate the vehicle, a simulation model has been constructed in Matlab Simulink for software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. This vehicle model has been constructed using a combination of dSPACE Automotive Simulation Models and MSU developed component models. Each of these component models has been parameterized from manufacturer provided data in order to ensure the accuracy of the vehicle evaluations. An analysis of the vehicle’s fuel economy has been performed using SIL and HIL simulation over four drive cycles for CD and CS modes of operation. A combined fuel economy has been calculated according to SAE Standard J1711 for both E85 and gasoline fuels.