An Energetic Comparison for Hybrid Vehicles Ranging from Low to High Degree of Hybridization

The efficiency achievable with effective energy management strategies represents a key issue for modern hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs). In this paper, by comparing different HEVs architectures with the same power to weight ratio, the dependence of energy consumption on different degrees of hybridization and powertrain architectures is analyzed. The fuel economy achievable by using dynamic programming based strategies is considered as the benchmark. The comparative study analyzes also the influence of driving cycles and the impact of plug-in concepts both on fuel economy and battery lifetime. Numerical results on realistic vehicles highlight the higher energy saving potentialities offered by parallel HEVs, while series HEVs remain of interest because of their simpler energy management and higher suitability for plug-in operations.