Powerpack Design in S-HEV: Quantifying the Influence of Duty Cycles on Design and Fuel Economy

Military vehicles experience a wide range of duty cycles depending on the place and purpose of their deployment. Vehicle fuel consumption directly depends on those use cases, which are ranging from patrolling during peace keeping operations to direct engagements in hostiles areas. Vehicle design should accommodate this wide range of operation modes to maximize the vehicle practicality during their service life. This paper aims to quantify the sensitivity of the powerpack design for a notional 15-ton series hybrid electric vehicle for two highly dynamic military drive cycles. The optimal design for a powerpack (engine coupled with a generator) will be separately determined for each of the use cases through a previously developed optimization routine that use the Genetic Algorithm. For each iteration of the Genetic Algorithm a design benchmarking was incorporated by using Dynamic Programming. Subsequently a comparison between the cycle-optimized designs will be performed to quantify the fuel consumption penalty of operating the vehicle with a cycle-tailored design on a different cycle. The results can help to understand the sensitivity of the vehicle fuel economy under various use conditions rather than designing around a single drive cycle.