Combined Battery Design Optimization and Energy Management of a Series Hybrid Military Truck

This article investigates the fuel savings potential of a series hybrid military truck using a simultaneous battery pack design and powertrain supervisory control optimization algorithm. The design optimization refers to the sizing of the lithium-ion battery pack in the hybrid configuration. The powertrain supervisory control optimization determines the most efficient way to split the power demand between the battery pack and the engine. Despite the available design and control optimization techniques, a generalized mathematical formulation and solution approach for combined design and control optimization is still missing in the literature. This article intends to fill that void by proposing a unified framework to simultaneously optimize both the battery pack size and power split control sequence. This is achieved through a combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and Pontryagin’s minimum principle (PMP) where the design parameters are integrated into the Hamiltonian function. As GA and PMP are global optimization methodologies under suitable conditions, the solution can be considered as a benchmark for the application under study. Five military drive cycles are used to evaluate the proposed approach. The simulation results show 5%-19% reduction in fuel consumption depending on the drive cycle compared to a baseline non-optimized case.