With the recent adoption of fuel economy and emissions regulations for medium and heavy duty vehicles by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency, new technologies to meet these targets are being developed. One such vehicle architecture that could meetthese regulations is hydraulic hybridization. Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles which operate on high intensity drive cycles (city buses, delivery vehicles, refuse vehicles, etc.) are good candidates for hydraulic hybridization due to the drive cycle intensity and the speeds at which they operate.
This paper, through MATLAB/Simulink modeling, investigates the overall effectiveness of hydraulic hybridization through the selection of individual hydraulic parameters. With the effect of each hydraulic parameter determined, this paper defines a design of experiments to optimize the parameters for specific drive cycles to help determine the feasibility of the hydraulic technology for these classes of vehicles.