Effects of an Ultra-Capacitor and Battery Energy Storage System in a Hybrid Electric Vehicle

This paper focuses on the effects of ultra-capacitors as a component of energy storage in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). The main energy source in a hybrid vehicle is the battery. HEVs with battery sources are presently fairly effective; however, major drawbacks include the cost and size of such batteries. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the addition of ultra-capacitors as a component of the energy storage system can reduce these drawbacks significantly by reducing the size of batteries required to drive the vehicle. To integrate ultra-capacitors into hybrid vehicles, the ADvanced VehIcle SimulatOR (ADVISOR) was used. The vehicle used to conduct this study was the 2004 Jeep Liberty sport utility vehicle (SUV). To simplify the analysis process, the conventional Jeep Liberty was modeled in ADVISOR to resemble the actual performance specifications of the SUV currently in the market. This provided a platform to model the Jeep Liberty as a hybrid electric SUV and ultimately to include an energy storage model for the ultra-capacitors. The resulting data indicates that ultra-capacitors provide an effective means to reduce cost and weight of the HEV energy storage system while maintaining the same or improved performance of the conventional energy storage system.