Impact of Naturalistic Driving Patterns on PHEV Performance and System Design

The paper investigates the impact of the drive cycle choice on the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) design, and particularly the selection of component sizes. Models of representative Power-Split and Series PHEVs have been built and validated first. Then, the performance and energy/power usage metrics were obtained by simulating the vehicle behavior over real-world (naturalistic) drive cycles recorded during Field Operational Tests in South East Michigan. The PHEV performance predictions obtained with real-world driving cycles are in stark contrast to the results obtained by using a sequence of repeated federal drive cycles. Longer commutes require much higher peak power and consume much greater amount of energy per mile than EPA UDDS or HWFET cycle. The second part of the paper investigates the sensitivities of the PHEV attributes, such as the charge depleting range and the fuel economy in the charge sustaining mode, to component size variations. The results provide quantitative guidance pertaining to design decisions in the context of driving patterns.