Modeling and Development of E85 Fueled Two-Mode Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Texas Tech University (TTU) was one of sixteen universities competing in EcoCAR:-The Next Challenge competition. It is a three year collegiate advanced vehicle technology competition where teams are challenged to re-engineer a General Motors(GM) donated vehicle to achieve improved fuel economy and reduced emissions while maintaining consumer acceptability in the areas of stock performance, utility and safety. Two-mode hybrid which is an electrically variable transmission was selected as the Texas Tech team's architecture. The first year of the competition emphasized vehicle design through Powertrain System Analysis Toolkit (PSAT) software. The vehicle design parameters were established through vehicle technical specifications(VTS), development of software-in-the-loop (SIL) and hardware in-the-loop (HIL) techniques, rapid control system prototyping and components selection and sizing. These first year activities were continued for the vehicle development and refinement in subsequent years of the competition. This paper describes the design procedure of SIL, HIL and rapid prototyping. The Mathworks Simulink, SimDriveline, SimScape and Stateflow software provided an environment for modeling selected architecture and powertrain components. Once the model was verified HIL testing was performed with the use of National Instruments PXI and dSpace MicroAutoBox (MABX). In this way the process moved from mathematical models to lab based tests with HIL. A realistic vehicle propulsion controller was developed by moving to in-vehicle testing of the vehicles' on board software.