Implementation and performance analysis of ECMS for P0 hybrid light commercial vehicle

The automotive industry has been driven to develop more sustainable transportation solutions, in lieu of recent legislations regarding emissions reduction. The need comes from the fact that road transport is a major contributor to greenhouse gas and other emissions. Hybrid electric vehicles proved to have significant potential to increase fuel consumption efficiency and reduce tailpipe emissions. This comes at the expense of complex Powertrain architectures, control strategies and software development, for the purpose of developing control units of the vehicle. The aim of this thesis is to implement and evaluate the performance of on-line implementable energy management system for hybrid electric vehicles. The strategy is named as “Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (ECMS)”, and it was implemented for a Light Commercial Vehicle (LCV) with a 2.2L diesel engine. The vehicle is equipped with a 48V electric motor in P0 hybrid architecture i.e., connected to the engine at the front side through a belt coupling. The vehicle and powertrain model used were developed in “GT-Suite” software whereas the ECMS controller was developed in Simulink. Furthermore, the first release of actual ECU software was tested to identify anomalies and test calibrations, to be taken care of in further development of software. The results were compared, validated, and analyzed against a high-fidelity simulation data, specifically to identify fuel consumption benefits, battery state of charge trend and adaptation over the WLTP driving cycle.