Validation and Analysis of the Fuel Cell Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Built by Colorado State University for the EcoCAR 2: Plugging into the Future Vehicle Competition

EcoCAR 2 is the premiere North American collegiate automotive competition that challenges 15 North American universities to redesign a 2013 Chevrolet Malibu to decrease the environmental impact of the Malibu while maintaining its performance, safety, and consumer appeal. The EcoCAR 2 project is a three year competition headline sponsored by General Motors and U.S. Department of Energy. In Year 1 of the competition, extensive modeling guided the Colorado State University (CSU) Vehicle Innovation Team (VIT) to choose an all-electric vehicle powertrain architecture with range extending hydrogen fuel cells, to be called the Malibu H2eV. During this year, the CSU VIT followed the EcoCAR 2 Vehicle Design Process (VDP) to develop the H2eV’s electric and hydrogen powertrain, energy storage system (ESS), control systems, and auxiliary systems. From the design developed in Year 1 of the EcoCAR 2 competition, a Malibu donated by General Motors was converted into a concept validating prototype during Year 2. Through extensive vehicle simulations and on-road testing, the FCPHEV architecture was optimized to meet the goals of the VTS in Year 3. The progress of the CSU VIT through the vehicle design process, discussion of the safety control systems of the vehicle, optimization and validation of both software in the loop (SIL) and hardware in the loop (HIL) testing, as well as the expected VTS goals and realization of the FCPHEV prototype will be discussed in this paper.