For years the interest of the University of Roma 1 (UDR1) research group has been focused on the development of a Hybrid Series vehicle (called Lethe), different from standard ones, thanks to the use of a Gas Turbine (GT) set as a thermal engine. The reason for this choice resides in the opportunity to reduce weight and dimensions, in comparison to a traditional Internal Combustion Engine. It’s...

This paper is the second of a two part study which quantifies the economic and greenhouse performance of conventional, hybrid and fully electric passenger vehicles operating in Australian driving conditions. This second study focuses on the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions. Two vehicle sizes are considered, Class-B and Class-E, which bracket the large majority of passenger vehicles on Austra...

1. What is a Hypercar® vehicle? 2. How could Hypercar® vehicles attain such dramatically improved fuel economy? 3. Would there be tradeoffs in performance or styling? 4. Why a hybrid-electric instead of a battery-electric vehicle? 5. What fuels would Hypercar® vehicles use? 6. Are fuel cells being considered in Hypercar® vehicles? 7. Why advanced composites? 8. Would Hypercar® vehicles be safe?...

Automotive Industry is targeting sustainable transportation in near future. Therefore hybrid and electric vehicles are going to be popular due to their sustainability, energy saving and zero emission. Electric motors play significant role in EV’s. In-wheel motor technology is being used in modern electric vehicles to improve efficiency, safety and controllability of vehicle nowadays. BLDC motor...

This paper presents the power management strategy for a parallel hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). The vehicle is powered by dual energy sources consisting of internal combustion engine (IC engine) as the peak power source and the electric battery as the secondary energy source. The operational principle of the power management strategy and the possible power flow patterns are described. Based on...

Two major emerging automotive technologies are the continued development of hybrid-electric drivetrains and telematics-enabled (or ‘intelligent’) vehicles capable of garnering and utilizing information about the traffic environment in which the vehicles are operating. The significant costs of each of these technologies are located internal to the vehicle (i.e. the powertrain) in the former case...

This paper presents a hybrid cascaded H-bridge multilevel motor drive control scheme for electric/hybrid electric vehicles where each phase of a three-phase cascaded multilevel converter can be implemented using only a single DC source and capacitors for the other DC sources. Traditionally, each phase of a three-phase cascaded multilevel converter requires n DC sources for 2n + 1 output voltage...

The fuel consumption of a simulation model of a real Hybrid Electric Vehicle is optimized on a standardized driving cycle using metaheuristics (PSO, ES, GA). Search space discretization and metamodels are considered for reducing the number of required, time-expensive simulations. Two hybrid metaheuristics for combining the discussed methods are presented. In experiments it is shown that the use...