Closed-Loop Design for Hybrid Powertrains

The increasing interest into hybrid electric vehicles imposes the need to provide computational support for design choices during the development of these vehicles. This paper presents the use of a new methodology which allows for automatically generating topologically different hybrid powertrain concepts, and evaluating their performance. Since the energy management controller plays an important role in the performance assessment, a modular framework based on optimal control theory is used for assessing the closed-loop performance of different hybrid powertrain architectures. This paper illustrates how the concept generation methodology can be combined with optimal control in order to compare the closed-loop performance of a series and parallel hybrid powertrain.