Study Of Fuel Economy And Power Performance For Buick LaCROSSE Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Driven by economic and environmental concerns, automobile engineers start considering the R&D of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), which are more technologically feasible. The R&D of HEV's powertrain is one of the key tasks and it requires accurate and flexible simulation tools. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on the modeling,simulation,testing & evaluation of HEV's powertrain. Firstly, the function & modeling method of Unified Energy & Driveability Model, which is based on MATLAB/Simulink & developed by GM is introduced. Then, component models, some of which already in the database of UM, while others were created on base of the bench measurement result, such as engine torque characteristic, BSFC, motor torque characteristic, motor efficiency characteristic, battery charge/discharge internal resistance etc., all of which were input into UM as the necessary component models.And then, HEV's powertrain acceleration tests, fuel economy, and electric energy consumption simulations are run using by UM. The comparison between simulation results and test data show that UM can predict these performances accurately.At last, in order to evaluate the HEV's powertrain primary components'working condition, several evaluation references, such as Ratio of Efficiency Distribution, are defined for the evaluation and proved to be feasible and rational by their application in real HEVs, LaCROSSE Hybrid. The current state of engine and motor's technology are also considered and set as criteria in the evaluation references.The results of this paper are both beneficial for HEV's powertrain Modeling & simulation for prediction of fuel economy and performance, and useful for its evaluation reference.