• Energy Research

CONVENIENT is a project where prediction and integrated control are applied on several subsystems with electrified actuators. The technologies developed in this project are applied to a long-haul t ...

AbstractCONVENIENT is a project where prediction and integrated control are applied on several subsystems with electrified actuators. The technologies developed in this project are applied to a long-haul tractor and semi-trailer combination. A Volvo truck meeting the Eu6 emission standard is rebuilt with a number of controllable electrified actuators. An e-Horizon system collects information about future road topography and speed limits. Controllable aerodynamic wind deflectors reduce the wind drag. The tractor is also equipped with a full digital cluster for human machine interface development.A primary project goal is to develop a model-based optimal controller that uses predictive information from the e-Horizon system in order to minimize fuel consumption. Several energy buffers are controlled in an integrated and optimal way using model predictive control. Several buffers are considered, such as the cooling system, the battery, and the vehicle kinetic energy. This paper presents details on the model predictive controller of the battery system and of the cooling system. Another project goal is to reduce fuel consumption by using adaptive aerodynamics. Controllers are developed that automatically sets an optimal roof deflector angle and the optimal side deflector angle. The results presented in this paper are encouraging. A third focus is the human machine interface and especially the communication between the driver and the control system during driving. This project develops a driver interface that encourages the driver to use the adaptive cruise controller when appropriate.The CONVENIENT project will be finalized this year. This paper presents the main project findings.

Reducing energy consumption of ground vehicles is a paramount pursuit in academia and industry. Even though the road infrastructural has a significant influence on vehicular fuel consumption, the majority of the R&D efforts are dedicated to improving vehicles. Little investigation has been made in the optimal design of the road infrastructure to minimize the total fuel consumption of all vehicles running on it. This paper focuses on this overlooked design problem and the design parameters of the optimal road infrastructure is the profile of road grade angle between two fixed points. We assume that all vehicles on the road follow a given acceleration profile between the two given points. The mean value of the energy consumptions of all vehicles running on the road is defined as the objective function. The optimization problem is solved both analytically by Pontryagin’s minimum principle and numerically by dynamic programming. The two solutions agree well. A large number of Monte Carlo simulations show that the vehicles driving on the road with the optimal road grade consume up to 31.7% less energy than on a flat road. Finally, a rough cost analysis justifies the economic advantage of building the optimal road profile.

<div class=""abs_img""><img src=""[disp_template_path]/JRM/abst-image/00260006/13.jpg"" width=""300"" />Schematic of ECMS controller</div> Decreasing fuel consumption and emissions in automobiles continues to be an active research problem. A promising technology is powertrain hybridization. Study in this area usually focuses on the development of optimal power management control methods. The equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS) is a widely used real-time control method used for determining the optimal trajectory of the power split between the engine and motor. Reports also cover applying ECMS to find an optimal gear changing strategy, but results are not always satisfactory in fuel economy and drivability. One possible reason for this is that gearbox dynamics are slow, but ECMS is based on instant optimization and neglects this time delay. This paper proposes a simple prediction strategy for improving ECMS performance used with gear changing control. The proposed controller improves fuel efficiency and drivability without the need of adding extra sensors to the automobile. The proposed method’s simplicity makes it suitable for implementation. </span>

The electric engine cooling system, where the coolant pump and the radiator fan are driven by electric motors, admits advanced control methods to decrease auxiliary energy consumption. Recent publications show the fuel saving potential of optimal control strategies for the electric cooling system through offline simulations. These strategies often assume full knowledge of the drive cycle and compute the optimal control sequence by expensive global optimization methods. In reality, the full drive cycle is unknown during driving and global optimization not directly applicable on resource-constrained truck electronic control units. This paper reports state-of-the-art engineering achievements of exploiting vehicular onboard prediction for a limited time horizon and minimizing the auxiliary energy consumption of the electric cooling system through real-time optimization. The prediction and optimization are integrated into a model predictive controller (MPC), which is implemented on a dSPACE MicroAutoBox and tested on a truck on a public road. Systematic simulations show that the new method reduces fuel consumption of a 40-tonne truck by 0.36% and a 60-tonne truck by 0.69% in a real drive cycle compared to a base-line controller. The reductions on auxiliary fuel consumption for the 40-tonne and 60-tonne trucks are about 26% and 38%, respectively. Truck experiments validate the consistency between simulations and experiments and confirm the real-time feasibility of the MPC controller.

Abstract Reducing energy consumption, regardless of fuel or electricity, of ground vehicles is a paramount pursuit in academia and industry. Current research concentrates exclusively on the improvement of the vehicle, but accepts the road conditions as external influences. The innovation of this article is to consider the road conditions, particularly the grade angle, as design variables. It is assumed that the stochastic speed trajectories of all vehicles on the road can be modelled by a Markov chain. The expected value of the average energy consumptions of all vehicles running on the road is defined as the objective function. The optimisation problem is solved by dynamic programming with Markov model. Evaluations have been made on both simulated and measured speed trajectories. For the simulated speed trajectories, the optimal road grade profile designed by the method saves up to 22% energy compared with a flat road. For the measured speed trajectories, the optimal road grade profile saves up to 2.7% transportation energy compared with the actual road profile. Application of this method on building road could lead to considerable energy saving.

Abstract To improve the energy efficiency of hybrid electric city buses, a hierarchical predictive energy management strategy (HP-EMS) based on driver behavior and type is proposed in this paper. Within the model predictive control (MPC) framework, the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) method is applied to identify the driver type, and the deep neural network (DNN) is adopted to predict future speed based on the historical speed, driver type, and driver behavior. Combined with the city bus driving characteristics, the hierarchical strategy aims to reduce the frequent starts of the engine. The upper-level controller implements a rule-based strategy to limit the engine start-stop frequency. The lower-level controller uses dynamic programming (DP) to search for the best control strategy in the prediction horizon. Simulation results show that, compared with speed prediction without driver information, the new method can effectively improve the accuracy of future speed prediction, and RMSE between the prediction and measurement drops from 1.58 m/s to 1.45 m/s. The HP-EMS without driver information can reduce the number of engine starts by 30% while increase only 2% energy consumption compared with predictive energy management without hierarchical control. The paper also studies the benefits of considering driver behavior and type. The same HP-EMS controller is implemented with and without driver behavior and type. The one with the additional information reduces the energy consumption by 3.34% compared to the one without the information.