Development and Validation of Engine Start/Stop Strategy for P2 Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Abstract

Today we live in an era where environmental awareness is increasing day by day, at the same time the gradual increase of gasoline prices is also a major issue [2]. Automobile industries are making efforts to address this problem and they are trying to find new methods to increase the mileage of vehicles and reduce environmental pollution caused by vehicles. Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) are one of the ways by which this goal can be achieved. This paper proposes a Start/Stop strategy for a vehicle consisting of P2 hybrid electric powertrain. In the vehicle with P2 hybrid electric powertrain, the clutch is present in between the engine and motor/generator. S/S strategy automatically turn off the engine when the vehicle is at rest and eliminate idle emissions. When the driver presses the clutch to select the 1st gear, S/S strategy restarts the engine automatically. In this system when a vehicle stops at a particular place for more than 10 s the vehicle will stop automatically and it will start as soon as the clutch is pressed. This strategy can be implemented in normal vehicles by converting them into P2 hybrid electric powertrain by means of very minor modifications. We have used LSM Amesim software to develop the P2 vehicle model and MATLAB Simulink to implement the Start/Stop control strategy. From experimentation, it is found that the fuel economy has improved by 5%–6% with limitation of start/stop frequency of 2 stops/km [9].