Optimization of the Control Strategy for a Range Extender Vehicle

The Subject of this work is the optimization of the control stratgy for a Plug-In Range Extender in order to decrease CO2 emissions with respect to the regulations. Therefore, the vehicle is equipped with a gasoline combustion engine, a high voltage battery and two electric motors. One electric motor propells the front axle and the other one is connected to the combustion engine to generate electric power. The control is restricted by customer requirements due to the concept of the vehicle.

A Model-in-the-Loop is created to simulate the control strategy with support of a battery model. Therefore, the control strategy is optimized in a Matlab/Simulink environment. The simulation results are compared to tests on the dynamometer rig. The optimization highly depends on the specific goal function, which can be a global optimization or a local minimum to balance the State of Charge. Furthermore, customer related drive cycles are taken into account to analyze the control strategy.