Browsing by Author "Lee, Jeongwoo"

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    Rotating Inertia Impact on Propulsion and Regenerative Braking for Electric Motor Driven Vehicles
    Lee, Jeongwoo (Virginia Tech, 2005-12-09)
    A vehicle has several rotating components such as a traction electric motor, the driveline, and the wheels and tires. The rotating inertia of these components is important in vehicle performance analyses. However, in many studies, the rotating inertias are typically lumped into an equivalent inertial mass to simplify the analysis, making it difficult to investigate the effect of those components and losses for vehicle energy use. In this study, a backward-tracking model from the wheels and tires to the power source (battery or fuel cell) is developed to estimate the effect of rotating inertias for each component during propulsion and regenerative braking of a vehicle. This paper presents the effect of rotating inertias on the power and energy for propulsion and regenerative braking for two-wheel drive (either front or rear) and all-wheel drive (AWD) cases. On-road driving and dynamometer tests are different since only one axle (two wheels) is rotating in the latter case, instead of two axles (four wheels). The differences between an on-road test and a dynamometer test are estimated using the developed model. The results show that the rotating inertias can contribute a significant fraction (8 -13 %) of the energy recovered during deceleration due to the relatively lower losses of rotating components compared to vehicle inertia, where a large fraction is dissipated in friction braking. In a dynamometer test, the amount of energy captured from available energy in wheel/tire assemblies is slightly less than that of the AWD case in on-road test. The total regenerative brake energy capture is significantly higher (> 70 %) for a FWD vehicle on a dynamometer compared to an on-road case. The rest of inertial energy is lost by inefficiencies in components, regenerative brake fraction, and friction braking on the un-driven axle.
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    Vehicle Inertia Impact on Fuel Consumption of Conventional and Hybrid Electric Vehicles Using Acceleration and Coast Driving Strategy
    Lee, Jeongwoo (Virginia Tech, 2009-09-04)
    In the past few years, the price of petroleum based fuels, especially vehicle fuels such as gasoline and diesel, has been increasing at a significant rate. Consequently, there is much more consumer interest related to reducing fuel consumption for conventional vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) than in the past. The goal of many competitions and challenges held in North America and Europe is to achieve extremely low fuel consumption. A possible strategy to reduce fuel consumption is to use the vehicle's fuel converter such as an engine to accelerate the vehicle to a high speed and coast to a lower speed with the engine off. This method will reduce fuel flow to zero during the coast phase. Also, the vehicle uses higher power engine load to accelerate to the upper vehicle speed in a limited time, thus increasing the engine brake thermal efficiency. This strategy is known as "pulse and glide" or "burn and coast" in some references. In this study, the "pulse and glide" (PnG) method is first applied to a conventional vehicle to quantify the fuel consumption benefits when compared to steady speed conditions over the same distance. After that, an HEV is used as well to investigate if a hybrid system can further reduce fuel consumption with the proposed strategy. Note that the HEV used in this study has the advantage that the engine can be automatically shut off below a certain speed (~40 mph) at low loads, however a driver must shut off the engine manually in a conventional vehicle to apply this driving strategy. In this document, three preliminary results of the PnG driving strategy are presented; (1) improved fuel economy for a conventional vehicle from a simple spread sheet model, (2) improved fuel economy for an HEV from a dynamic vehicle simulation model (the Powertrain Analysis Toolkit (PSAT)) and (3) improved fuel economy for an HEV from vehicle testing at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), all compared to steady speed conditions. The preliminary results show that the impact of engine load and kinetic energy stored in vehicle inertia is significant for fuel consumption using a PnG driving strategy compared to steady speed driving at the same average speed case. Especially, fuel economy can be improved at low speed range and higher acceleration because the aerodynamic drag force is smaller at low speed and the engine is running in a more efficient region for a short period of time respectively. In the last section, proposed directions of research are addressed based on the preliminary results.