Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Electrical and Computer Engineering

The ubiquitous influence of fossil fuels in driving the world economy and the imperative need to reduce dependence of transportation on these fuels, has brought about a decade of research on alternative propulsion systems. Of the several alternative propulsion systems, hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are seen as an important short-term solution. In the most generic sense, a HEV consists of a battery and one or more electric machines in addition to the engine powered by petroleum/diesel. Depending on the vehicle architecture, the additional degree of freedom in selecting the amount of energy supplied by the primary and the secondary source of energy is a challenging control and optimization problem. The energy management strategy in a HEV aims at finding the optimal distribution of energy between the battery and the fuel to satisfy the requested power from the driver.Different energy management strategies have been developed both by the industry and the academia and they can be classified into non-realizable and realizable energy management strategies based on the amount of information required for real-time implementation. Traditionally, the non-realizable strategies formulate the energy management problem as a constrained optimal control problem of minimizing a performance index over a finite time interval under operational constraints. These strategies provide the global optimal solution and are used as benchmark solutions for comparative analysis of strategies. The realizable strategies in the literature have been primarily developed for implementation in real vehicles and have been shown to produce results similar to the global optimal solution. In spite of the extensive amount of research on both non-realizable and realizable energy management strategies, there are many shortcomings in the literature which have been addressed in this dissertation. The energy management problem of finding the optimal split between the different sources of energy in a charge-sust (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Giorgio Rizzoni Professor (Advisor); Stephen Yurkovich Professor (Committee Member); Vadim Utkin Professor (Committee Member); Yann Guezennec Professor (Committee Member); Simona Onori PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Alternative Energy; Automotive Engineering; Electrical Engineering; Mechanical Engineering