Development of Improved Hybrid Tactical Vehicle Fuel Economy Analysis

DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. OPSEC#8505.

One of the expectations driving hybrid adoption in the Army’s tactical ground fleet is improved energy efficiency. Current evaluations of hybrid fuel economy fail to accurately capture energy efficiency as these analyses are performed over flat (0% grade) terrain. By ignoring grade changes in real-world terrain, existing analyses do not evaluate the impact of peak power requests and regenerative braking power on the vehicle’s overall energy use.

This project sought to develop a fuel economy analysis that integrates real-world grade changes consistent with the terrain the vehicle is likely to encounter to more accurately characterize the energy consumption of conceptual hybrid vehicles. The analysis considers power and energy available from vehicle engine and battery systems before determining how to most efficiently use these systems to provide the required mobility power. As this approach will be integrated into increasingly complex vehicle models, researchers also investigated the benefit of modular programming, parallelization, and high-performance computing (HPC) utilizations on computational time to improve the usability of the analysis.

This novel fuel economy analysis reduces the gap between modeled vehicle behavior and expected vehicle operation. This is crucial when evaluating conceptual hybrid vehicles as there is limited hybrid tactical vehicle data available to validate model simplifications such as flat terrain driving.

PRESENTER

Barron, Morgan
morgan.j.barron4.civ@army.mil
801-898-5648

Ground Vehicle System Center

CO-AUTHOR

Figueroa-Santos, Miriam
miriam.a.figueroa-santos.civ@army.mil

Castanier, Matthew
matthew.p.castanier.civ@army.mil

CATEGORY

Usage of HPC to Support Modeling and Simulation that Informs Combat Decisions

SYSTEMS USED

Narwhal

SECRET

No