Design and construction of a hybrid vehicle driveline Developed for an ECO-marathon car

Abstract

In this work a test bench for a small hybrid electrical vehicle was designed and built. In particular it was designed since Chalmers is building a car to be able to compete in Shell ECO-marathon. This car is going to be a hybrid car using petrol as primary energy and electricity as secondary source. The resulting drive train system which was first tested in the rig was a series hybrid using a 35 cc 4-stroke engine with two brushed DC-motors attached to it via a chain. These are directly connected to a super capacitor with a soft start in between to be able to connect them in a smooth way. By doing this, the generators are also used as a start engine. The drive motor is also a brushed DC-motor connected to the super capacitor via a converter. All parts of the test bench are controlled by a PLC-system. Interesting quantities are measured and logged to be able to analyze the data to calculate efficiency etc. The strategy was implemented in Chalmers car Smarter and was competing in the Shell ECO-marathon 2009. Unfortunately the car suffered from mechanical problems and weren’t able to achieve a complete race but the whole power train operated as planned. The test bench is complete and working for a series hybrid with an ICE of about 1 kW. The test bench can be modified to a parallel electrical hybrid set-up with reasonable efforts and be used to optimize Smarter for future years.